Social Values and Identities in the Black Sea Region

Social Values and Identities in the Black Sea Region focuses on the nexus between geopolitical challenges and cultural framework in the Black Sea region. Building on the path-dependency approach, the volume goes beyond the classical cultural blocks paradigm, showing how the common inheritance interferes with different religious and political institutional backgrounds, fostering the formation of a particular cultural area. The interdisciplinary approach combines contributions from the domains of sociology, political science, international relations, and security studies and employs qualitative and quantitative analyses, the last ones relying on large-scale survey evidence coming from the World Values Survey, the European Values Study, and the European Social Survey. The analysis of the empirical data allows contributors to examine the change of social values and identities over the past three decades. Although there is no declared common social identity, the comprehensive investigation of social, political, moral, and religious values, identities, and beliefs concludes the presence of shared domains and trends that provide reasoning to consider the Black Sea region a cultural area. The matter is of great importance, especially in the context of the open military conflict in Ukraine and other frozen conflicts in the region. Common culture, relying not only on the shared values or strong identities, but also in customs, material objects, or daily life practices and strategies may help in finding peaceful solutions to the existing conflicts.