Jour fixe culture studies with Milica Popović 

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia crumbled in violent wars in the 1990s that led to the loss of over 140,000 lives, and unfathomable consequences for the (post)Yugoslav societies. The political elites, needing to legitimize the wars and demands for independence, resorted to different forms of nationalist mobilization and imposed ethnocentric narratives. However, media and nongovernmental reports have noted thousands of cases of desertion and draft evasion. The wartime regimes responded with (show) trials, threats, torture, and forced mobilizations. Today, acts of anti-war, but also anti-ethnonational, resistance during and after the Yugoslav wars are included in, or excluded from, official memory politics of the (post)Yugoslav states in accordance with the ideological aims of contemporary political struggles: through its epitomizing as an ultimate ethical act, or by purposefully forcing it into oblivion. Presenting the phenomenon of desertion in the Yugoslav wars, theoretical underpinnings and empirical challenges of researching silenced and hidden narratives, after almost 18 months in the field across the (post)Yugoslav space, the lecture aims to open the debate on how, in the interplay of public and private memory narratives, diverse mnemonic actors create a story of the deserter from the Yugoslav wars in today’s (post)Yugoslav space.

Chair:Univ. - Prof. Dr. phil. Florian Bieber, University of Graz