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.

This lecture opens with the question of how existing scholarship has interpreted the role of intellectuals in Yugoslav socialism: what has been meant by “engagement,” how the relationship between culture and politics has been explained, and how notions such as opposition and dissidence have been used to sort actors into “system” loyalists and anti-system critics. Against these inherited labels, we ask what they illuminate and what they obscure—especially when the national question is treated as the key issue, as a derivative consequence, or as a predetermined outcome of late-socialist transformations. In the second part, we trace how Dobrica Ćosić and Ljubomir Tadić constructed their public narratives across different phases of Yugoslav socialism, and how in both cases one can observe a shift from broader, integrative frameworks toward increasingly particularist interpretations of the national—through changes in their reading of the past, their conceptual repertoires, and their political expectations.

Petar Žarković is a historian and Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His work focuses on the political and intellectual history of socialist Yugoslavia.

Pavle Antonijević is a historian and Research Assistant at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His work focuses on the intellectual history of socialist Yugoslavia, Yugoslav self-management, and the history of Marxist philosophy and anarchism.