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 lecture departs from the premise that contemporary Serbian national identity should be understood above all as the outcome of an ongoing dispute over the meaning of the past, present, and future under conditions of deep political, ideological, and social transformation — encompassing the crisis of socialism in the 1980s, the catastrophe of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the wars of the 1990s, and the transitional period of the twenty-first century. Within this framework, particular attention is given to narratives as the primary forms of political and collective self-understanding, as well as to the consequences of narrative shifts for societies and individuals. The year 1989 is taken as a symbolic turning point of such a shift, enabling a comparison between the broader Eastern European space and Serbia within Yugoslavia, with a special focus on the question of redefining Serbian national identity. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, the collapse of the socialist horizon of expectation, and the post-Yugoslav transition opened space for an intensive redefinition of the relationship between history and identity, with history becoming the central site of negotiation over continuity, discontinuity, and the possible directions of collective self-understanding. The theoretical and methodological framework of the lecture draws on Koselleck’s Historik, Palti’s history of political languages, and Hartog’s regimes of historicity, in order to demonstrate that historical narratives are not a pre-given foundation of identity, but rather the product of ideological and political conflicts. In this light, the dissident narrative — which gained particular strength in Serbia in the late 1980s and placed the national question at its centre — is examined both as the unreflected foundation of contemporary Serbian self-understanding and as an illustration of the importance of studying narrative shifts as a conceptual apparatus for observing the relationship between the political, the historical, and the ideological.

Adriana Zaharijević is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her work brings together political philosophy, feminist theory, and social history.

Vukan Marković is a Research Assistant at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His primary fields of specialization are the philosophy of history of the contemporary period, intellectual history of the twentieth century, and the history of political thought.