Globalising the Yugoslav Revolution in the Postcolonial World:
Veterans, Memory and Transnational Networks of Solidarity during the Cold War
Yugoslavia and its institutions and mass organisations invested serious efforts in diplomatic, financial, military and humanitarian assistance to anti-colonial struggle across Africa between the late 1950s and early 1980s. Centring on the exchanges between Yugoslav Partisans and anti-colonial liberation movements, the project explores the role of memory and war legacies in Yugoslav socialist internationalism and initiatives of anti-colonial solidarity. The project focuses on the narratives of the common struggle for liberation, transfers of knowledge in war commemoration, and the sharing of the Yugoslav experience of the People’s Liberation War and the postwar building of state socialism in the postcolonial world. The project combines approaches of transnational history and memory studies with a focus on the agency of war veterans, exploring the connected histories of antifascism and anti-colonialism. It is grounded in multi-sited archival research in the post-Yugoslav space and Algeria as the main case studies and Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique as additional examples.
Biography
Dr. Jelena Đureinović is historian based at the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. Her current project, funded through the APART-GSK program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, investigates the role of memory and legacies of war in the relations between Yugoslavia and anti-colonial liberation movements from Africa, focusing on the agency of Yugoslav Partisans. Her main research interests include memory studies, global Cold War history and the history of Yugoslavia. She holds a PhD in History from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution was published with Routledge in 2020.
During her stay at the ZZF Potsdam Dr. Jelena Đureinović researches in the Leibniz Research Alliance "Value of the Past".