Jelena Dureinovic1; 1 University of Vienna, Austria
Discussion
During the first decade after the fall of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in 2000, there was no clear memory politics regarding the armed conflicts that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. After the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came to power in 2012, the 1990s wars became the central theme of state-sponsored memory politics, alongside the Second World War. State actors use the fact that the previous governments had failed to confront the past as the foundation of their political legitimacy. In this way, the SNS regime claims to have restored pride to the Serbian nation and that politicians and the international community had previously forced Serbs to be ashamed of their heroes and victims in the 1990s wars. The current memory politics is populist and centres on the dichotomy of heroism and victimhood. Political actors have created an industry of memory where commemorations travel and are broadcast and streamed live; high-budget documentaries and feature films are made about the events of the 1990s, and the state finances publications about the memory of the combatants and mandates commemorative public classes in schools. Taking Serbia as a case study, this paper investigates the transformation of post-socialist memory politics and specific features of memory work by hybrid regimes of authoritarian democracy. The paper examines the industry of memory of the 1990s wars, focusing on state-sponsored events, film production and publishing.
