Memories of War – Wars of Memory

Serbian memory politics on national, regional and European levels

This one-day public seminar aims to explore Serbian memory politics in relation to the wars that have characterized the twentieth century in South-Eastern Europe. The First World War led to the collapse of multinational empires and the fall of the Serbian national state and the creation of new states in the region, including the Yugoslav Kingdom and Albania. The Second World War completely transformed the political and social systems and the international politics of the states in South-Eastern Europe. In a way, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reversed these processes, leading to the collapse of communism and the destruction of the federal multinational Yugoslav state.

In recent decades, Serbian memory politics have been struggling with forging its war histories into coherent meaningful narratives that can become parts of an established public memory fitting the contemporary Serbian national state. This struggle has taken place internally in Serbia, but also in negotiation with other states in the region and with the European Union and other European states.

The seminar is sponsored by the Centre for Modern European Studies (CEMES) at the University of Copenhagen. It is open to anyone interested. For more information, please contact Ismar Dedovic or Tea Sindbæk Andersen.