Volume 65, Issue 4

This paper discusses various points about the response of the Serbian theatre to the social crisis of the 1990s. The focus here is on publicly-funded theatres and their role in pacifying or mobilizing theatre audiences either to participate in or revolt against the political projects which accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The Serbian theatre system in the 1990s entered a clear process of transformation of its models of management, production, financing, public relations and, naturally, the language and forms of expression inherited from the socialist 1980s. The chief interest of this study is the transformation of the theatre system since the end of World War II, theatrical interpretations of the historical and literary past in Serbia, the role of theatre in the identity ‘makeovers’ that followed the demise of Yugoslavia, and stage interpretations of contemporary crises. Consideration is also given to the present state of the theatre in Serbia.

This article, based on the results of focus-group discussions, dyads, and interviews in Croatia, examines how Croatians construct their narrative of the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia’s role in it. Despite judgements at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluding that the Croatian state intervened in the Bosnian conflict, respondents in this study claimed to be ignorant of any such intervention. What was discussed worked in concert with the dominant Croatian war narrative of Croatian defence, victimhood, and sacrifice in the face of a larger, Serbian aggressor. By portraying the Bosnian conflict as chaotic and savage, respondents differentiated it from the Croatian one and relativised any illicit actions within a framework of nesting orientalism. Croatian involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina was generally seen as positive: it was viewed in terms of Croatia welcoming Bosniak refugees and providing military assistance, which enabled moral licensing with regard to the rarely mentioned and marginalised negative aspects of Croatia’s involvement in the conflict.

The authors offer an analysis of the property reforms that accompanied economic transformation in late socialist and postsocialist Yugoslavia, as experienced and narrated by industrial workers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia today. The property reforms carried out in these two countries between 1990 and the 2000s have profoundly influenced the narratives that workers form around their experience of economic transformation in the workplace. By analysing how industrial workers have developed a feeling of ownership towards their particular workplace, and how they now talk about that experience, the authors provide an explanation for workers’ disillusionment and dissatisfaction towards privatisation reforms in recent years, and show how they have made sense of the seismic shifts in property relations that have accompanied economic reforms since 1989.

This paper aims at forecasting the size and effects of remittances and emigration in Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo, using a qualitative forecasting method, a Delphi questionnaire. The authors examined consensus building within and between two groups of respondents: ten experts and twenty remittance receivers per country, in three subsequent rounds–two on the same group and a third cross-round. Consensual results suggest that remittances in the projected five-year period will increase in Macedonia and Serbia, and will reduce in Albania and Kosovo. With less consensus, the results forecast that emigration will decelerate, except in Serbia. Emigration effects for the society have been forecast as predominantly negative due to skilled labour emigration, while remittances were forecast to maintain their effect on poverty in Macedonia and Serbia, and weaken in Albania. Consensus has been reached, except in Macedonia, that remittances will support labour market activity.

This article reports on a metamorphosis. As a participant in a Marie Curie project called ‘Trans-Making’, the author spent three weeks in Istanbul to see which of three abstract ideas he had considered in advance might match, challenge or subvert existing depictions of one of the most complex metropolitan cities in the world. In clarifying his project proposal, he not only had to face his own private orientalism, but also found that, to come to a basic understanding of the unique metropolis that is Istanbul, he had to observe the anxious present political and cultural changes in everyday life through the longue durée historical lens.