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 examines the transformations of Serbian national identity and their political effects in the contemporary period, with particular focus on the relationship between internal changes in the state field and Serbia’s foreign-policy positioning. The first part analyses the period from 2000 to 2025 as a phase in which national identity undergoes two key transformations: from the normative stabilization and institutional sedimentation of the post-October period toward its subsequent routinization and deployment as a flexible resource of everyday governance. Particular attention will be devoted to the shift in its function — from a mobilizing instrument during the 1990s to an implicit yet enduring legitimation infrastructure of the state, one that cushions social tensions and manages political contradictions without producing the structural conditions for their resolution.

The second part considers the ways in which such a transformed national identity shapes Serbia’s international positioning. Drawing on a critical social-constructivist approach, the lecture will show that contemporary Serbian foreign policy rests on the conjunction of two interlinked logics: an idea of Serbian exceptionalism, grounded in the country’s self-perception as an actor endowed with a particular historical and geopolitical role, and an effort to emulate, under contemporary global conditions, the Yugoslav non-aligned stance. In this light, Serbia’s so-called neutrality is interpreted as a contradictory and “hollow” form of foreign-policy positioning — one that fails to secure genuine autonomy and instead operates as a symbolic framework for managing the state’s limited room for maneuver in international relations. The underlying hypothesis is that the transformations of national identity and Serbia’s foreign-policy strategy do not constitute separate processes but rather two interlinked dimensions of the same historical and political configuration.

Ivica Mladenović is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His work addresses political sociology, the history of political ideas, and the analysis of the relationship between the state, class relations, and national identity.

Filip Balunović is a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He works on contemporary political theory, political philosophy, and foreign-policy analysis, with particular focus on post-socialist and post-Yugoslav contexts.