The destruction of the Military Headquarters (Generalštab) in the center of Belgrade during the 1999 NATO bombing, left a lasting imprint on the city’s urban landscape, serving as both a physical and symbolic remnant of the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Recognized as a protected cultural heritage site, the building’s status legally prevented its redevelopment, leaving it to remain a ruin and an unofficial monument of the NATO bombing. Today, more than two decades later, Serbian government, in a close alignment to Donald Trump’s politics, promised the building to Jared Kushner who intends to repurpose the Generalštab into a luxury hotel and a museum of the bombing. What does it mean for a building targeted by NATO to now become a site of American investment and privatized commemoration? How does this reflect broader processes of post-war redevelopment, in which global capital repurposes ruins not for public memory, but for profit and political realignment?
This presentation explores intersections of military destruction and capitalist redevelopment, showing how the transformation from a state-owned military headquarters to a privatized luxury space erases and reshapes public memory to fit contemporary economic and political interests. By tracing the entanglements of military destruction, privatization, and the commodification of memory, the presentation situates Belgrade within wider debates on war, urban crisis, and the populism driven politics of space in the 21st century.
Astrea Nikolovska is a research associate at the ERC project MEMPOP: Memory and Populism from Below. She graduated from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Vienna. Her Ph.D. research, “Towards an Anthropology of Defeat: Serbia Trapped in the Binary Narratives of Perpetrators and Victims” explored how Serbia constructs memory politics rooted in victimhood despite numerous transitional justice processes and evidence for war crimes. The thesis is framed within the conflict between liberalism, which drives transitional justice, and counter-liberalism, which rejects transitional justice institutions. Her main research interest explores this ideological conflict, aiming to show how the enduring Cold War legacies and East-West divisions continue to structure contemporary politics.