We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy

Positioned at the interface between historical sociology, anthropology, and social movement studies, We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy goes beyond the widely exploited paradigms of nationalism and civil society to track the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war protest cycle which unfolded throughout the 1990s. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in the region, the author argues that (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activism cannot be recovered without appreciating both the inter- and intra-republican cooperations and contestations in socialist Yugoslavia. (Post-)Yugoslav anti-war undertakings appropriated and developed the already existing social networks and were instrumental for the establishment of present-day organisations devoted to human rights protection, transitional justice, and peace education across the ex-Yugoslav space. Bojan Bilic is a post-doctoral fellow at the Central European University Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest.