Research Interests

• Labor in Socialist and Post-Colonial Settings
• 20th Century Revolutions
• Global Cold War
• Political Economy of State Socialism
• Global Value Chains

Current Research Projects

Goran Musić is the Principal Investigator of two ongoing research projects:

“A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of the Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (P34980). This project advances knowledge about Yugoslavia’s ‘socialist globalization’, revealing the effects that Yugoslav companies’ operations in the Global South had on Yugoslav workers’ relationship to the self-management system and its values, as well as how Zambian actors perceived their connections with Yugoslavia. It examines labor relations on the ground and highlights how daily life and work enacted an intimate, embodied, and spatial politics of race. The study breaks new ground in labor history, development history, and critical race studies by connecting two domains that social history still separates, postcolonial Africa and state socialist Europe.

"Enhancing Capacities for Quality and Impactful Research on Transformations, Labor and Migration in Southeast-Europe" (RETLAMI-SEE), funded by Horizon Europe and coordinated by the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Banja Luka. The project aims to enhance the research capacities of the University of Banja Luka and empower young researchers to conduct interdisciplinary research on transformations, labor, and migration in Southeast Europe. It is based on networking, knowledge exchange, and mentoring programs that enable collaboration between researchers from the University of Banja Luka and more experienced researchers from three European partner institutions: The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET, Vienna), Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU, Slovenia), and Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS, Germany).

Selected Publications

• Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: A Story of Two Self-Managed Factories (Budapest: CEU Press, 2021)
• “Chains of Labor: Connecting Global Labor History and the Commodity Chain Paradigm”, in Andrea Komlosy and Goran Musić (eds.), Global Commodity Chains and Labor Relations (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 1–26. (with Andrea Komlosy)
• “New Perspectives on East European Labor History: An Introduction”, in Labor: Studies in Working Class History, vol. 17, no. 3, 2020, pp. 19‒29 (with Rory Archer)
• “Approaching the Socialist Factory and its Workforce: Considerations from Fieldwork”, in (former) Yugoslavia, in Labor History, vol. 58, no. 1, 2017, pp. 44‒66, (with Rory Archer)
• “Diesel Power: Serbian Hip Hop from the Pleasure of the Privileged to Mass Youth Culture”, in Milosz Miszczynski (ed.), Hip-Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency and Social Change, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2017). (together with Predrag Vukčević)
• “Yugoslavia: Workers’ Self-Management as State Paradigm”, in Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (eds.), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers control from the commune to the present (Chicago: Haymarket books, 2011), pp. 172‒191.