The article aims to explain the changing dynamics of property restitution to historical Hungarian churches in Romania. While in the early 2000s most claims by these churches were approved, after 2010 most of their petitions were denied when the courts started questioning these churches’ historical property rights. It is argued here that this jurisprudential shift can be explained by the changing political environment after Romania’s EU accession, when the courts deferred to the prevailing social consensus, reflecting the unpopularity of restitution to minority churches amongst the Romanian public.

In 2015 and 2017 the Czech Republic adopted two strategic documents that were aimed to support Czech nationals in positions within international organisations (IOs). In this article, we explore the rationale of the Czech government in doing so. Considering the Czech Republic as a small state, we approached the question from the perspective of status-seeking and observed the mechanisms of personnel support in selected IOs. We argue that the policy of promoting nationals in the ranks of prioritised IOs was intended to enhance the country’s international status and also formed part of domestic legitimation games.

In this essay, we build on earlier discussions on the insufficiency of labels such as ‘post-Soviet’ and ‘postcolonial’ for Central Asian regimes and propose a consideration of their particular post-imperial character. We illustrate the usefulness of this lens through an analysis of security and violent conflicts in Central Asia and how governments interpret and present these conflicts. Our discussion draws systematically on existing research on relevant processes in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, allowing us to identify key themes of a post-imperial politics of security and their implications in a comparative perspective.