Abstract This article examines the literary career of Yugoslav/Serbian writer Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) by focusing on his theoretical debts to nineteenth-century aestheticist thought. Kiš is an author usually associated with the representation of twentieth century’s great historical traumas, including both the Holocaust and the Gulag, and his work is routinely examined through the lens of what he himself termed ‘po-ethics’—a dual concern with literary form and the ethics of representation. In this article I complicate that vision by showing how Kiš’s theoretical reflections and approach to writing were governed by a set of preoccupations firmly associated with the legacy of nineteenth-century aestheticist thinkers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. These include a hostility to didacticism, critique of modernity and of the notion of progress, and an embrace of aesthetic autonomy and the cult of form. I demonstrate that this distinct set of theoretical commitments simultaneously shaped Kiš’s formal choices and helped him position himself within the context of multiethnic and socialist Yugoslavia. I also chart the complex evolution of his views and examine the ways in which, later in his career, Kiš sought to balance these aestheticist attitudes with a sense of political responsibility. Kiš, I argue, is one of the most remarkable and most complex examples of a contemporary writer seeking to maintain a formalist agenda while confronting the demands of historical testimony.

The paper provides an overview of the development of nuclear research in socialist Yugoslavia from the late 1940s to the end of the 1980s. It reviews the ambitions of the state leadership in developing fundamental nuclear research, their application in energy production and the construction of nuclear power plants, as well as occasional ambitions for military applications. The development of institutions, construction of facilities, personnel training, international cooperation, internal and foreign political motives, and the role of state security bodies and the army in certain segments and periods of research are presented. An overview of the most important historiographical works, political science studies, and memoirs on this topic is also provided.

With the collapse of the post-Cold War bipolar world order, religious institutions regained their public role in the socialist and people’s republic states of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Religion not only regained its social influence, but also once again became a decisive factor in shaping national identity. During the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, religion did not merely attempt to fill the ideological void left by the crisis of the socialist value system; it also actively contributed to the reconfiguration of national values, culture, identity and political discourse. This study examines the religious factors that contributed to the sacralisation of national identity; the consolidation of the ‘Us’, ‘Them’, and ‘Us versus Them’ narratives; and the justification of wartime violence during the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). In this context, ‘Us’ refers to the dominant religious/ethnic community of a given member republic, while ‘Them’ denotes the ethnic majority and their confessional affiliations living in other member republics. This mainly refers to the three largest religious/ethnic communities, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims. The ‘Us versus Them’ confrontation escalated tensions and ultimately played a central role in the disintegration of the SFR of Yugoslavia. The study concludes that religion played a dual role: on the one hand, it supported the preservation of community identity and social cohesion; on the other hand, it fostered exclusion, the ethnicisation of loyalty, the political instrumentalisation of religion, and the legitimisation of war discourses on the other.

Abstract The aim of the article is to present the common features of present disputes concerning the once socially owned immovable property in Slovenia and other Ex-Yugoslav countries, and to analyze their causes originating in the old Yugoslav socialist law. First, the main characteristics of the former legal regime of social property in immovables (land and buildings) are presented, followed by a review of the main mechanisms of its transformation into classic property in Slovenia. Typical irregularities in these transformation processes and afterward challenges faced by practice and the judiciary are analyzed and sourced back to specific features of the social property regime, followed by a discussion of the legal remedies available to the legitimate owners to protect their rights in such situations. A special focus is placed on the problems regarding privatization of the so-called ‘functional land’, i.e. land serving the buildings constructed on socially owned land.

This paper examines the policy of monument construction in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on their function as sites of collective memory of the People's Liberation Struggle, as well as their broader, multifaceted role, exemplified by the monument at Petrova Gora. Special attention is given to the ways in which the state regime’s use of history contributed to the construction and reinforcement of the ruling ideology. The legacy of the People’s Liberation Struggle, understood also as a socialist revolution, played a crucial role in legitimizing communist authority and shaping socialist ideology. Within this context, monuments functioned not only as commemorative spaces but also as instruments of cultural, educational, and touristic development. Petrova Gora, as a site of historical significance and a symbol of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity, serves as a paradigmatic example of the entanglement of memory politics, regional development, and ideological formation aimed at creating the new socialist man.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the socialist government in Yugoslavia was actively pushing the policy of brotherhood and unity. Unlike the interwar integralist version, the promotion of socialist Yugoslavism was envisioned as a building block of togetherness. The agrarian reform and colonisation, which spanned from 1945 to 1948, completely transformed land ownership relations and allowed an unprecedented level of social mobility. This paper explores the impact of internal migration on nation-building through a case study of the colonist settlement of Stanišić, located in Vojvodina, populated by settlers from the similarly multicultural region of Dalmatia. The colonisation effort primarily targeted Partisan fighters and their families. The settlers officially declared themselves Croats or Serbs and represented the two largest ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, but during the colonisation, they were classified by the government as Dalmatians. Consequently, they are a prime example of blurred lines between regional, national, and transnational identities. This paper analyses the impact of internal migration on identity formation within Stanišić over the following decades and examines how it correlates with the rest of Vojvodina. It explores the different layers of colonists’ identity, their position and influence on Serbian nationalism and Yugoslav multinationalism, as well as the fluidity of the said stance.

