Syllabus
1) Reconsidering national identification: National Politics of Tito’s Yugoslavia
2) "Recounting the Dead" - Nationalist propaganda in the 80s in Socialist Yugoslavia
3) "On the edge of abyss" - Constitutional nationalism and disintegration of the Federal Yugoslavia
4) The Break-Up of the Yugoslav Federation - From Crisis to War in the Republics of former Yugoslavia
5) Ethnic conflicts or myth of ethnic wars? Civil Wars or Aggression? The understanding of the wars in the former Yugoslavia I.
6) Ethnic cleansing or genocide? The understanding of the wars in the former Yugoslavia II.
7) The war in Croatia and its interpretation
8) The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its interpretation
9) The Role of Religion in the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Intra-Muslim Civil War.
10) Violence brought into ex-yugoslav communities from the outside: paramilitary units, volunteers and foreign warriors
11) Cities under siege. Safe Areas: strategy of surviving in besieged city.
12) The Kosovo War and Its Aftermath
13) Macedonia on the brink: War in FYROM
Annotation
The course focuses on Balkan nationalism and selected aspects of conflict society in the Western Balkans after the break-up of the so-called 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 and FYROM).
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 which influenced ex-Yugoslav communities in the course of the war and on 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.