Yugoslav Wars Research Articles

Demarginalizations and destination(s) of post-Yugoslav literary canons

The focus of our paper is on the changing status of female authors in post-Yugoslav literary canons caused by feminist interventions. We will point to the broader context of the fall of communism and the decomposition of socialist Yugoslavia, its transition to capitalism and the reintroduction of feminism. We will discuss the different aspects of the politicization of the national canon ranging from pointing to its gender bias, and the restoration of female authors, who have not been part of the canon. Then we will point to the political function of the literary canon in (re)constructing post-socialist, post-Yugoslav national identities and the supporting of female authors as part of the process of European-integration, as well as the possibilities of experimental writing in post-Yugoslav literatures. The essential thing will be to point to feminist reception of post-Yugoslav literatures as an important part of the processes of reconciliation after the Yugoslav war in the first part of the 1990s. In the final part of the paper, we will discuss the anxieties caused by feminism and the stance of most female authors who seek the diversification of female literary production which will move between the positions of particularity and universality.

Physics in the former Yugoslavia: from socialist dreams to capitalist realities

The homeland of Nikola Tesla and Jožef Stefan saw a rise in physics funding after World War II. Now, after the destruction wrought by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, physics in Yugoslavia’s successor states is recovering, albeit unevenly.

CBRN EVENT - DO WE NEED MEDICAL INTELLIGENCE

Nowadays the risk level for Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) events raises globally. The industrialization is leading to establishing of thousands plants, where toxic industrial materials are used into the processes or are end products. Radioactive materials are widely used into different industries, while biological and geno-modified products are found all over world. The increased use requires proper and diligent transportation and storage. If any of these processes is jeopardized a CBRN event could occur. Another grim scenario, unfortunately, present into modern world war conflicts is the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction – Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War, War in Yugoslavia, Syria etc. The aim of this study is to analyse the hospital staff awareness regarding the need of focused medical intelligence in case of CBRN event. Material and methods: By the means of descriptive and comparative methods the records from diverse CBRN events’ medical support and hospitals involvement into the process are analysed in order to highlight the significance of the promptly, adequate and timely performed medical intelligence for assuring the medical support success. Dichotomous survey among 54 medical professionals was performed in order to discover their awareness regarding medical intelligence performance in case of CBRN event. Results and discussion: Great majority of the inquired hospital staff completely ignores the medical intelligence as first step in case of CBRN event that endangers both medical staff and casualties. Conclusion: Medical Intelligence has to be taught in greatest details during medical managers’ education.

Eating an Onion. Notes on Marina Abramović

The Onion is a 1995 video performance by Marina Abramovic. The essay aims at analyzing some central themes of the artist’s path, taking this work as reference text. First of all, by including the artist in the process of dissolution of beauty marking the art of the Twentieth century and regarding performance art as one of the outcomes of this process inaugurated by the avant-gardes. Secondly, by showing the link between the political dimension (in this particular case, the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s) and an existential reflection focused on the role of the artist and the woman in the contemporary world.

Southward and Otherwise

Abstract This project comes out of a conversation between Mohaiemen and Pajović, about the relative absence of Non-Aligned Movement co-founder Josip Broz Tito, from the three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017, dir: Mohaiemen). In the film, a series of conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki sketch out the shadow play of warring forces inside the Non-Aligned Movement, especially around the decolonizing nations of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia that found an option to look toward an "Islamic" supra-national identity. Because of that focus, the role of Central and Eastern Europe, especially that of Yugoslavia under Tito, is absent from the film. Pajović's text re-integrates the Yugoslav bloc into Two Meetings and a Funeral. While Pajović's text concludes with a hopeful view of the potential of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mohaiemen's images and superimposed quote from Tito express an ironic doubling back. Indira Gandhi's Indian coalition of 1971, while maneuvering for Bangladesh independence from Pakistan, encountered Tito's confident comment that such problems of “tribalism” were only happening in Asia. Yugoslavia had solved the “Balkan problem”– this was spoken confidently twenty years before Tito's nation would split apart during the Yugoslav Wars. The geopolitical struggles that Tito fails to see in 1971 are harbingers for the blind spots that would cause Non-Alignment's collapse.

Confronting Recent History: Media in Serbia During Aleksandar Vučić's Ministry of Information in the Milošević Era (1998–1999)

Abstract Since the end of the Yugoslav wars of the nineties, Serbia seems to have fallen out of the spotlight in scholarly research. Attempting to counter this, in this article, we tackle the media suppression by the 1998-99 Ministry of Information led by Aleksandar Vučić, nowadays serving as Serbia's President. Repositioning the spotlight from Slobodan Milošević to Aleksandar Vučić, we confront the numerous attempts of media suppression and censorship in the late nineties.

