This book explores Soviet influences on Yugoslav gender policies, examining how Yugoslav communists interpreted, adapted and used Soviet ideas to change Yugoslav society. The book sheds new light on the role of Soviet models in producing Yugoslav family and reproductive laws, and in framing the understandings of gender which affected key policies such as the collectivisation of agriculture, labour policies, policies towards Muslim populations, and policies concerning youth sexuality. Through a gender analysis of all these policies, this book points to the difficulties of applying Soviet solutions in Yugoslavia. Deeply entrenched patriarchal attitudes undermined Yugoslav communists’ ability to challenge gender norms, causing many disputes and struggles within the Communist Party over the meanings and application of Soviet gender models. Yet, Soviet models informed how Yugoslav communists approached gender-related issues for many years, even after the conflict erupted between these two countries.

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated.

This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this book encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. This book moves beyond exploring state-regulated prostitution, which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The nine chapters shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution well into the second half of the twentieth century to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region’s highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women’s movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces’ organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

After a summit in Belgrade in September 1961, socialist Yugoslavia, led by President Josip Broz Tito until his death in 1980, initiated a movement with states in the Global South. The Non-Aligned Movement not only offered an alternative to the Cold War polarization between NATO and the Warsaw Pact but also expressed the hopes of a world emerging from colonial domination. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement investigates the Non-Aligned Movement both as a top-down, interstate initiative and as a site for transnational exchange in science, art and culture, architecture, education, and industry. Re-invigorating older debates by consulting newly available sources, the volume challenges studies that marginalize the role of socialist Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement. Contributors address topics such as women’s involvement, antifascism and anti-imperialism, cultural and educational exchange, tensions in Yugoslav diplomacy, competing understandings of economic development, the role of the Yugoslav construction company Energoprojekt, Yugoslav relations with Latin America and Africa, and contemporary support for refugees and asylum seekers as a kind of practical and affective afterlife of Yugoslavia’s non-aligned commitments. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement offers an innovative approach to one of the twentieth century’s most important international movements and confronts issues of economic, social, and cultural rights that remain relevant today.

What explains the popularity and widespread appeal of numerous post-Yugoslav feminist and LGBTQ+ festivals in the last decade? This book argues that the millennial generation expresses "reparative politics", as a distinct type of activism, through festivals. Reparative political acting, as identified here, characteristically relies on playfulness and creativity, interpretative (gender) dissent, acceptance of organizational and programmatic messiness and hybridity, belonging, and positive affect. The reparative politics is vital in a context that is marked by an individual and collective trauma of heteropatriarchy, violent breakdown of the common state, and post-transitional economic precarity. The book uses excerpts from programs, interviews and observations collected through the multi-sited ethnographic research. Siročić’s focus on contemporary activism in Southeastern Europe challenges the narrow geopolitical understanding of the recent feminist politics and refutes the common assumptions of a passive millennial generation. Yet, the book’s relevance surpasses its area of study, as it argues against the popular deriding of "artivist" expressions as the "merely cultural" or "merely aesthetic" engagement. In contrast, the book claims that such activities urge a redefined understanding of political agency. Festivals as Reparative Politics demonstrates that contemporary feminist festivals represent a distinct reformulation of contentious politics of gender whose constitutive principles can be exemplary for other types of political engagements.

Spanning five continents, this cutting-edge book provides a thorough international overview of equality, diversity and inclusion at work. Analysing the demographics of the workplace and the economic outcomes achieved by different segments of the population, it offers readers a better understanding of diverse work environments and how they are influenced by legislation and populations.

A compendium of one hundred sources, preceded by a short author’s bio and an introduction, this volume offers an English language selection of the most representative texts on feminism and women’s rights from East Central Europe between the end of the Second World War and the early 1990s. While communist era is the primary focus, the interwar years and the post-1989 transition period also receive attention. All texts are new translations from the original. The book is organised around themes instead of countries; the similarities and differences between nations are nevertheless pointed out. The editors consider women not only in their local context, but also in conjunction with other systems of thought—including shared agendas with socialism, liberalism, nationalism, and even eugenics. The choice of texts seeks to demonstrate how feminism as political thought was shaped and organised in the region. They vary in type and format from political treatises, philosophy to literary works, even films and the visual arts, with the necessary inclusion of the personal and the private. Women’s political rights, right to education, their role in nation-building, women, and war (and especially women and peace) are part of the anthology, alongside the gendered division of labour, violence against women, the body, and reproduction.

This study launches a systematic inquiry into the nature of the concept of humanitarian intervention, focusing on its primary function of the protection of the endangered civilian populations who find themselves at the grave risk of genocide. This is strengthened by a recollection of selected historical examples of similar events and the responses to them by the international community, empowered by our modern understanding of the principle of state sovereignty, human rights, and anti-genocide legislation. Applying the in-statu-nascendi ontology that accounts for the latest hybridized compartmentalization of various IR-related theories, the author provides a deep ontological inquiry into the nature, origin, and genesis of the idea of humanitarian intervention and opens up a broader debate on the limits of the principle of state sovereignty as well as on the international community’s ignorance of some of the most severe cases of human rights abuses around the world.

This book focuses on the mass participation of women in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance during World War II.