How Holocaust Memories Continue to Divide the Serbs and the Croats

In Holocaust and genocide education, we frequently and rightly stress remembrance in order to honor the victims of the past as well as to safeguard our future from repeated transgressions. However, there are parts of the world where remembering or “misremembering” atrocities accentuates the fracturing of communities. In the Balkans, the festering wounds that have been inflicted throughout history never seem to truly heal, as the past, both real and fictionalized, drives contemporary and competing realities. This is noticeably evident with the modern-day rifts separating ethnic Croats and ethnic Serbs, which despite recent political inroads and relative stability, persist in being purveyors of mutual animosity

Why Croatia is bucking the eastern European trend on migrants

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Tourism, conflict and contested heritage in former Yugoslavia

Although, historically, there have always been travellers crossing the Balkan Peninsula, Todorova (1994 Todorova, M. (1994). The Balkans: From discovery to invention. Slavic Review, 53, 453–482. doi: 10.2307/2501301) notes that early travellers were usually heading for important centres such as Constantinople or Jerusalem, and considered South-East Europe as a peripheral place where people were just passing through. The region is only really discovered in the eighteenth century along with an increasing interest in the East. More organised forms of tourism appear at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emerging first around railway lines and thermal therapy resources, and then expanding towards the coastlines. A large part of these developments took place in Croatia and the ‘Dalmatian Riviera’, but other regions also experienced the arrival of visitors and the first organised trip in Bosnia was proposed by Thomas Cook & Sons in 1898. It is only after the Second World War, during the rule of Marshall Tito, that tourism really flourished particularly in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) followed an alternative way of development as the rest of the Eastern Bloc. A relative openness to the West allowed the arrival of European tourists and led to forms of mass tourism in some parts of the region (Grandits & Taylor, 2010 Grandits, H., & Taylor, K. (Eds.). (2010). Yugoslavia’s sunny side: A history of tourism and socialism (1950s–1980s). Budapest: CEU Press.). While communist regimes such as Bulgaria and Romania mainly hosted eastern ‘apparatchiks’ on the Black Sea resorts, Yugoslavia and Greece focused on attracting seaside tourists from Western Europe (Cattaruzza & Sintès, 2012 Cattaruzza, A., & Sintès, P. (2012). Atlas géopolitique des Balkans. Un autre visage de l'Europe. Paris: Autrement.)

Whose museum? Whose history? Whose memories?: remembering in the work of Dubravka Ugrešić

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Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies

Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of ‘cultures’. Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as cosmopolitan individuals with subjective and complex socio-political and historical identities. Such models push the boundaries of current concepts in language pedagogy to new understandings of who the language learner is and a refashioning of the cultural maps they inhabit. This article presents a model for cultural understanding that draws on the theoretical framework of Beck's Cosmopolitan Vision and its related concepts of ‘Banal Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Cosmopolitan Empathy’. Narrative accounts are used to illustrate the experience of a group of students of Arabic and Serbian/Croatian and their use of the cultural resources at their disposal to construct their own subjective cosmopolitan life-worlds. Through the analysis of learners' everyday cultural practices inside and outside the educational environment, the scope of the intercultural experience is revisited and a new paradigm for the language learner is presented. The Cosmopolitan Speaker (CS) described in this article is a subject who adopts a flâneur-like disposition to reflect on and scrutinise the target culture. Armed with this highly personal interpretation of reality, CSs will be able to take part in their own cultural trajectories and imagine and ‘figure’ their own cartography of the world

"It All Ended in an Unsporting Way": Serbian Football and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia, 1989-2006

Part of a wider examination into football during the collapse of Eastern European Communism between 1989 and 1991, this article studies the interplay between Serbian football and politics during the period of Yugoslavia's demise. Research utilizing interviews with individuals directly involved in the Serbian game, in conjunction with contemporary Yugoslav media sources, indicates that football played an important proactive role in the revival of Serbian nationalism. At the same time the Yugoslav conflict, twinned with a complex transition to a market economy, had disastrous consequences for football throughout the territories of the former Yugoslavia. In the years following the hostilities the Serbian game has suffered decline, major financial hardship and continuing terrace violence, resulting in widespread nostalgia for the pre-conflict era

Writing war, writing memory: the representation of the recent past and the construction of cultural memory in contemporary Bosnian prose

Focusing on the work of Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, and Saša Stanišić, this paper examines how the representation of the recent past intertwines with the construction of collective memory in contemporary Bosnian prose. The author argues that a first, significant function of recent Bosnian literature consisted of not only witnessing the horror of the Bosnian war but also turning historical events into sites of memory. This is especially true for the literature about the wars of the nineties – the siege of Sarajevo, Srebrenica, etc. However, the involvement of Bosnian authors with the recent past – in prose written during the war as well as in more recent works – proves to be more complex and seems to be indicative of a growing interest in and reflexivity upon the ways in which collective and individual memory are constructed. This paper suggests that the interest in memory/remembering the recent past has been accelerated by the war and the social and political turmoil of the nineties. This liminal situation urged writers firstly to represent the horrors of the recent past in order to prevent them from falling into oblivion. Secondly, because war emerged as a kind of turning point, a radical break between past and present, writers were compelled to reflect on the processes of remembering and oblivion and on the ways identity is constituted by a strange and often unpredictable interplay of both