Yugoslavia and Ex-Yugoslavia Fieldwork

The most unexpected result of my dissertation fieldwork in India in 1979 was that I devoted most of the rest of my life, professional and personal, to understanding Yugoslavia and its successor republics. Milica and I met in India, married a year later. As I was finishing a doctorate in anthropology I thought that if my training had not prepared me to be able to learn quickly about a new culture and society, what was it good for? So I read as much as I could in English on Yugoslav courts and law, and applied for a Fulbright fellowship for research in her country, which I got on the basis of my law degree, not yet having defended my PhD thesis.

Thus I began fieldwork in Yugoslavia in 1981, as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Law in Belgrade. Fortunately a two-year fellowship, since the Fulbright staff said that “nobody can get research done in their first year in Yugoslavia.” Which was true! My project was an ethnographic study of the Courts of Associated Labor, in theory workers’ courts for labor cases. I can still get a laugh from older lawyers as the world’s only expert on the Sudovi Udruženog Rada. Good academic work, I think; well published, well funded (grants from NSF, IREX, ACLS, among others). It turned out to be salvage ethnography of one aspect of Yugoslavia’s unique system of socialist self-management, but nobody knew then that state socialism in Europe would collapse so suddenly in 1989, much less that Yugoslavia would dissolve, bloodily, into small states defined in large part by their hostility to each other – exactly the configuration that Yugoslavia as a state had been designed to prevent.

But it happened. In the late 1980s a “permanent crisis” in the socialist economy led to political conflicts, which led to a constitutional crisis, and the collapse of the country into war in 1991. I found myself tracking these events, an the logic of them as shown in the constitutions adopted or rejected for the new states.

And then I analyzed the wars, in real time and from materials directly from the region, in what was then called Serbo-Croatian. I paid little attention to what the actors said in English to foreigners, but rather what they said to their own peoples, and each other, in their own language. The wars, and studying phenomena that I had never thought I would need to consider: ethno-national violence, mass gendered violence, the constitutional structures and politics of ethnocracies, war crimes, plus the international involvement in all of this. See Collapse of Yugoslavia and Formation of New States (1988-2001. I also found myself engaged as an expert in various meetings/ fact-finding missions of NGOs and a couple of foreign ministries; had a 5-day diplomatic career as a Personal Advisor to the last Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, Milan Panić, at the London Conference in August 1992; and was one of the first expert witnesses in the first international criminal tribunal after the Nuremberg and Tokyo ones of the 1940s. And living in Serbia off and on has provided an opportunity to watch many, many, MANY mass protests – 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996-97, 2000…..

All of this led to three books and many, many articles, and I continue to work on issues in the former Yugoslavia and its successor republics mainly in Bosnia – Herzegovina, on an NSF grant, 2018-2024 – see “(Re)Constructing Religioscapes as Competing Territorial Claims in Post-War Bosnia & Herzegovina.”

Robert M. HAYDEN, JD, PhD

Yugoslavia and Ex-Yugoslavia Fieldwork

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