Waters, Leslie. 2022. Borders on the Move: Territorial Changes and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948. Rochester, University of Rochester Press (Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe).

The history of the Hungarian-(Czecho)Slovak border-area in the twentieth century has already received much attention in Hungarian historiography, in memory politics and in local history, but until recently the presentation of this history has been mostly ethnographic and Hungaro-centric, focusing on the the post-World War II period of 1945-1948 and based mainly on Hungarian sources. In 2012, Leslie Waters completed her doctoral dissertation at UCLA, titled Resurrecting the Nation: Felvidék and the Hungarian Territorial Revisionist Project, 19381945, which probably prepared and equipped her for her new work of a decade later. Waters's perspective on the problems of this border region, especially its eastern half, helps readers to break out of the overly Hungaro-centric paradigm that all too often governs the study and discourse of the period and the region in question. Waters boldly draws heavily on Hungarian, Czech and Slovak sources as well as on ego materials such as memoirs written or recorded orally from Slovak, Hungarian and Jewish persons by the USHMMM and the USC. Even more importantly, she finally puts the history of this border region into a theoretical framework that breaks with the decades-long discourse of the suffering of the two nations and, basing herself on more recent genocide and borderland studies, she places the bloody 1940s decade of the Hungarian-Slovak borderland within a comprehensive, internationally informed and comparable framework. Yet, Waters would not impose this newer theoretical framework at all costs. For example, when she disagrees with other researchers on the issue of the possibility to create an ethnically homogeneous nation-state as opposed to one with a hegemonic majority, she is able to challenge her disputants, relying not only on historical documents but also on Slovak and Hungarian works of and about language and literature. Following a thorough theoretical Introduction, Waters divides her study into four major units: the 1938 territorial reoccupation, the wartime policies toward minorities and – as an issue unto itself – anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the postwar period of population exchange/expulsion. Waters is thorough and careful in her handling of a vast amount of available sources and is thus able to survey the political conditions of the region in the period under study,