The lecture is a part of a broader research project that focuses on the narratives of the common struggle for liberation, transfers of knowledge in war commemoration, and the sharing of the Yugoslav experience of the People’s Liberation War and the postwar building of state socialism in the postcolonial world. The memory of the People’s Liberation War, the antifascist struggle and socialist revolution during the Second World War in Yugoslavia, played a connecting role between Yugoslav actors and liberation movements during decolonisation. The war memory surfaced in the narratives of a shared struggle for liberation and Partisans’ deep identification with the anti-colonial struggle, which was particularly prominent during the Algerian War of Independence and communicated in public discourses in Yugoslav society. Veterans’ internationalism also involved exchanges of experiences in the field of war remembrance. Finally, different spheres of Yugoslav anti-colonial solidarity directly related to the wartime and postwar experience of the People’s Liberation War and the building of state socialism. Medical assistance represents an illuminating example, as it often focused on the care and rehabilitation of the wounded and disabled soldiers, building upon the Yugoslav know-how in the establishment of fields, expertise and structures of military medicine and rehabilitation of the Partisans with war-related disabilities after the war. The project combines approaches of transnational history and memory studies with a focus on the agency of war veterans, exploring the multidirectional war memory and connected histories of antifascism and anti-colonialism.

The lecture was based on Algeria as the main case study, reflecting on additional examples of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The Partisans constitute a valuable lens of analysis as key political actors in socialist Yugoslavia, leading agents of the culture of war remembrance and as women and men with a direct experience of war and revolution. Their agency in the decolonisation context transpired through, on the one hand, the veteran association SUBNOR as a socio-political organisation involved in all Yugoslav solidarity initiatives and, on the other, individually as the Partisans occupied leading positions in state institutions, embassies, and other socio-political organisations. They were also key actors of Yugoslav non-alignment, illuminating its multi-level nature as interstate and centralised as well as bottom-up phenomenon and uncovering complex networks and discourses of anti-colonial solidarity.

On 9 April 2024, I presented my research project at the National Research and Study Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa, INEP) in Bissau. In the talk, I focused on the relationship between Yugoslavia and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in the broader context of Yugoslav assistance to anti-colonial liberation movements. The presesentation particularly addressed the role of the memory and legacies of the People’s Liberation War in Yugoslav anti-colonial solidarity.

The talk was a part of the event on the connected history of Yugoslavia and Guinea-Bissau, where Sanja Horvatinčić from the Institute of Art History in Zagreb also presented her work on the Yugoslav architecture in Guinea-Bissau.

In recent years, however, international relations scholars have acknowledged the analytical and explanatory value of international friendship, recognizing it as a relationship extending beyond conflict-free interstate dynamics. In this regard, international friendship is interpreted as a bilateral relationship that emerges from intersecting collective identities and revolves around shared projects. A friendship bond is marked by a high degree of trust and affect, embedded in close cooperation at different levels of state and society, and expressed in a range of friendship practices (Koschut and Oelsner, 2014; Berenskoetter and Van Hoef, 2017).

The intention of the workshop is to expand the research on international friendship from international relations into the realm of history, particularly by broadening the predominantly Western-focused studies within socialist and Cold War contexts. Scholars are invited to employ conceptual content on international friendship to investigate the processes of formation, maintenance, reproduction, and dissolution of friendship bonds, and to assess their impact on interactions, behaviors, and decision-making at different political and social levels. By examining specific case studies, scholars are encouraged to add valuable empirical insights to the expanding field of (international) friendship studies.

The main objectives of the workshop are to explore the identity- and trust-building processes between states and their peoples, to examine the (de)integrating and (de)mobilizing power of international friendship, and to analyze the interaction between normative factors and strategic or material interests in interstate and transnational relations.

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El objetivo de nuestro encuentro es poner ambas estrategias en relación, implementando un análisis transversal de estos y otros mecanismos que resultaron clave en la (re)construcción de las diferentes memorias e identidades nacionales europeas en la posguerra mundial. Para ello proponemos una serie de intervenciones que conectan varios casos de estudio domésticos desde una perspectiva transnacional, la cual nos permite reflexionar de una manera global sobre el contexto europeo y sus ramificaciones coloniales tras 1945.

Peter Wright is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. His work revolves around Yugoslavia‘s relations with the Global South during the Cold War, focusing on development aid, education, and racism and racialisation.

The Transformative Podcast takes the year 1989 as a starting point to think about social, economic, and cultural transformations on a European and global scale. This podcast is produced by the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET).

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Histories of the Non-Aligned Movement keep opening up a variety of unexplored topics, as well as new perspectives on its organisation and the promotion of transnational networks of solidarity. In doing so, these new perspectives help in formulating critical questions about the legacies of this political platform, and encouraging new forms of responsibility in terms of for whom, how and why histories of non-alignment are being narrated.

Defined by a vast global network and diverse epistemic regimes, this field of research is inseparable from ongoing discussions on the decolonisation of knowledge production and demands the diversification of agents, as well as new ways of creating and narrating. The narratives that emerge from these discussions shed light on less known contradictions, providing new insights and addressing important methodological challenges.

This workshop gathers researchers from different backgrounds: historians, architectural historians/curators and artists, with the aim of critically reassessing the complexities of the Non-Aligned Movement through several case studies. While diverse in their geographies and approaches, participants’ presentations will revolve around the common questions of how these histories came to be, and how can they be explored and narrated in ways that are meaningful in the present.

Presentations by Jelena Đureinović, Vladimir Kulić, Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås will be followed by a panel discussion of the participants, moderated by Sanja Horvatinčić and Paul Stubbs.

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The workshop is part of the program of the final conference of the HRZZ project Models and practices of global and cultural exchange and the movement of non-aligned countries: research into spatio-temporal cultural dynamics.