The purpose of the research paper is to identify the mechanisms through which regulatory and legal reforms and educational initiatives influenced the transformation of the social status of Albanian women in Kosovo in the context of Yugoslav socialist modernization. The study applied the principles of historicism, objectivity, and consistency, as well as methods of structural and functional analysis, the comparative method, critical analysis, systems analysis, and an intersectional approach to examining multiple forms of discrimination. The scientific novelty lies in the comprehensive analysis of how legislative acts – including the Federal Law on Compulsory Education, the Decree on Schooling, and the Law on the Prohibition of the Veil – shaped the institutional foundations of gender equality in Kosovo. The study also reveals the contradictions between the formal implementation of equality and the persistence of regional and ethnic imbalances, reflecting the limits of socialist modernization in a multi-ethnic context. Conclusions. It is established that the evolution of the legal provision of women’s education took place through three key legislative acts: the Federal Law on compulsory education, the Decree on Schooling, and the Law on the Prohibition of the Veil, which created the legal basis for formal gender equality; but their practical implementation revealed substantial regional and ethnic imbalances. Literacy programmes have shown impressive quantitative results – girls’ primary education completion rates increased from 10-15% to 85% during the study period, and about 90,000 Albanian girls and women have completed specialised courses; but regional differences between urban (80-90% academic performance) and rural areas (30-40% academic performance) have remained critically high. The specifics of the model of ‘emancipation from above’ are identified, which was characterised by the instrumentalisation of women’s liberation to legitimise the socialist regime and by the limited agency of women themselves in the process of emancipation. The intersectional nature of discrimination against Albanian women as members of a gender, ethnic, and regional minority created a unique configuration of social exclusion that required specific approaches to overcoming multiple forms of marginalisation.

The paper examines the practice of self-sewn clothing in socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1991) in order to determine the conditions that enabled it, the extent of its spread, and the social strata where it was common. The spread of self-sewing practice was influenced by several factors: the availability of Bagat and other sewing machines; tailoring and sewing courses; the selling of Burda magazine with practical instructions on how to make fashion pieces using cutting sheets; the circulation of other domestic and foreign fashion magazines; the publication of Burda: Perfect Independent Tailoring and Sewing; an effort to improve the quality of the yardage, patterns and color spectrum produced by the Yugoslav textile industry; and the increased import of foreign fabrics. A change in attitude towards fashion also played a significant role. Following the Second World War, fashion was seen as a bourgeois practice in socialist Yugoslavia, but since the beginning of the 1950s, following fashion through self-sewn clothing regained social desirability. Unsatisfactory clothing offers in Yugoslav stores such as poor quality, limited colors and designs, inadequate ready-made sizes, and high prices, also led to the prevalence of this practice, as did the opportunities to earn income by sewing for others. The most common way of acquiring clothing was to purchase garments produced in Yugoslavia, with self-sewing as the second most frequent method. Workers and middle-class members were engaged in self-sewing most extensively, as it enabled access to clothing at lower costs and contributed to leading a lifestyle determined by social status and the resulting material position, thus functioning as a form of creative everyday activity of the ordinary people. Self-sewing represented subordinates’ art of coping with the available by creating their own popular culture using the resources, goods and materials given to them by the ruling system in socialist Yugoslavia.

