School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

Graduate Student, Centre for South-East European Studies

About

Bojan Bilić is a PhD candidate in Political Sociology at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL SSEES).

Bojan's research explores different manners in which the Yugoslav anti-war activisms were conceived and practised as a function of the differing power positions within the armed conflict. This study shows that the present-day extra-institutional human rights activisms in the countries/ex-republics of its principal interest stem from a plethora of anti-war campaigns that took place throughout the 1990s. The anti-war engagement, in turn, was itself embedded in the history of Yugoslav post-war (mostly feminist and environmentalist) civic activism. Unlike a vast majority of studies on social movements that focus on their emergence and development, this research is particularly interested in the ways in which social movements are weakened and marginalised and the mechanisms upon which they draw to resist oppression and protect their critical voice within an authoritarian political arena. It also maps out a gamut of ideological positions, tensions and inconsistencies which accompany such processes.

With Vesna Janković, the founding member of the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia and the founding editor-in-chief of ARKzin, Bojan is currently co-editing a volume entitled "Resisting the Evil: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Contention". This book systematically illuminates the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement as an important and up to now neglected aspect of Yugoslavia’s painful disintegration. With its distinctly trans-national approach, this book recovers the relevance of various forms of civic organising in former Yugoslavia for the anti-war contention which unfolded before, during and after the wars of Yugoslav succession. A collective endeavour of a group of authors coming from all the republics of former Yugoslavia, this volume offers a look from within which has been conspicuously missing from the regional sociology. Almost all of the contributors combine a rigorous theoretical reflection with the empirically rich accounts stemming from their own activist experience in the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and peace initiatives. The volume is scheduled to appear by the end of 2012. http://www.ceis-eu.org/publications/22.htm

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