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 traces the ways in which the Communist Party and the socialist state in Yugoslavia drew on “disintegrative” processes and “progressive” elements within the Serbian Orthodox Church — such as the Macedonian schism or clerical associations — with the aim of suppressing traditionally conceived national identity in favour of class-based identification. Through an analysis of dissident narratives within the SOC, the lecture also brings into relief the contours of an alternative imagining of Serbian national identity. Though never explicitly articulated, this alternative found fragmentary expression in discursive practices that stood in sharp contrast to the dominant ethnoreligious understanding of national belonging. Beyond this, the evolution of contemporary discourse on faith and nationhood bears witness to the limits of socialist modernization and to the marginalised yet real force of the Church as an institution of pre-modern society.

Marko Božić is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, Union University in Belgrade. His research engages with the general theory and history of law.