C-E-P-S Journal

"It would be pretentious to say that Yugoslavia serves as an ultimate historical lesson for the future, and it would be overly optimistic to expect that anyone learned their ‘lesson’, but it is clear now that the Yugoslav example has informed theoretical thinking, and influenced a formation of conceptual constructions concerning topics such as social conflicts, political actors, ideologies and so on. Jana Bacevic’s book inscribes itself into this conceptual space with one of the most consistent and clarifying interdisciplinary insights into the structures, processes and twisted logics of the Yugoslav episode in recent European history. The fact that the book is focused on and by education contributes much to the precision of hypotheses and assumptions in the book. At the same time, such a perspective proves to be especially rewarding as it enables the author to dispense with the abundance of clichés, simplifications and other more or less ideologically fashioned ‘explanations’ of the deplorable end of what once seemed as a promising large-scale political project. Jana Bacevic also clearly demonstrates that taking a view on a society through its central institutional instrument of reproduction is precisely that point of departure, which triggers an eruption of a number of crucial questions on how we understand and interpret a society and especially its conflicts. Jana Bacevic gives a very good overview of historical events, explains the logics of the development towards politics of identity that followed decades of the communist stress on class politics and, above all, makes a reader understand how education can work for different goals in conjunction with social forces"
Reviewed book: 
Author: 
Jana Bacevic
ISBN: 
978-615-5225-72-7
cloth
$79.00 / €69.00 / £63.00