The author analyzes Serbian political mythology about the nation, in particular the role of narratives in political discourse and notions of time, nature, borders, heroism and national identity.

The author analyzes Serbian political mythology about the nation, in particular the role of narratives in political discourse and notions of time, nature, borders, heroism and national identity.

"These thought-provoking essays on the Serbian ethno-myth make this book a valuable contribution to the literature on the former Yugoslavia." —The Journal of Slavic Military Studies "The newspaper articles . . . offer incisive, ironic, and often witty analyses of nationalist discourse found in a wide variety of texts, including political speeches." — Slavic Review Symbols are central to politics. In this groundbreaking work, Ivan Colevic investigates the symbols of politics and the politics of symbols in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovnia. The first part of the work, "The Serbian Political Ethno-Myth," analyzes Serbian political mythology about the nation and nationalism in particular, as well as the role of narratives in political discourse, and notions of time, nature, borders, heroism, and national identity. The second part, "From the History of Serbian Political Mythology," is concerned with the historical development of Serbian political myths. The third part, "Characters and Figures of Power," comprises case studies which analyze political symbolism, myth, rhetoric, and propaganda. These studies are based on examples gleaned from the Serbian press, academic texts and literature, political speeches, and from everyday life. Finally, Colevic investigates the relationship between the masses, mass culture, and politics, including the recruitment of soccer fans into the war in the former Yugoslavia, and how symbolic communication was used by Serbia's anti-Milosevic opposition.

This work: analyses Serbian political mythology about the nation; examines the historical development of Serbian myths; analyses political symbolism, myth, rhetoric and propaganda, using case studies; and investigates the relationship between the masses, mass culture and politics.

"In the 1990s, Yugoslavia, which had once been a role model for development, became a symbol for state collapse, external intervention and post-war reconstruction. Today the region has two international protectorates, contested states and borders, severe ethnic polarisation and minority concerns. In this first in-depth critical analysis of international administration, aid and reconstruction policies in Kosovo, Jens Stilhoff Sorensen argues that the region must be analysed as a whole, and that the process of state collapse and recent changes in aid policy must be interpreted in connection to the wider transformation of the global political economy and world order. He examines the shifting inter- and intracommunity relations, the emergence of a 'political economy' of conflict, and of informal clientelist arrangements in Serbia and Kosovo and provides a framework for interpreting the collapse of the Yugoslav state, the emergence of ethnic conflict and shadow economies, and the character of western aid and intervention. Western governments and agencies have built policies on conceptions and assumptions for which there is no genuine historical or contemporary economic, social or political basis in the region. As the author persuasively argues, this discrepancy has exacerbated and cemented problems in the region and provided further complications that are likely to remain for years to come." -- Back cover.

Thomas carefully examines the complexities of modern Serbian politics, largely in the words of the political players themselves. He illuminates the chronic factionalism that has frustrated any attempt to unseat Slobodan Milosevic from the presidency.

This book develops a novel way of thinking about crises in world politics. By building on ontological security theory, this work conceptualises critical situations as radical disjunctions that challenge the ability of collective agents to ‘go on’. These ontological crises bring into the realm of discursive consciousness four fundamental questions related to existence, finitude, relations and autobiography. In times of crisis, collective agents such as states are particularly attached to their ontic spaces, or spatial extensions of the self that cause collective identities to appear more firm and continuous. These theoretical arguments are illustrated in a case study looking at Serbia’s anxiety over the secession of Kosovo. The author argues that Serbia’s seemingly irrational and self-harming policy vis-à-vis Kosovo can be understood as a form of ontological self-help. It is a rational pursuit of biographical continuity and a healthy sense of self in the face of an ontological crisis triggered by the secession of a province that has been constructed as the ontic space of the Serbian nation since the late 19th century.