ГУМАНІТАРНА ДОПОМОГА ТА ЦИВІЛЬНИЙ ЗАХИСТ ЯК НАПРЯМ ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОГО СОЮЗУ ДЛЯ СПРИЯННЯ МІЖНАРОДНОМУ МИРУ Й БЕЗПЕЦІ

Гуманітарна допомога й цивільний захист належать до напрямів зовнішньополітичної діяльності Європейського Союзу. Допомога спрямовується через 200+ міжнародних і місцевих партнерських організацій та агентств і підтримується тисячами європейських волонтерів. Це робить ЄС одним із найпотужніших донорів гуманітарної допомоги у світі. На міжнародній арені Союз підтримує й пропагує свої цінності та інтереси й сприяє миру, безпеці, сталому розвитку і взаємній повазі між народами. Збереження життя, запобігання та полегшення людських страждань, збереження честі й гідності населення, яке постраждало від стихійних лих та техногенних криз, – місія Генерального директорату Європейської комісії з питань цивільного захисту й операцій із гуманітарної допомоги. Уся діяльність ЄС та країн-членів у сфері надання гуманітарної допомоги здійснюється відповідно до норм міжнародного гуманітарного права і його базових принципів: гуманності, нейтральності, неупередженості та незалежності. Операції з надання допомоги ЄС керуються такими додатковими принципами: координації, узгодженості й взаємодоповнюваності між задіяними учасниками; якості, ефективності та підзвітності; різноманітності партнерських відносин. Низка нормативно-правових документів регулює гуманітарну діяльність ЄС щодо збереження життя людей під час надзвичайних ситуацій, подолання їхніх негайних негативних наслідків; надання необхідної допомоги постраждалим від довготривалих криз, особливо там, де уряди виявляються неспроможними допомогти; боротьби з наслідками переселення населення; забезпечення готовності до ризиків стихійних лих і використання відповідного швидкого раннього попередження й системи втручання тощо. Із 1992 р. ЄС надавав допомогу потерпілим після численних катастроф по всьому світу, зокрема жертвам війни в Югославії, геноциду в Руанді, громадянської війни в Судані; постраждалим від стихійних лих у Тихоокеанському регіоні, Західній Африці, на Балканах тощо. Сьогодні Україна також є реципієнтом гуманітарної допомоги ЄС .

“You cannot forgive and you cannot forget”: The Serbian refugee settlement experience in Australia

AbstractCurrently, there is limited research on the settlement experiences of refugees from the Balkan regions and in particular Serbia. There is also a need to provide a contextual understanding of the refugee settlement experience. The current study explored the refugee experience of 12 male Serbian refugees (aged 30 to 65), who migrated to Australia following the Yugoslav Civil War (1991–2001). A qualitative, phenomenological methodology explored the experiences of the refugees from their own perspective. Thematic coding of the interview data revealed the two major themes of settlement and traumatic experiences, as central to the experiences of this group of refugees. Language difficulties, discrimination, stigmatization of Serbian identity, multiple losses and grief, and failing of the justice system to establish accountability and provide reparation to the victims were all significant obstacles to successful settlement. Most salient, however, were the experiences of torture and trauma. Participants were still trying to negotiate these memories years after the events. Nevertheless, some participants showed strong resilience and the belief that they became stronger as a consequence of their experiences. We encourage those working with Serbian refugees to help them search for meaning in their stories of trauma.

CSDP: A Balancing Strategy against the United States?

<em>In the aftermath of the Second World War, European integration progressed rapidly. Despite economic performance, the European community is far from playing a major role in security and defense. The catalyst for a European defense policy is the war in Yugoslavia, which shows that Europeans are dependent on Americans. Thus, the EU has the CSDP and has conducted many military and civilian operations. Yet a new wave of academic studies, launched by proponents of American neorealism, argues that the EU is engaged in an attempt to “balance” the US by exploiting the CSDP. By studying European history in terms of security, we find that the balancing theory can not be justified.</em>

