In the 1990s, Yugoslavia broke down and a brutal war unfolded, culminating in a genocide being prepatrated against Bosniaks and Kosovan Albanians. The war brought to surface questions of ethnicity and belonging with ‘Serbianess’ being at the forefront. But what is Serbia and what does it mean to be a Serb? How did we get from a narrative of being an oppressed people to perpetrating genocides? The history of Serbia remains poorly understood, the current trajectory of both Serbia and Republika Srpska underappreciated, and the future of the Balkans not widely discussed enough. MEMO Conversations catches up with Dr Marko Attila Hoare who has just published a complete history of the Serbs.
Hoare is an Associate Professor and Head of Research for the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. He was born in London and received his BA (Hons) in History for the University of Cambridge in 1994 and his PhD in History from Yale University in 2000. He is the author of four published books on the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina, of which ‘Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943‘ won the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Monograph Competition in 2004. His work has appeared in outlets including the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Standpoint, Open Democracy and New Lines Magazine, among others. He has featured in programmes by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Sky History Channel, and made appearances on many TV and radio stations including BBC TV and Sky News. His latest book is ‘Serbia: A Modern History‘.
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