Issue 3(12) includes articles dealing with the forms of collective self-organisation in Central Europe and neighbouring regions in modern and contemporary history. Of particular interest are instances where the combination of several group identities and community-affiliations united representatives of differing ethnicities or denominations, or supporters of certain political programs and aesthetic principles. Each example permits discussion of the degree of social determinism in the exercise of personal choice and the resistance to attempts to direct, regulate, and limit such choice. The issue examines the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the 1980s, and geographically stretches from the Dubrovnik Republic and Trieste to the Land of the Don Army and revolutionary Petrograd. The articles examine the responses of societies to the challenges of regional and world wars; the activities of parties and social organisations (from national to artistic) in the context of individuals and social groups implementing political programs and cultural initiatives; the school as an institution for educating the nation; and the people who shaped the faces of associations and unions.