Branislav Radeljić and Carlos González-Villa: Researching Yugoslavia and its Aftermath. Sources, Prejudices and Alternative Solutions

The methodological discussion about research on, in, and about Southeastern Europe has been a constant topic of critical scholarly debate. The present volume inscribes itself in this field and explicitly focuses on the complexity of researching the post-Yugoslav region. It brings together a broad and compelling mix of interdisciplinary contributions that certainly broaden our understanding of the methodological challenges in researching Yugoslavia’s aftermath.

For the editors, the observation that research about ex-Yugoslavia is often accompanied by a rather superficial treatment of the region, at least in some disciplines, is the starting point for a critical assessment of “sources, prejudices, and alternative solutions.” Three decades after the end of the Yugoslav wars, they draw a critical picture of the political and social situation in the region and, on this basis, ask: “How does the given constellation affect scientific inquiry about the post-Yugoslav space? What factors should be considered when debating the trajectory from the inception of socialist Yugoslavia to recent occurrences? How do personal experiences, including the so-called unconscious biases, influence the outcome of the produced work? What are the benefits of scholarly conclusions for policymakers, if any? What are the usual blind spots characterizing the whole process?” (vi). These extensive research questions already reveal a core challenge of this interdisciplinary volume, namely to address the positionality of the researchers, the agency of the research subjects, the field in general, and the transfer of research on the region. It is therefore rather surprising that the book is not structured according to these thematic clusters, but chronologically in a socialist “Brotherhood and (Dis)Unity” and a postsocialist “Dissolution and After” section. Since most of the articles are from the field of social and political sciences and therefore deal with the present, the structure sometimes does not seem quite comprehensible to the reader.

In the reviewer’s reading of the book, there are two major approaches—or in the words of the editors “alternative solutions”—which are empirically founded or methodically reflected in the individual contributions. The first can be classified under the term “(new) methodological approaches.” Gal Kirn’s contribution in particular stands out here, looking at the Yugoslav partisan pasts and making a strong and convincing methodological case for the creation of counter-archives. According to Kirn, such counter-archives can serve two functions: preserving the memory of the oppressed on the one hand; and continuing the intellectual legacy of the partisans on the other, precisely because they defy the rules of classical canonization and thus provide intersections for new questions and approaches in the study of Yugoslav history.

The other contributions work with more classical methods, but are also able to show very well, using their respective case studies as examples, what potential these have for creating new approaches to controversial topics. For instance, Martin Previši ć makes a case for a broad empirical approach in researching the Goli Otok camp that draws a comprehensive picture of the historical past, based on a wide variety of sources, from oral history interviews to archival records. Elsewhere, by asking about the relationship between architecture and society in the case of New Belgrade, Jelena Prokopljevi ć makes a case for a broad set of sources and an interdisciplinary methodological approach.

The other articles, however, advocate a more focused approach, as do Beáta Huszka’s and Laura Pérez Rastrilla’s contributions, both using discourse frame analysis. While Huszka examines mobilization discourses and independence movements in Slovenia and Croatia in her research, Pérez Rastrilla analyzes the Spanish press coverage of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. By identifying four discursive frameworks—fear, genocide, relations between the Balkans and the West, and humanitarian intervention—she points to the special role of Spain in the Kosovo War: on the one hand, because of Solana’s position as secretary general of NATO that time; on the other hand, because of Spain’s internal political situation regarding regional claims of independence.

The second methodological proposal that connects the articles in the book is the focus on “reflexivity and positionality.” The most innovative and, in my opinion, also long-awaited contribution for research and teaching on the Yugoslav region comes from Daniela Lai on the importance of language learning. In “Stranci: Political Research and Language Learning in the Former Yugoslavia,” she draws from fieldwork experiences in her own discipline, International Relations (IR), which has a particularly bad image in the post-Yugoslav region for often only talking to English-speaking interlocutors. As Lai makes clear in her article, although insider knowledge that arises from language skills and longer research stays is valued within IR, this still has no influence on (the absence of) language training within the discipline. Lai’s contribution further touches on the problem of prioritizing languages within the region, which in turn also leads to an imbalance in research—for example, the absence of Albanian and Kosovar topics is fed by the lack of Albanian language competence and Albanian learning opportunities.

The contributions of Charles González-Villa, Branislav Radelji ć, and Milivoj Bešlin propose a similar reflexive approach to fieldwork. While González-Villa discusses how the dynamic process of European integration of Slovenia is not only the subject of his research but also influences the process of his investigations, Radeljić addresses the important issue of archival bias, especially in times of war and conflict. Using the example of his research on European Community-Yugoslav relations in socialist times, he shows that archives are “not political nor culturally neutral” (112). By comparing rather different sources on a similar topic in the archives of European Union institutions and the Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia, he states that one must critically reflect on the respective archival practices and traditions. The same holds true for Bešlin’s approach who describes two limiting factors in studying socialist Yugoslavia—the global and the national framework—by reviewing the existing literature on the subject.

Finally, a plea for a self-reflexive approach to researching the Yugoslav region is made by Senija Čaušević and Catherine Baker. Čaušević uses the example of her own ethnographic research on anti-fascist monuments to describe the advantages and disadvantages of her position as a “local insider researcher.” On the one hand, this gives her easier access to the field; on the other hand, this position possibly compromises her own view, which is why she makes a strong case for positionality in researching the post-Yugoslav region. Baker’s article argues for decolonizing research not only about the region but also in the centers outside the region where this knowledge is produced. In line with her title “The Call is Coming from Inside the House,” she states that reflexive research can only succeed when one critically engages with institutional practices of academic knowledge production. Using the example of her own academic environment in the United Kingdom, she draws on University College London’s initiatives “Why is My Curriculum White?” and “Why isn’t My Professor Black?” to show how important this confrontation was in her own academic trajectory to engage with questions of race, which eventually led to her book Race and the Yugoslav Region.

The volume ends with Baker’s strong argument for self-reflexive area studies, and by that, it delivers on its promise to look at sources, prejudices, and alternative solutions that lead to a differentiated methodological approach in researching Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Unfortunately, not all contributions fulfill this promise in equal measure, which is why the reader would have wished that the editors would have put more emphasis on a joint methodological discussion based on the important demands formulated at the beginning of the book for a critical assessment of positionality, methods, theories, and sources. Particularly against the background of the already existing research literature on the topic of Southeast European Studies,^[1] a stronger integration into existing debates would have been desirable for the readers’ gain of knowledge.

In particular, the current debate about the decolonization of the discipline and the hegemonic position of certain perspectives over others is especially visible in the absence of the case of Kosovo from the volume. Unfortunately, this happens all too often when talking about Yugoslavia and has not least to do with hegemonic knowledge infrastructures in and outside the region. Becoming aware of these and steering against them should become a central desideratum of future methodological reflections. The volume under review can be a good starting point to open up for such topics and questions on the future of research about Yugoslavia and its aftermath.