State-sponsored populism and the rise of populistgovernance: the case of Montenegro

Ever since it became independent in 2006, Montenegro has steadily progressed in its ambition to accede to the European Union. Even so, a new form of populism, dominated by neither a far-right nor a far-left discourse, but controlled by leading political elites in the country’s government has developed in Montenegro. This form of populism is not a mechanism of ensuring the dominance of the Democratic Party of Socialists (Demokratska Partija Socijalista Crne Gore, DPS) in Montenegro per se. Instead it is used as a tool to support and enhance other mechanisms that the party utilizes in order to stay in power and remain the dominant force in the country. Hence, we can observe the growth of a new kind of populism, a state-sponsored populist discourse that is very different from populism as understood in Western Europe. What we find in Montenegro is a government that uses populist language and messages to support a clientelistic state system

Post-partition citizenship policies: Lessons from Post-Yugoslav federal states

Citizenship policies are important tools of inclusion and exclusion in a post-partition context. In most cases, they reflect the unitary and mono-ethnic character of newly established states. Their function in countries and territories where an ethnonational break-up resulted in further ethnically diverse societies is far more complex. Citizenship in multilevel states created through state disintegration is a counterintuitive combination of (1) the legacies of the old citizenship tradition and replications of the old federal structure, and (2) processes of ethnic engineering and designing group-centric citizenship regimes. Legacies of the old structure are framed by the modalities of break-up and initial determination of citizenry (e.g. the absence of zero solution), but strongly mirror elements of the previous multilevel construction of citizenship, including bottom-up derivation, ethno-national determination of membership, voting rights and representation. Discontinuities in citizenship policies reflect wider tensions between nation- and state-building (and destruction), and how these processes have been molded through different international influences. We undertake a case-study of two post-Yugoslav multilevel states, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, with the intent of drawing broader conclusions on how citizenship policies can keep states together or break them apart