Nationalism Studies

In May 2016, a leading Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta published a long investigative piece entitled ‘The Groups of Death’ about public groups in the Russian social network VKontakte which allegedly target teenagers and encourage them to commit suicide. The author claimed that Russian youngsters were being killed by an unknown force that remotely ‘pulls the strings’ on the Internet. The article triggered a massive public debate about the danger of the Internet for young Russians and called for the founders of these groups imprisoned and legislation amended to prosecute anyone who tries to encourage, aid and abet suicide. The debate quickly escalated into the sphere of professional journalistic ethics: the author of ‘the groups of deaths’ pieces was accused of violating the ethical norms of journalistic investigation and thus spreading fear of technological progress among ordinary Russians.
On the one hand, the fact of publication in a respected investigative newspaper demonstrates that even critically thinking professionals are vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking. This not only shapes the alarmist national discourse around the internet but it indirectly helps the government to further curtail freedom of speech. On the other hand, the escalation of the debate to the sphere of ethics uncovers the lack of professional principles that allows Russian journalists to spread conspiracy theories without any professional or reputational reprimand.

Literature on the transitions facing former Socialist states throughout Europe and Eurasia, while attentive to the multiple simultaneous processes taking place, has not paid sufficient attention to the actors involved in those processes. Much of the scholarship that focuses on any of the individual processes or even on an in depth case study of a single state limits the analysis to the main actors that make up the triadic nexus identified by Brubaker . Thus, left out of the transitions literature is the advances made in the study of diasporas and the transnational practices of migrants and the way such dispersed populations in fact contribute to each of the processes of transition underway in the post-Socialist space. In this essay, I will demonstrate the ways in which a country's diaspora contributes to and effects transitions in the "homeland" through an in depth look at the process of transition in Croatia. It is my contention that these multiple transitions and their trajectory cannot be understood without taking into account the role of dispersed populations.

This edited volume aims to cover a wide range of topics related to Yugoslavia and its successor
states. The core themes are the historical analysis of the social conditions and the contradictions
of the (post-)Yugoslav society. The main focus in this analysis are the Yugoslav Partisans and
the war remembrance on the one hand, and the social movements and protests on the other.
The book encompasses a chronological framework from the interwar period, through socialist
Yugoslavia, to the current issues, providing new perspectives and posing new questions. The
volume consists not only of scholarly contributions, but also assembles a diverse compilation of
essays, reports, interviews, and photos.

U radu se analizira zakonodavstvo o rehabilitaciji u širem kontekstu politike sećanja na Drugi svetski rat i posleratni period i odnosa između istorije, sećanja i prava. Polazeći od teorijske diskusije  o interakciji prava, istorije i sećanja, rad analizira formulaciju zakona o rehabilitaciji i njihovu primenu. U fokusu rada je pitanje selektivnosti u pristupu istorijskim događajima i izvorima u sudnici kao i uloga istoričara kao stručnih svedoka. Rehabilitacija se promišlja i iz perspektive njenog potencijala za buduće istraživanje u studijama sećanja i istorijskoj nauci.

This paper discusses the legislation in Serbia which regulates rehabilitation of those killed, sentenced, or deprived of any rights for political or ideological reasons in Yugoslavi in the aftermath of the Second World War and its implementation in the court from the perspective of historiography and memory studies. The Serbian National Assembly adopted two Rehabilitation Acts in 2006 and 2011 with the aim to rehabilitate those sentenced, killed, or deprived of any rights because of political and ideological reasons after 1941. Although the mechanism of legal rehabilitation normally accommodates the victims of unfair trials by revising court processes, these laws, particularly the 2006 Rehabilitation Act, broadened the grounds for rehabilitation. The law includes those imprisoned or killed, as well as deprived
of property or any rights, with and also without a court or administrative decision. Most importantly, because of the vague formulation of the 2006 Act, the rehabilitation practice in Serbia encompasses the persons sentenced for collaboration or war crimes as long as it can be argumented that there were ideological or political reasons involved, regardless if there were also other reasons for persecution. This led to in Europe unprecedented rehabilitation processes which has been happening in the courts in Serbia since 2006, which question and usually annul the postwar court decisions, rewriting the history of the Second World War
and Yugoslavia.
This paper examines how history and historical records are approached in the courtroom in the rehabilitation cases and the role of historians as expert witnesses. The aim of the paper is to examine the framing of the narrative in the courtroom and the selectivity in the approach to archival documents and testimonies which arises from the formulation of the Rehabilitation Acts themselves. Moreover, the paper is concerned with the mechanism of rehabilitation from the perspective of its potential for the study of collective memory and argues that it represents a very valuable source for examining otherwise understudied reception in memory studies.