During the 1980s, two attitudes crystallized in Serbia, which read as follows: 1) Serbs and Croats can no longer live together in Croatia, as well as Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, and 2) the solution to this problem is the unification of all Serbian countries (those parts of Yugoslavia where Serbs are the majority of the population). The creators of this solution were primarily prominent members of two institutions: the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) and the Serbian Writers' Association (UKS). Later, it was accepted with open arms by the bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church who were its most determined and persistent representatives. Already in the early 90s, two Serbian entities were created outside Serbia: Serb Republic of Krajina (in Croatia) and Republika Srpska (in Bosnia and Herzegovina). All that was needed was to merge them with the motherland of the Serbian people. And thus, the ultimate goal would be achieved. But it turned out that the realization of such a project required capable individuals: politicians, spiritual leaders and military leaders. And, of course, people who are firm in the belief that their fight is just and justified. Instead, Serbs had at their disposal communists once loyal to Tito's regime, "elite intellectuals" who wisely kept silent during Tito's life, and a large number of zealous bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church, some of whom were willing to sacrifice thousands of people to achieve certain political goals. These goals were thought to be achievable with military leaders ready to completely destroy a city like Vukovar, hold a city like Sarajevo under siege for more than a thousand days, and shoot thousands of (war) prisoners in an organized manner, as was done in Srebrenica. Or, with convicted criminals at the head of paramilitary formations whose members expressed their patriotic feelings through robbery, rape and killing. At the same time, the bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church left their dioceses and bishops' courts, leaving Orthodox believers without spiritual help and holy communion. They hung out and took photos with those who mercilessly shot thousands of unarmed or disarmed people. They baptized and blessed paramilitary formations that committed numerous war crimes. And they demanded continuing of the war, regardless of the number of those who will suffer. According to the author of this book, the above facts contain the answer to the question why the Serbian people, at the very end of the second millennium since the birth of Jesus Christ, experienced one of the greatest defeats and humiliations in its entire history.

This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of Eastern Christian churches in Europe, the Middle East, America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Written by leading international scholars in the field, it examines both Orthodox and Oriental churches from the end of the Cold War up to the present day. The book offers a unique insight into the myriad church-state relations in Eastern Christianity and tackles contemporary concerns, opportunities and challenges, such as religious revival after the fall of communism; churches and democracy; relations between Orthodox, Catholic and Greek Catholic churches; religious education and monastic life; the size and structure of congregations; and the impact of migration, secularisation and globalisation on Eastern Christianity in the twenty-first century.

Exploring the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and postwar retribution and focusing on the Chetnik movement, this book analyses the politics of memory. Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second World War and its aftermath is understood and interpreted. The glorification and romanticisation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, more commonly referred to as the Chetnik movement, has become the central theme of Serbia’s memory politics during this period. The book traces their construction as a national antifascist movement equal to the communist-led Partisans and as victims of communism, showing the parallel justification and denial of their wartime activities of collaboration and mass atrocities. The multifaceted approach of this book combines a diachronic perspective that illuminates the continuities and ruptures of narratives, actors and practices, with in-depth analysis of contemporary Serbia, rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and exploring multiple levels of memory work and their interactions. It will appeal to students and academics working on contemporary history of the region, memory studies, sociology, public history, transitional justice, human rights and Southeast and East European Studies.

This multifaceted and up-to-date encyclopedia is sure to be of interest to pastors and church workers of all confessions, equally so to students, scholars, and researchers around the world who are interested in any aspect of Christianity or religion in general. The first volume contains 465 articles that address a comprehensive list of topics.

In the last years of their existence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) found themselves facing a similar and very grim state of affairs. After their disintegration, the former Yugoslav republics spiralled into a set of ethnic conflicts that did not leave a single one of them unscathed, and in the ex-Soviet space, conflicts were far more limited. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the difference in state collapses and ensuing conflicts in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by focusing on their asymmetric ethnofederal structure and the different dynamics of ethnic mobilization that the federal units experienced. Moreover, it explores the links between identity politics and international relations, as the latter has been a latecomer in research on ethnonationalism and ethnic conflict. Finally, it contributes to the literature on the democratization-conflict nexus by proposing that the sequencing of ethnic mobilization and political liberalization has significant effects on the likelihood of conflict. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Post-Soviet politics, Balkan politics, ethnic conflict, peace and conflict studies, federalism, and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.

This book examines the role religion played in the dismantling of Yugoslavia; addressing practical concerns of inter-ethnic fighting, religiously-motivated warfare, and the role religion played within the dissolution of the nation.

This book explores the uses of the past in foreign policy-making. It outlines why and how political leaders refer to historical events in contemporary foreign policy discourses; the goals they hope to achieve; and the sometimes unintended foreign policy consequences of their (ab)use of historical memory. Furthermore, it looks at how political leaders shape domestic collective memories in pursuit of their international agendas, and highlight historical events leaders forget, reinterpret or obscure through selective narratives. The chapters explore a variety of theoretical concepts that shed light on how memory and foreign policy are linked in a complex and reciprocal way. The following mechanisms are discussed: the application of historical analogies; the construction of historical narratives; the creation of memory sites; the marginalisation and forgetting of the past; and the securitisation of historical memory. Through the use of a number of methodological approaches (such as discourse analysis, narrative analysis and content analysis of securitising moves) and a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data (newspaper articles, policy documents, commemorative speeches, interviews with policymakers and the observation of memory sites), the contributions highlight the interdependence of the international, national, regional and local dimensions of memory practices and history writing. Although they mostly focus on national case studies of foreign policy-making, they also reveal how representations of historical events evolve through interaction between political actors at the international level of analysis. The collection originated in the section entitled ‘Exploring the Link between Historical Memory and Foreign Policy’ at the annual Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA) 2018 held in Prague, the Czech Republic.