SLOWED SERBIAN DEVELOPMENT IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY UNTIL WORLD WAR II

Permanently economic backwardness of Serbia (as, after all, and most of the Balkan countries) compared to the Western and Central Europe always makes actual causes of this trend. Of course, there is no simple and straightforward answer. The prevailing opinion is that the countries of South Eastern Europe, because of the specificity of its historical development, primarily in the age of the first industrial revolution lost pace compared to the rest of the continent and found themselves at a disadvantage, which can not fail to compensate. Such thinking usually implies the necessity to southeast Europe, or Balkans, pass the path of development identical western European way. However, whether it the only model that leads to creation of economically prosperous and socially stable society or priority should be given to understanding the local specificity and optimally use them in order to build a welfare state? Serbia can now be classified as countries that have not successfully passed the transition period from a socialist to neoliberal capitalist system. The reasons for this here we can not discuss in detail, but we will mention the most difficult challenges facing the country has faced since the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia until today. These are, first, the Yugoslav wars, including them in the armed conflict with the NATO alliance in 1999, economic sanctions and international isolation in the last decade of the last century, the unsuccessful privatization of public enterprises in the years of the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic after him and, as a consequence, worsening the situation of workers who will be a key generator of losing confidence in democratic government and return to the main political scene those who in the 1990s were the protagonists of the Yugoslav wars, and who were the main culprits for the degradation of the international reputation of the Serbian nation is unprecedented in the history of Serbia. Today Serbia is far closer to autocracy rather than democracy, exposed internal political violence, with non-free state institutions, unclear status of Kosovo and Metohija and undefined national borders. Omnipotent Government is trying to attract foreign investors by promoting its own citizens as cheap labor for which workers' rights are not applicable in the present developed societies. Essentially an important answer to the question why Serbia today so gloomy and hopeless.We will try to clarify the situation somewhat emphasis on the social history of modern Serbia.

The Sword and the Shield: The Uses of Poetry at the War Crimes Trial of Radovan Karadžić, the Poet-Warrior1

A substantial body of scholarship has developed addressing the narrative importance poetry plays in understanding war and conflict. This article develops a new thread in that conversation by examining how poetry and the discussion of poets served multiple, competing, and sometimes outright contradictory purposes at the four-and-a-half-year-long war crimes trial for Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb leader during the third Yugoslav War. The article endeavors to classify each of the principal ways poetry was used as evidence or as argument at Karadžić's trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A review of 47,659 pages of the public trial transcripts reveals that poetry and discussion of poets served both as a sword and a shield, depending on whether the prosecution or defense invoked poetry and poets, and why. Finally, the article comments on poetry's narrative import for the legal-historic record of Karadžić's trial and the precedent it sets for including creative arts in prosecutions for war crimes – a precedent with utility for deterrence and vigilance in an increasingly fractured international scene.

Memory in the margins: The connecting and colliding of vernacular war memories

This article examines how war memory circulates, connects and collides on digital media platforms driven by digital publics that form around popular culture. Through a case study of vernacular memory discourses emerging around a game inspired by the Yugoslav war, the article investigates how the commenting practices of YouTube users provide insights into the feelings of belonging of conflict-affected subjects that go beyond ethnicity and exceed geographical boundaries. The comments of 331 videos were analysed, using an open source tool and sequential mixed-method content analysis. Media-based collectivities emerging on YouTube are influenced by the reactive and asynchronous dynamics of comments that stimulate the emergence of micro-narratives. Within this plurality of voices, connective moments focus on shared memories of trauma and displacement beyond ethnicity. However, clashing collective memories cause disputes that reify identification along ethnic lines. The article concludes that memory discourses emerging in the margins of YouTube represent the affective reactions of serendipitous encounters between users of audio-visual content.

On social practices which Donna Haraway calls "Teddy Bear Patriarchy"

Jelena Jureša’s video installation Aphasia consists of three chapters, each focusing on the absurdity arising from the collective silence surrounding crime and the compartmentalization of historical events, tracing the line between Belgian colonialism, Austrian antisemitism and the war in Yugoslavia. The film borrows the term 'aphasia' not exclusively from medical vocabulary—where it refers to trouble finding words or losing the ability to speak—but also from the writing of scholar Ann L. Stoler, who coined the term 'colonial aphasia', referring to the occlusion of knowledge in addition to collective amnesia, and the difficulty of generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words, or concepts with appropriate things. Aphasia brings together compartmentalized historical events, through the history of racism and eugenics, focusing on the blind spots of history and the difficulty of speaking about the troubled past. The film charts the line starting with museum dioramas through photography to film, and sees them as deeply interwoven with imperialism and colonialism, used in order to produce a template for the blooming science of biological or physical anthropology.

