ABSTRACT

This book explores the politics of memory in Southeastern Europe in the context of rising populisms and their hegemonic grip on official memory and politics.

It speaks to the increased political, media and academic attention paid to the rise of discontent, frustration and cultural resistance from below across the European continent and the world. In order to demonstrate the complexities of these processes, the volume transcends disciplinary boundaries to explore memory politics, examining the interconnections between memory and populism. It shows how memory politics has become one of the most important fields of symbolic struggle in the contemporary process of "meaning-making," providing space for actors, movements and other mnemonic entrepreneurs who challenge and point to incoherencies in the official narratives of memory and forgetting.

Charting the contemporary rise of populist movements, the volume will be of particular interest to regional specialists in Southeastern Europe, Balkan and postcommunist studies, as well as researchers, activists, policy-makers and politicians at the national and EU levels and academics in the fields of political science, sociology, history, cultural heritage and management, conflict and peace studies.

chapter 1|11 pages

Introduction

Memory politics and populism in Southeastern Europe – toward an ethnographic understanding of enmity

chapter 2|15 pages

(Not) Remembering a populist event

The Serbian Antibureaucratic Revolution (1988–1989)

chapter 3|20 pages

The modernist abject

Ruins of socialism, reconstruction and populist politics in Belgrade and Sarajevo

chapter 4|17 pages

Whose is Herceg Kosača?

Populist memory politics of constructing “historical people” in Bosnia and Herzegovina

chapter 5|14 pages

Of (anti)fascists and (anti)communists

Constructing the people and its enemies at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar

chapter 7|15 pages

The “War for Peace”

Commemoration of the bombing of Dubrovnik in Montenegro

chapter 10|12 pages

Operation museum

Memory politics as “populist mobilization” in North Macedonia (2006–2011)

chapter 11|17 pages

Integration versus identity

Memory politics, populism and the Good Neighborliness Agreement between North Macedonia and Bulgaria

chapter 12|18 pages

Lukov March as a “template of possibility” for historical revisionism

Memory, history and populism in post-1989 Bulgaria