CITSEE studies on “Citizens and Citizenship after Yugoslavia” published in Serbian

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CITSEE is pleased to announce that CLIO (a Belgrade-based publisher) has recently published the volume “Citizens and Citizenship after Yugoslavia” (Državljani i državljanstvo posle Jugoslavije) edited by Professor Jo Shaw and Dr Igor Štiks. The volume contains the Serbian translations of the studies that previously appeared in the special issue of Citizenship Studies dedicated to “Citizenship in the new states of South Eastern Europe”. The book was promoted in Belgrade in early October in the presence of the editors (for a report in Serbian click here)

“Citizens and Citizenship after Yugoslavia” is the first comprehensive examination of the citizenship regimes of the new states that emerged out of the break-up of Yugoslavia to appear in Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. It covers both the states that emerged out of the initial disintegration across 1991 and 1992 (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Macedonia), as well as those that have been formed through subsequent partitions (Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo). The studies demonstrate the ways in which citizenship has often been used as a tool of ethnic engineering to reinforce the position of the titular majority in many of these states. In some cases, citizenship laws and practices have been liberalised as part of a wider political settlement intended to include minority communities more effectively in the political process. Meanwhile, frequent (re)definitions of these increasingly overlapping regimes still provoke conflicts among post-Yugoslav states.

The book’s contribution to the study of these issues has been praised by a number of distinguished scholars, among them Jacques Rupnik, of Sciences Po - Paris / CERI.

“This examination of the ways in which citizenship has been reclaimed, suppressed, violated, and redefined provides a crucial and much neglected insight into what happened to the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia over the last two decades. This study — of broader significance beyond the case of the Balkans — reveals what happens to citizens and political communities when a multinational federal state disintegrates and new nation-states are being built under close scrutiny of another would-be federal project in the making. Shaw and Štiks’ volume provides a most valuable contribution to the subject combining a European perspective with the view from within.”

Aleš Debeljak, of the University of Ljubljana, was equally fulsome in his praise.

“This collection of essays on the vicissitudes of citizenship in the successor-states to Yugoslavia is a timely reminder of the pernicious consequences the ethnicisation of political membership has for individuals and for communities. The varieties of citizenship experience are here illuminated with a passionate, yet scholarly debate about the possibilities of multiple and overlapping forms of citizenship in a multi-ethnic federal state, informed as they are with the collapse of the country that tried out many models before giving way to ethnic singularity and the attendant closing of the Yugoslav mind. These specific lessons from the Yugoslav past read at times as disturbing premonitions of the European future, urging us to look into ways of political membership with a reason and emphatic solidarity.”

To order the book, contact the publisher

An extended version of the Citizenship Studies special issue will be published by Routledge in November 2012 under the title ‘Citizenship after Yugoslavia’.