Socialist creativity, understood as a form of collective creativity, was based on the engagement of shared human capacities in order to achieve an envisioned project of modernity and a bright future. In its attempt to erase the distinction between manual and intellectual labor, official ideology promoted the direct implementation of imaginative and creative ideas into production. Within such a cultural context, there was little room for the fashion designer, as an individual, to express creative genius. Nevertheless, from the mid-1960s onwards, radical changes occurred in the practice of Yugoslav socialism. Economic reform, the rise of a socialist middle class, and the rapid development of the Yugoslav textile and fashion industry - which increasingly penetrated demanding international markets year after year - led to the personalization of fashion designers, among whom the most prominent figures were Dobrila Vasiljević Smiljanić, Aleksandar Joksimović, and Mirjana Marić. While the name of Dobrila Vasiljević Smiljanić, a designer of hand-knitwear from Sirogojno, remained inseparably linked to numerous named and unnamed knitters producing designs within a cooperative system, thus embodying the idea of collective creativity and shared effort, the designs of Aleksandar Joksimović and Mirjana Marić came to be recognized as products bearing an authorial signature. However, Joksimović’s fashion production largely remained unnamed, in contrast to the creations of Mirjana Marić for Belgrade-based Jugoeksport, Moda from Veliko Gradište, and Rudnik from Gornji Milanovac, which acquired an explicit authorial label during the 1970s and 1980s.

ABSTRACT This article explores institutionalised labour migration from socialist Yugoslavia to Western capitalist countries, focusing on the recruitment of female labour migrants. By examining Yugoslav archival sources, it investigates the mechanisms of migration control and management developed by the Yugoslav government to discharge labour surplus to the West in accordance with state interests. The article highlights the alignment of women’s unemployment and increased social mobility with these processes; further, it demonstrates that from the onset of Yugoslavia’s liberalised labour migration policy, women were integral to the state’s efforts to employ labour surplus in Western labour markets and shape labour migrants’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Thus, the article expands the understanding of Yugoslav labour migration and governmental and institutional efforts to control and shape international migrations and underscores the value of archived sources in providing a comprehensive understanding of the state’s role in labour migrations.

This article explores the development of the Yugoslav blood transfusion system and practices, analysing them from their beginnings in the 1920s to the end of Yugoslavia. It shows that Yugoslav doctors experimented with blood transfusion almost as early as their international colleagues. Nevertheless, it took a massive effort by the post-war Yugoslav communists to develop the infrastructure, workforce, blood production system and modern practices needed to meet ever-growing demands. I show that Yugoslav communists based their organisational framework on the Soviet model with assistance from Soviet specialists, yet I argue that Yugoslav doctors also followed practices in the West. Furthermore, I show that the development of voluntary blood donation in Yugoslavia represented a departure from the earlier Soviet system based on paid donation and reflected diverse international influences. Following the split with the Soviet Union and the adoption of a non-aligned foreign policy, Yugoslav healthcare developed without adhering to a single political model and Yugoslav doctors were eventually able to participate freely in the exchange of knowledge with both the Western and Eastern blocs. However, the article also shows that once the blood donation system relied on incentives, making it fully voluntary proved almost impossible, a problem that became acute when Yugoslav socialism collapsed and the socialist economy disappeared. Finally, by situating Yugoslav healthcare within a transnational history paradigm, this article demonstrates the importance of examining the circulation of ideas in health, as medical practices were shaped by complex and overlapping international influences rather than by a single political system.

The article is based on a revised an expanded version of the presentation entitled »Fallout Shelters in Zagreb After the End of World War II«, given at the 71st Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held 18–22 April 2018 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The fallout shelters built on the territory of the City of Zagreb have largely remained outside the scope of architectural historiography. Nevertheless, the city’s Civil Protection organization recently cited the existence of over 900 shelter facilities under its authority. The research and analysis presented herein covers the period in which the fallout shelters were built, who conceived them, who designed and built them, under whose technical and political influence they appeared, who financed them, and, finally, whether they are necessary or obsolete in present times. The construction of air raid shelters began in 1932 and flourished in the period before World War II. The air raid shelters (officially Protuavionska zaštita , lit. Anti-Aircraft Defense) conceived in the 1948–1971 period were an integral part of the Civil Protection Forces. After the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Yugoslav president Tito introduced the doctrine of self-defense and ordered the construction of fallout shelters, which was carried out in the 1974–1991 period. The article concludes with five key points. Politically, the entire process of shelter construction, including fallout shelters, was hugely dependent on the political changes in the former monarchical, and later socialist Yugoslavia. After the late 1960s, fallout shelters became one of the instruments of the militarization of Yugoslav society in the 1970s and retained this status until the collapse of the Federation. Economically, the construction of fallout shelters was a huge burden to the socialist economy, despite the availability of cheap labor and the Yugoslav debt-driven self-management-based economic system. Hyperinflation in the 1980s eroded the nominal funds that had been collected as a »shelter tax«. Technologically, the reinforced-concrete shelter construction was in line with contemporaneous global developments. While the construction of the structures themselves did not present any problems, the control process was inadequate due to parallel power structures. The question of aesthetics was not even raised, as the shelters were conceptualized solely for protecting the population. Due to the project’s military nature, the visible parts of the shelters were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, while the interiors were executed in the simplest possible manner. Regarding their fate, the shelters proved useful during the air raids in the 1991–1995 period, but afterwards they gradually fell into neglect. Nevertheless, the current administrations are attempting to organize their use in the event of possible natural or human-made disasters, particularly in light of the worsening geopolitical situation at the time of this article’s presentation and publication.