Paul Poet transforms Christoph Schlingensief’s Container Project: Performance into Image

Paul Poet transforms Christoph Schlingensief’s Container Project: Performance into Image Birgit Tautz (bio) An Event, its Effects and Discontents Wiener Festwochen (Viennese Art Festival), June 2000: long considered the enfant terrible among European performance artists, Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010), is at it again. In a fortress-like compound made of shipping containers and placed next to the opera house, Schlingensief stages a weeklong Aktion (political performance). Formally akin to the then-booming Big Brother television show, the performance stages an “intervention.”1 The “houseguests” have applied for asylum in Austria and several are recent refugees, people displaced by the civil and ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia or forced into migration by famines in Africa. The “show” is (co-)produced by members of the public passing by on their way to and from the city center but also lurking online. To top it all, the happenings in the compound are streamed live, 24/7. Online, the audience votes for their “favorite refugee,” with the vote enabling the foreigner to stay in the country after an arranged marriage to an Austrian, while votes taken over the phone expel a houseguest from the compound. S/he is to be escorted from the premises live, each night at 7 p.m.2 Schlingensief’s Aktion meant to uncover any subtle (and not so subtle) workings of prejudice and xenophobia in the immediate aftermath of right-wing electoral success in Austria in 2000. Beginning with the title, Bitte liebt Österreich! – Erste Österreichische Koalitionswoche (Please love Austria: First Austrian Coalition Week), it invited protests by all those it targeted, from the (anonymous but vocal) public to the (inter-) national and boulevard press, all the while involving them in the production. Public, press and other media organizations, as well as artists, but also accused politicians became co-producers of “factual” declarations, name-shaming, and “misreadings.” While pedestrians’ protests proved to be self-revealing—as they confirmed accusations of xenophobia—and are well documented on film, television, and in newspapers, Kronen-Zeitung, the largest, most populist daily in Austria, feigned protest. It [End Page 50] riled up the public over the originally chosen, but ultimately retracted subtitle “Konzentrationswoche” (concentration week, in allusion to concentration camp), while revealing a performance script that had the layout of the compound but was captioned “Lagerplan” (camp plan) rather than “Lageplan” (location map).3 Ultimately though, Krone only proliferated any and all insults by endlessly repeating them. Xenophobic media slogans, along with actual and fake brand logos, decorated the container walls, emphasizing insult and offensiveness through their loud, in-your-face visual presence. The signs were so omnipresent that leftwing protesters mistook them for xenophobic overreach, climbed the outer walls and tore them down. The project’s message seemed ubiquitous: xenophobia is everywhere, as is latent fascism. Schlingensief’s intent was more complex, though, as he aimed to move beyond exterior signs and expose internalized habitus: “Everybody was meant to read xenophobic Austria as a character, a role or a person that anybody can inhabit and that everybody has internalized.”4 The declared intent aimed to transcend the performance itself, lifting temporal art into a realm of experiencing a human condition, up to and in all its (self-) destructiveness.5 In its volatility and controversy, the performance revealed, as Anna Teresa Scheer observes, that left- and rightwing ideologies (and respective attributions by the other side) may be entirely insufficient to discuss the issues at hand.6 And yet, this snippet-like account can only convey parts of the performance. The project website (with clips from www.freewebTV.com) and an out-of-print book contain elements of the original design, scripts, and media-materials commenting on the weeklong happening.7 They inventory and archive them, presumably, without any editorial intervention or any efforts to organize the visual material. But these media, like any other, fall short of preserving the nature of the performance action. As it had played out live across different spaces, multiplied and augmented in several media, it resisted and undercut any unified message. (The different titles underscore the latter point.) Rather these aspects point to an event that yielded multidirectional...

Confronting Recent History: Media in Serbia During Aleksandar Vučić’s Ministry of Information in the Milošević Era (1998–1999)

Since the end of the Yugoslav wars of the nineties, Serbia seems to have fallen out of the spotlight in scholarly research. Attempting to counter this, in this article, we tackle the media suppression by the 1998-99 Ministry of Information led by Aleksandar Vucic, nowadays serving as Serbia’s President. Repositioning the spotlight from Slobodan Milosevic to Aleksandar Vucic, we confront the numerous attempts of media suppression and censorship in the late nineties.

Theoretical Metric of Civilization: The Case of the International Court of Justice

The usefulness of a theoretical metric for civilization is that it can help to identify the kinds of progress which society can make that is universalized for all humanity. Societal systems perform the functions which provide the values and performance of the society, and wherein societal problems occur. In the concept of the level of “civilization” of a society, four kinds of measures can assess the progress of a society in attaining universalized values: Truth, Good, Beautiful, and Wealth. The value of Truth in our civilization is methodologically investigated by science. The value of Good in our civilization is politically pursued through democracy. The value of Beautiful in our civilization is seen in the preservation of the environment of the Earth. The value of Wealth in our civilization is generated through industrialization of societal production. We apply the theory to the historical case of the International Court of Justice and Yugoslav War Crimes to examine empirical evidence about the validity of a theoretical metric.

