Dr. Piro Rexhepi is a scholar of East European Studies currently teaching at the Center for Global Affairs, New York University. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde, UK (2013). His research is located in the Queer and Feminist Theories in International Relations with special interest in Islam and Southeastern Europe. He is fluent in Albanian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian.

Unmapping Islam in Eastern Europe:  Periodization and Muslim Subjectivities in the Balkans

This project examines the historical and ongoing marginalisation of Muslim communities in the Balkans, tracing it to post-Ottoman nation-building and European colonial intervention. It challenges the dominant narrative of Islam’s “retreat” from Europe, a periodisation that, from Hegel onward, placed Islam outside the continent’s spatial and temporal imagination and framed Muslims as a problem to be resolved through exclusion. The study shows how the Congress of Berlin and the emergence of post-Ottoman Christian states fragmented Muslim identities along national lines. This produced what the author terms “discontiguity”: the imposed separation of Balkan Muslims from the wider ummah. Drawing on historical sources and the reflections of Muslim activists and intellectuals, including Haxhi Qamili and Melika Salihbegović, the project recovers overlooked histories of transnational solidarity. It argues that contemporary Islamophobia is rooted in these colonial separations and calls for rethinking Balkan Muslim subjectivities as connected and transnational rather than as isolated national minorities.