APART-GSK, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2024-2028
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 memory of the People’s Liberation War, the antifascist struggle and socialist revolution during the Second World War in Yugoslavia, played a connecting role between Yugoslav actors and liberation movements during decolonisation. The war memory surfaced in the narratives of a shared struggle for liberation and Partisans’ deep identification with the anti-colonial struggle, which was particularly prominent during the Algerian War of Independence and communicated in public discourses in Yugoslav society. Veterans’ internationalism also involved exchanges of experiences in the field of war remembrance. Finally, different spheres of Yugoslav anti-colonial solidarity directly related to the wartime and postwar experience of the People’s Liberation War and the building of state socialism. Medical assistance represents an illuminating example, as it often focused on the care and rehabilitation of the wounded and disabled soldiers, building upon the Yugoslav know-how in the establishment of fields, expertise and structures of military medicine and rehabilitation of the Partisans with war-related disabilities after the war.
The project combines approaches of transnational history and memory studies with a focus on the agency of war veterans, exploring the multidirectional war memory and 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.
The Partisans constitute a valuable lens of analysis as key political actors in socialist Yugoslavia, leading agents of the culture of war remembrance and as women and men with a direct experience of war and revolution. Their agency in the decolonisation context transpired through, on the one hand, the veteran association SUBNOR as a socio-political organisation involved in all Yugoslav solidarity initiatives and, on the other, individually as the Partisans occupied leading positions in state institutions, embassies, and other socio-political organisations. They were also key actors of Yugoslav non-alignment, illuminating its multi-level nature as interstate and centralised as well as bottom-up phenomenon and uncovering complex networks and discourses of anti-colonial solidarity.
