Volume 73, Issue 2

The recognition of Slovenia and Croatia was a defining moment in the history of the post-Cold War order in Europe. From the outset, this step was a controversial one, and scholars focussing on the role of the United Kingdom often claim that London’s responses to the collapse of Yugoslavia can be explained by a long British tradition of pro-Serbian sentiment, the Foreign Office’s realpolitik approach, or Britain’s neocolonial interests. This article analyses British foreign policy on the basis of recently declassified documents in order to critically discuss such assumptions about the motives of British foreign policy and thus contribute to the international history of the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s.

The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina is primarily notable for being an annex to the Dayton Peace Treaty that ended the 1992–1995 war. A significant aspect of this constitutional framework is its emphasis on the three main ethnic groups – Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs – designated as constituent peoples, which play a central role in the state’s governance and institutions. The recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Savickis and Others v. Latvia has indirectly highlighted the (in)compatibility of certain constitutional solutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the principle of non-discrimination of the European Convention on Human Rights. In this article, the authors explain how the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not seek to implement the rulings issued by the ECtHR, but rather interpreted the constitutional identity of the country as being based precisely on the central role given to the constituent peoples. In so doing, the Constitutional Court, now also supported by the case Savickis and Others v. Latvia , created the prospect of abuse of constitutionalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This article discusses the implications of including women in the labor force of the fish-canning factories on the Adriatic coast in socialist Yugoslavia. The discussion is based on ethnographic interviews with former workers from the Plavica (Cres), Kvarner (Lošinj), and Sirena (Lastovo) canneries. The authors offer insights into the socially relevant discursive registers in which this gendered labor is situated. As they reminisced, the interviewees spoke about modernization, mobility, and women’s emancipation as the dominant tropes of socialist industrialization, but also about perceptions based on strictly defined gender roles, insider-outsider dynamics, and local logics of social differentiation. The authors contextualize these workers’ narratives and experiences in discourses on industrial labor and fish canning on the global scale. They observe how workers’ memories and experiences in the Yugoslav socialist context contrast with the widespread perception of factory work as mundane and meaningless.

Corruption is often defined as the abuse of public functions for private gain, but research has expanded this view to include clientelism and forbearance, particularly in neo-patrimonial contexts. While forbearance has been widely studied, it remains largely unexplored in Southeastern Europe, where corruption is often oversimplified. This article innovatively combines forbearance, electoral corruption, and clientelism to analyse tax authorities’ behaviour during election periods in three Western Balkan countries. Findings suggest that due to staff politicisation and various other motives, tax authorities adjust their actions around elections, aligning with forbearance and electoral clientelism. This behaviour fosters tax evasion and market distortions, highlighting the need for a more in-depth investigation into these dynamics in the region.

In this article, the authors present the ERC project Open Borders, conducted between 2023 and 2027 at the Science and Research Centre (ZRS) in Koper, Slovenia. The project redefines Cold War history through multidisciplinary research on people, places, and cross-border practices. It examines transnational interactions in the social, cultural, and political context of the Cold War, and beyond, in the border region between Austria, Italy, and Yugoslavia (Slovenia and Croatia). The authors provide an assessment of the project’s results at its midpoint, outlining its methodology and framework; its recent conference “Places of Cross-Border Interaction in History: The Alps-Adriatic Region”; and the exhibition “Never Mind the Borders. People, Places, and Cross-Border Practices between the Alps and the Adriatic”, which the research group created in both a physical and online version. The two events make a valuable contribution to the programme of the first twin European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica/Gorizia.