Bojan Bilic Boeken

This volume combines empirically oriented and theoretically grounded reflections upon various forms of LGBT activist engagement to examine how the notion of intersectionality enters the political context of contemporary Serbia and Croatia. By uncovering experiences of multiple oppression and voicing fear and frustration that accompany exclusionary practices, the contributions to this book seek to reinvigorate the critical potential of intersectionality, in order to generate the basis for wider political alliances and solidarities in the post-Yugoslav space. The authors, both activists and academics, challenge the systematic absence of discussions of (post-)Yugoslav LGBT activist initiatives in recent social science scholarship, and show how emancipatory politics of resistance can reshape what is possible to imagine as identity and community in post-war and post-socialist societies. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of history and politics of Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav states, as well as to those working in the fields of political sociology, European studies, social movements, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, and queer theory and activism.

Positioned at the interface between historical sociology, anthropology, and social movement studies, We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy goes beyond the widely exploited paradigms of nationalism and civil society to track the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war protest cycle which unfolded throughout the 1990s. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in the region, the author argues that (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activism cannot be recovered without appreciating both the inter- and intra-republican cooperations and contestations in socialist Yugoslavia. (Post-)Yugoslav anti-war undertakings appropriated and developed the already existing social networks and were instrumental for the establishment of present-day organisations devoted to human rights protection, transitional justice, and peace education across the ex-Yugoslav space. Bojan Bili? is a post-doctoral fellow at the Central European University Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest.

[Post-]Yugoslav anti-war contention has remained a blind spot in East European sociological scholarship. More than a decade after the end of the wars of Yugoslav succession, there is very little that we know about the processes through which the imminence of an armed conflict awakened dormant social networks and strengthened the existing activist circles or created new ones. This study systematically illuminates (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement as an important and up to now neglected aspect of the complex process of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. With its distinctly trans-national approach, this volume recovers the relevance of various forms of civic organising in former Yugoslavia for the anti-war contention which unfolded before, during and after the wars of Yugoslav succession. This book is a collective endeavour of a group of authors coming from all the republics of former Yugoslavia. It, thus, offers a look from within which has been conspicuously missing from the regional sociology. Almost all of the contributors combine rigorous theoretical reflection with empirically rich accounts stemming from their own activist experience in the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and peace initiatives.