Peace (peaceful coexistence) and solidarity were central concerns that shaped the politics and practices of non-alignment and socialist internationalism in the second half of the 20th century. Petrović traceс the mechanisms that led to the obscuring and obliteration of a vocabulary centered around the ideas of peace, solidarity, and socialist internationalism, and mobilized against the politics of war, which was understood to be humanity’s greatest enemy. Language points to a different understanding of the relationship between the individual and the collective from the one that prevailed in the aftermath of state socialism in Europe. What are the possibilities of recovering this vocabulary seen as a precondition for regaining the capacity for collective utopian imagination?
Tanja Petrović is a Principal Research Associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. She is interested in Yugoslav socialism and its afterlives, as well as in understandings of time and history and regimes of historization in the aftermath of Yugoslavia. Her latest book is Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Duke University Press, 2024).