The International Context of Wars in the Former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1991–1995)

The article attempts to explain the reasons of the Yugoslav tragedy, which claimed about 300,000 lives and led to the displacement of more than 2 million people. The author boils the answer down to the simplified and biased Western interpretation of the in-fluence of Balkan history on the situation after the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), systemic uncertain-ty in European and transatlantic relations after the end of the Cold War, adventurous and irresponsible behaviour of the leaders of several independent countries established on the ruins of the former SFRY, inadequate reaction of the United States of America (US) and NATO to the crisis, Europeans’ false initial belief that they will be able to address security challenges in the ‘new’ Europe by their own efforts. The author emphasizes that the settlement of the Yugoslav crisis should have immediately become NATO’s priority. In such a case, Americans and Europeans could have started working together as mediators among different conflicting parties to ensure a peaceful ‘divorce’ of the republics. However, Washington did not want to see this. The US attitude to the Yugoslav crisis in 1990–1992 undermined the foundations of the declared policy of NATO’s central role in Europe after the Cold War, which envisaged the responsibility of the Alliance for resolving the Balkan conflict. The author argues that if the deployment of an international peacekeeping contingent in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions takes an expressive form, Kyiv will need to carefully examine the factual background of the events in the former SFRY. This should help avoid many of the complications that arose during the peace enforcement operation in the Balkans in the first half of the 1990s. Keywords: NATO, Balkans, SFRY, Yugoslav tragedy, USA.

Early 21st-century Serbian exploitation cinema

Exploitation films are one of the main trends of the Serbian cinema of the beginning of the 21st century, when Serbia enters the second phase of systemic transformation, striving to neutralize the effects of the crisis in the first phase of transformation – towards the end of the 20th century – due to the authoritarian policy of Slobodan Milošević and Yugoslav wars. This non-film context allows better understanding of the phenomenon of these films, which in many respects are a continuation of the cinema of self-balkanization cultivated in the 1990s, and at the same time differ from it, because they do not offer a compromise with difficult transformational reality, but express the need to release the social trauma born of experience of political violence in the Milošević era.

The trouble of gender sin in post-Yugoslav film – in the name of the father

Post-Yugoslav film art is, similarly to Yugoslav cinema, exemplary of masculine cultural domination, approaching socio-national themes in a highly gendered mode and reflecting a return to patriarchy, more brutal than that during the existence of Yugoslavia. A new generation of cinéasts explores, with a backlash mixture of contempt and compassion, the themes of violence, displaying a new assault on female emancipation, which seemed to be in line with the socio-political context of rising nationalist movements that led to the bloody events of the Yugoslav war in 1991. The female character is re-located to a place traditionally assigned to women not as the subject of narrative or discourse, but as the object of love and/or hatred by a masculine subject. The films chosen to be analysed here are full-length auteur feature films – Virgina, Grbavica, Djeca, Bure baruta, with a specific focus on the work by Danis Tanović – are not representative of post-Yugoslav cinema, but as rare exceptions demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant post-Yugoslav public opinion, both the Yugoslav wars and post-war traumatic realities remain cinematically unexplored.

Time networks: history and synchronicity in contemporary Croatian cinema

Th e paper demonstrates the prominence of network narratives ( fi lms with several autonomous storylines, globally popular since the mid- 1990 s) in post-Yugoslav, particularly Croatian, cinema, with examples such as Metastases ( 2009 ), Th e Reaper ( 2014 ), You Carry Me ( 2015 ), Th e Constitution ( 2016 ), Th e Trampoline ( 2017 ), etc. Unlike network narratives elsewhere, these fi lms o ft en thematize history, with parallel stories typically set during World War II and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990 s. Th is has been said to suggest as a circular, synchronic vision of history, a “transhistorical dance macabre” as a leitmotif of Balkan cinema. Th e fi lms Witnesses ( 2003 ) and Th e High Sun ( 2015 ), together with a group of multi-narrative plays, i.e. Th e Last Link ( 1994 ) , 3 Winters ( 2014 ) and Men of Wax ( 2016 ), are analysed as vehicles of counter-memory to such self-Balkanizing representations.