A Century of Albanian Censuses. Opening New Perspectives of Research on the Formation of a Balkan Nation-State

Alain Jarne

Discussion: Iphigenia Kokkali University of Thessaly, Gilles de Rapper EFA & Stavros Spyrellis EKKE

Géohistoire de l’Albanie moderne, une lecture des recensements de 1918 à 2011 (2020) is an innovative work offering an overview of modern Albanian history from the point of view of demographic dynamics and mobilities. It is based on an original corpus of statistical data as well as on regionalisations and spatial typologies used to discuss the evolution of territorial structures, mobility and urbanisation in Albania over the course of the last century. This ‘heritage’ of data essentially consists in simple population records (by sex), but at the most local level (around 3,000 Albanian towns and villages). The aim of this talk is to present the methodology consisting in locating these records as precisely as possible and allowing diachronic comparisons to be made as far as possible, thus circumventing a difficulty that presents itself to the researcher, i.e. the numerous territorial-administrative reforms that characterise modern Albania. The aim is also to discuss how these data on local populations and the methodological tools developed for their analysis make it possible to raise research questions and formulate hypotheses on the territorial history of the Albanian state.

Alain Jarne is a geographer and historian. He is currently head of strategy and forecasting at the Direction for Mobility and Roads in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. He previously worked as a scientific associate at the Natural, Architectural and Built Environment Faculty (ENAC) of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne, where he also taught cartography.  Between 2004 and 2022, he carried out several missions for the Albanian Statistical Office (Instat) as part of capacity-building projects, territorial definitions and post-census analyses. In 2020 he defended a doctoral thesis at the EPFL on a geohistory of modern Albania based on the registration of the population at local level by the fifteen censuses and enumerations carried out in the country between 1918 and 2011.