Serbia between East & West

Abstract

Serbia played an important role in European history in the twentieth century, from the Sarajevo assassination of 1914 that triggered World War I, to the wars of the 1990s that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Yet the country has attracted relatively little serious historical research by foreign scholars, so remains widely misunderstood and subject to stereotypes, both positive and negative. This lecture will discuss the turbulent series of wars, upheavals, putsches, assassinations and other crises that Serbia experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as its leaders sought first to establish it as a state, then expand it to incorporate neighbouring territories, then manage its immersion in the bigger multinational state of Yugoslavia, while navigating an often perilous world of rival Great Powers.

Prof. Marko Attila Hoare is Head of Research for the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. He studied at Cambridge and Yale and has been researching the history of the former Yugoslavia since the early 1990s.  He is the author of five books on the history of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, including Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia – The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (Oxford University Press, 2006) and most recently Serbia: A Modern History (Hurst, London, 2024), which was selected as a History ‘Book of the Year’ by the Financial Times.

Organisation

Prof. dr. Josip Glaurdić

• Contact
• Add to calendar