| ID | 134634 |
| Title Proper | Where is Serbia |
| Other Title Information | traditions of spatial identity and state positioning in Serbian geopolitical culture |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Savic, Bojan |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | This article studies the geopolitical traditions of spatial imagining of Serbia amongst the country’s political elites since the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It examines some of the socially dominant discourses of spatial positioning of Serbia as a historical-political narrative. The study argues that one can identify five distinct geopolitical traditions that, in variably overlapping or mutually contradicting ways, address two questions: ‘Where is Serbia’ and ‘How is its perceived smallness felt and described’? A first tradition is that which attributes sacred, divine and martyr-like features to the country, its small earthly “Serbian lands” and people. A second tradition conveys spatially maximised and biopolitical visions of “Serbdom”, amounting to variable designs of a “Greater Serbia” anxious about its felt frontiers and smallness. The final three traditions are the mutually exclusive positioning of Serbia around an East-West axis as either Eastern or Western, or a geographically unique and exceptional bridge between the two, whereby each positioning recasts smallness as a crucial feature of geopolitical exceptionality. The article concludes with some general observations on the challenges of studying geopolitical cultures. |
| `In' analytical Note | Geopolitics Vol.19, No.3; Aug.2014: p.684-718 |
| Journal Source | GeopoliticsVol: 19 No 3 |