The period from the 1970s to the 1980s had a great demand for apartment construction in Belgrade. The study examines how state policies in socialist Yugoslavia shaped architectural design principles, and how these design frameworks influenced everyday social life, with focus on Belgrade area. The research procedure includes the following methods: content analysis of professional and scientific literature in the field of architecture, urbanism and sociology of housing, historical- descriptive analysis of urban policies and housing construction in the period 1970-1980, through a review of available normative acts, publications and documents, interpretation of architectural elements characteristic of the Belgrade School of Housing and theoretical synthesis of philosophical views on space and home, with critical application in the context of specific architectural practices. The aim is to examine the way in which the architecture of residential space in socialist Yugoslavia, and especially in Belgrade, influenced architectural design principles and how that affected the lifestyle of the population. Through this two-tier relationship - policy shaping architecture and architecture shaping society - the paper reveals housing as an active medium of social engineering. This paper provides a qualitative analysis of historical and architectural sources, with an interpretation of theoretical frameworks of architecture, urbanism and social philosophy.

Based on new archival material, mainly police and judicial records and court sentences from the late 1940s, this article examines the legal and political background of the trials against homosexuals in post-revolutionary and early socialist Yugoslavia. During those years, at least two hundred men were convicted on prison terms for ‘unnatural fornication’ and some four hundred more were arrested and detained in police stations with their names entered into police registries. The year 1949 was particularly harsh for homosexuals in Yugoslavia. Two major anti-homosexual trials were held in Dubrovnik and Zagreb, when groups of homosexual men were accused of creating hotbeds of vice and debauchery. Perceived as a threat to the youth and their socialist upbringing, homosexuals were condemned as not only criminals but also renegades of the new socialist order and in some cases even as its saboteurs. Verdicts expressed a glaring ideological prejudice rooted in the notion that homosexuality was an expression of class exploitation, petty-bourgeois individualism and a visible sign of degeneration inherited from the old regime. The proper moral and sexual development of the youth, the first generation of the new socialist men and women, was consistently at the forefront of the reasoning behind guilty verdicts. This paper offers new insights into the legal history of homosexuality in Yugoslavia and contributes to the historiographical interpretation of ideological and political underpinnings surrounding homosexuality in early socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe.

The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a federal state composed of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, the Federation entity with a Bosniak majority, and the Brčko District with an undetermined status. This study focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, examining the ethnic policies implemented in Bosnia during the socialist Yugoslav period and the formation and development of Bosniak nationalism. By analyzing Tito‘s “Brotherhood and Unity” policy and its historical narrative strategies, this paper argues that while Yugoslavia sought to suppress nationalism, it simultaneously institutionalized Bosniak ethnic identity through political and cultural means. The policy shift of the 1960s and 1970s first granted Bosniaks official ethnic status while simultaneously weakening supra-ethnic Yugoslav identity. With the collapse of the socialist system and the resurgence of nationalism, Bosnian society once again descended into division and conflict. Today‘s “Yugoslav nostalgia” reflects a collective longing for the ideals of multi-ethnic coexistence and social equality—ideals once embodied by the Yugoslav state system.

