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This book explains theoretical work in postcolonial and postsocialist studies to offer a novel and distinctive insight into how Yugoslavia is configured by, and through, race. It presents the history of how ideas of racialised difference have been translated globally in Yugoslavia. The book provides a discussion on the critical race scholarship, global historical sociologies of 'race in translation' and south-east European cultural critique to show that the Yugoslav region is deeply embedded in global formations of race. It considers the geopolitical imagination of popular culture; the history of ethnicity; and transnational formations of race before and during state socialism, including the Non-Aligned Movement. The book also considers the post-Yugoslav discourses of security, migration, terrorism and international intervention, including the War on Terror and the refugee crisis. It elaborates how often-neglected aspects of the history of nationhood and migration reveal connections that tie the region into the global history of race. The book also explains the linkage between ethnic exclusivism and territory in the ethnopolitical logic of the Bosnian conflict and in the internationally mediated peace agreements that enshrined it: 'apartheid cartography'. Race and whiteness remained perceptible in post-war Bosnian identity discourses as new, open-ended forms of post-conflict international intervention developed.
Croats of western Herzegovina, long associated with Croat extremism, were among the most avid followers of Tudjman’s efforts to revive Croatian nationalism in the early 1990s and strong supporters of the dream of extending the revived Croatian statehood to their territory (dismembering Bosnia in the process). The identity of Bosnian Muslims is more problematic. While there was, in fact, a medieval Bosnian kingdom – Bosnian King Tvrtko was a key ally of Prince Lazar and the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo Field – no specifically Bosnian identity emerged from medieval
the ‘Third World’ just as the EU and other Western institutions seemed to be pushing the region into it. The separation of Yugoslavs and the Third World into different geopolitical categories undid the international solidarities of Non-Alignment – though might connote either that the Yugoslav region did belong on a higher rung of the global ladder, or that the ‘Third World’ did not deserve such treatment either. Race and whiteness remained perceptible in post-war Bosnian identity discourses as new, open-ended forms of post-conflict international