Methodologically the research relies on a combination of intellectual history, conceptual history and history of historiography, tackled in a rigorously contextualized manner and utilizing methods of comparative, transnational and entangled-history approaches.
We will explore the historiographical controversies in terms of formal structure, the arguments marshaled, the logic, strategic moves and rhetoric, as well as their evolution over time. We will reconstruct the motives, intentions, assumptions, implicit ideas, and implications underpinning the disputes over historical issues. In doing it we will have recourse to intellectual history, especially the pragmatically oriented Cambridge “contextualist” school and the “history of concepts” (Begriffsgeschichte). In order to better understand the stakes involved, we will examine the contemporary socio-political and cultural context of the historiography wars.
The study of historiographical battles fought by rival national/ist historians over the same events, personalities and processes, often drawing upon the same sources, invites the use of transnational or relational approaches, such as „entangled history“, histoire croisée (literally “crossed history”), and “shared history”. The apptness of these approaches ensues from the largely shared and intertwined character of the Balkan historical “reality” itself, due to pervasive imperial (Byzantine, Ottoman and communist) legacies. But it also ensues, paradoxically, from the national/ist historiographies themselves, which strive to neatly separate (“disentangle”) pieces of a shared past and appropriate them for “their own” nation. A common or shared past is thus “resurrected” in contradictory, often irreconcilable, ways. In the process the historical narratives crisscrossed and became mutually intertwined both because of the shared experiences and referents they drew upon and because the historians kept close eye on the rival positions and confronted them in their own writing – they wrote literally with regard to, and in view of, their opponents.
Finally, and perhaps most ambitiously, rather than analyzing the historiographical battles as isolated discursive occurrences, we will place them within the respective master national narratives. In this way we will also compare and “cross” the master narratives of the clashing historiographies. We will pay attention to the implicit way, in which the controversies under study have impacted the master national narratives.