Syllabus
1) Reconsidering national identification: National Politics of Tito’s Yugoslavia (4.10.)
2) “Recounting the Dead” - Nationalist propaganda in the 80s in Socialist Yugoslavia (11.10.)
3) "On the edge of abyss" - Constitutional nationalism and disintegration of the Federal Yugoslavia (18.10.)
4) The Break-Up of the Yugoslav Federation II. – The Dissolution of the SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1990 – 1992 (25.10.)
5) Ethnic conflicts or myths of ethnic wars? Civil Wars or Aggression? The understanding of the wars in the former Yugoslavia I. (1.11.)
6) Ethnic cleansing or genocide? The understanding of the wars in the former Yugoslavia II. (8.11.)
7) Paramilitary units. Violence brought into local communities from outside I. (15.11.)
8) Safe Areas: Violence brought into local communities from outside II. (22.11.)
9) The war in Croatia and its interpretation (29.11.)
10) Kosovo under the Milošević regime and The Kosovo War (6.12.)
11) Managing Mass Migration after Yugoslav Wars (13.12.)
12) Foreign Fighters (20.12.)
Annotation
The course focuses on Balkan nationalism and selected aspects of conflict society in the Western Balkans after the break-up of the Eastern Bloc. Because of the break-up of Socialist Yugoslavia in 1991, tensions and collective violence escalated in the Western Balkans (initially in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, later also in Kosovo).
The course examines both political and socio-economic causes of why the tensions escalated to such an extent in the former Yugoslav republics. It likewise puts emphasis on the typology of conflicts, chosen phenomena that influenced ex-Yugoslav communities in the course of the war and the formation of a new war identity.
Attention is also devoted to paramilitary groups and to the impacts of the war under scrutiny on the behaviour of societies as well as of individuals. The principal aim of the course is to provide students with an overview of the main aspects of war anthropology and their influence on communities dramatically changed by war.