There has been a renewed interest in recent years amongst scholars in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a kind of ‘alter’ or ‘prior’ globalization. NAM can be seen as a pre-figurative post-national configuration, an imagined networked community both transgressing the spatial order of nation-states but also, in many ways, reproducing a nation-state logic as a sort of United Nations light.
My concern here is to focus on some of the challenges posed by a focus on NAM based exclusively, or primarily, on socialist Yugoslav sources and some of the epistemological strategies and tactics that may be able to overcome the problems of what I term Yugocentrism.

In short, reinserting socialist Yugoslavia into a global historiography needs to perform a double movement: bringing Yugoslavia back into global social, political, economic and cultural relations and also decentering its positionality, ensuring that other sites of analysis and struggle, and the relations between them, are taken into consideration. Research firmly rooted in the anti-colonial struggles of Africa, Asia and Latin America is of vital importance in a reconsideration of the significance of non-alignment.

Paul Stubbs is a Liverpool-born sociologist who has lived and worked in Croatia and the wider region since 1993. Currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb, his main interests are in international actors and the political economy of social welfare, policy translation, social movements, and socialist Yugoslavia’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement. He is Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association.