As part of the Prizma / IMAGINATION project (“Imagining the Nation: Serbian National Narratives in Contestation (20th–21st Centuries)”), implemented at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade (2024–2027) with financial support from the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, a lecture series is being organized in which the project’s researchers present their findings and open a discussion on the ways national narratives are formed, contested, and transformed over the long durée of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The idea of an intimate connection between language, identity, and territory lies at the heart of modernity, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia offers a particularly productive framework for understanding the ways in which that connection is historically shaped and transformed. Taking the language policy of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as its point of departure, the first lecture examines questions of shared language and multilingualism, as well as the ways in which this legacy is approached in contemporary identity debates across post-Yugoslav societies — with particular attention to Serbia — illuminating the close entanglement of language, hierarchies of power, and the imagination of nationhood. The second part of the lecture shifts focus to the media discourse of the 1990s through an analysis of the illustrated magazine Duga, one of the most widely read periodicals in Serbia during the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Drawing on concrete examples, it demonstrates how collective identities were constructed, images of the enemy shaped, and war and territorial aspirations legitimized through language and narrative. Special attention is paid to the ways in which Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims were represented through processes of racialization and securitization, opening onto the broader question of the role of media in the production of political reality and violence.

Marija Mandić is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her research spans sociolinguistics, critical discourse studies, and linguistic anthropology, with a focus on the relationship between discourse and social identity (ethnic, national, and gender), minority languages of southeastern Europe, social memory, Ottoman heritage, and cultural trauma.

Ivan Ejub Kostić is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His research interests include (Islamic) social movements, the relationship between religion and nationalism, contemporary Islamic thought, Islam in Europe, the socio-legal status of Muslims in the republics of the former Yugoslavia, and the engagement between contemporary social theory and Islam.