During the disintegration of multinational federations at the beginning of the 1990s, existing political units within the Yugoslav political space declared independence and ethnic groups residing in them sought to establish separate autonomous entities. This study specifically focuses on state-building policies in North Macedonia during the Yugoslav turmoil of dissolution with a “state within society” approach. It examines how post-communist Macedonian political leadership attempted to build a dominant state image on the territories of the former Yugoslav socialist republic. The article argues that if an autonomous, united, and centralized state perception fails to resonate with society, alternative state images may emerge within the same national territory- possibly even transcending legitimate borders. This study applied the “states as images” approach to the Macedonian-Albanian relations in North Macedonia during a limited period, from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to the 2001 conflict. It is posited that post-communist Macedonian political elites projected a Macedonian state image through practices. However, Albanians of Macedonia implemented policies on behalf of revived Ilirida perception, where they could unite with Kosovar Albanians in the future. The 2001 conflict demonstrated that the Ilirida state image had reached a war-making capacity, challenging the Macedonian state’s monopoly on violence. As a result, Macedonian authorities were compelled to negotiate and eventually transform the state into a Macedonian-Albanian image.

The article examines the historical and political development of the Romanian Communist/Workers’ Party, detailing its trajectory up to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rise to power in 1965. Even before the rise of Ceaușescu, Romanian communists had managed to develop their own unique socialist model. By the standards commonly accepted among the European Marxists at the time, this fact would be enough to count Romanian communists among the pioneers of the search for the so-called “third path” toward socialism. A notion that each communist or socialist party should develop its own ideology in accordance with the unique characteristics of its own social, economic and cultural circumstances became a cause for numerous splits on the European far left of the 1960s and 1970s. Development of the Yugoslav socialist model, Czechoslovakian reformism, Eurocommunism, and other alternative paths to socialism were all influenced by the idea of abandoning the practice of appropriating principles of the Bolshevik socialist model in the policy-making process. However, there are multiple factors that excluded the unique evolution of the new ideology created by the Romanian Communist Party from the substantial number of historical studies devoted to researching alternative paths to socialism. The aim of this paper is to contribute to further understanding of the historical circumstances that separated the development of the ideology created by the Romanian communists from both their Eastern and their Western counterparts.

The development of civil and commercial law in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been deeply shaped by its complex political history, spanning five key periods: Ottoman rule, the Austro-Hungarian administration, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, socialist Yugoslavia, and the post-independence era. Civil law evolved through a blend of old legal traditions and the Austrian Civil Code, while commercial law had continuity in codification, dating back to the late Ottoman period. The socialist period interrupted legal continuity, introducing new laws that partly remain in modern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of these socialist laws were replaced relatively quickly by new legislation. However, due to the new constitutional structure, this new civil and commercial legislation was not adopted at the state level, but at a lower - entity level. Today, civil law codification remains off the agenda, and commercial law continues to evolve in a fragmented way, leading to inconsistencies across jurisdictions. Broader constitutional and political crises continue to divert attention from crucial legal and economic reforms necessary for EU integration and international support.

Abstract Taking into consideration postwar Yugoslavia’s position in the global political scene, as well as the period following the 1950 law on self-management, this article establishes the need to examine socialist Yugoslav intellectuals’ engagements with the tradition of Austro-Marxism. The article argues that further research into the afterlives of Austro-Marxism in socialist Yugoslavia is necessary to fully reconstruct the intellectual continuities and discontinuities between the interwar and postwar periods in Yugoslavia.

From the mid-1950s onwards, socialist Yugoslavia provided humanitarian assistance to over twenty liberation movements, particularly in Africa. Although authorities officially presented this support as a grassroots initiative, it was orchestrated and directed by the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia (SSRNJ). This ‘socio-political organization’ mobilized citizens around campaigns that were ostensibly focused on collecting material aid for liberation movements. To ensure broad public participation in these state-led solidarity efforts, Yugoslav media played a crucial role in promoting the campaigns at the federal, national, and local levels. The article examines the domestic dimension of Yugoslavia's annual ‘Solidarity Week’ campaigns (1967–1987) as a mechanism for fostering an internationalist consciousness among its citizens. These humanitarian campaigns were an integral part of Yugoslavia's broader support for anti-colonial liberation movements, reflecting its non-aligned foreign policy and shaping the country's internationalist identity. Rooted in Yugoslavia's partisan legacy and enshrined in its constitution, the nation's commitment to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism was framed as both a moral and legal imperative. To capture Yugoslavia's distinctive approach to solidarity, which framed anti-colonial struggles as humanitarian concerns, this study adopts the concept of ‘humanitarian internationalism.’ By analysing how Yugoslavia's humanitarian practices influenced both domestic society and its global engagement, the article contributes to the broader scholarship on socialist humanitarianism.