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This paper examines the factors affecting police officer willingness to adhere to a code of silence among the police in Croatia and Serbia. The paper explores the factors predicting police codes of silence in two countries formed after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s that pursued separate development paths. A police integrity questionnaire recorded the views of 1,007 police officers in Croatia and 1,843 police officers in Serbia. Multivariate modelling was used to analyse the predictors of officers' perceptions of whether they would report the violation in different scenarios. Decades since the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the results indicate that many of the factors predicting the code of silence remain similar across police officers in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EU political conditionality for candidate countries brings an unprecedented focus on transforming standards and practices of civil society engagement in policymaking and introduces a number of mechanisms for supporting reforms in this area. However, there is still not enough evidence on the effects of various conditionality mechanisms for various patterns of civil society policy engagement in countries on the path to EU accession. Drawing on theoretical approaches from Europeanization and interest group research, the paper seeks to analyse how various EU mechanisms influence the involvement, access and prominence of civil society organizations in national policymaking processes in the pre-accession phase. Based on the analysis of the cases of Serbia and Montenegro as the only two Western Balkans candidate countries which have started EU accession negotiations, it is argued that a clearer and more consistent application of EU conditionality can lead to more advanced civil society policy engagement, but its effectiveness depends on the genuine commitment of government bodies to proactive transparency and fundamental freedoms. It is also argued that purely formal government compliance with EU requirements can remain only a window dressing exercise and a source of legitimizing authorities' decision-making processes without empowering effects on domestic civil society actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the term "memory abuse" as an analytical framework to understanding politically constructed mnemonic tensions in the years preceding Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Here, "memory abuse" represents an intersection between the literatures of memory and conflict studies and refers to the intentional manipulation of memory beyond an intangible threshold, past which violence inevitably results. Drawing on the typologies of collective and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I argue that the political mobilisation of both distant and recent memories in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s to a significant degree contributed to the outbreak of war in the early 1990s, and contemporary political actors have perpetuated an abuse of memory that has limited reconciliatory outcomes in the region since the end of conflict. In reformulating the memories of, inter alia, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the atrocities of the Second World War to fit nationalist narratives, political actors across Yugoslavia's republics sought to profit from forced divisions that ultimately brought about the country's end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the civil wars in former Yugoslavia very serious ethnic tensions arose in Serbia. In these circumstances a number of non‐Serb police officers, and managers, were excluded from the police, because of their national origin. After democratic changes in October 2000, the reform of the police was launched. The police are still not representative of the population of Serbia in terms of ethnic structure, although it was one of the reform goals. The most important findings of the research conducted in 2006 regarding relations of the police and certain ethnic minorities are described in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses French cultural diplomacy in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, a country created after the First World War as a result of the Franco-Serbian military alliance during the war. Cultural diplomacy is examined as part of broader French political and economical action in Eastern Europe to organise the small newly created countries into the French field of interest and oppose Germany. French cultural diplomacy in the Kingdom of SCS had two aspects: the symbolical and the concrete. Its aim was to spread positive feelings towards France in the ex-Austria-Hungarian regions of the Kingdom, where France was unknown or seen as an enemy, and to maintain the pro-French attitude of the majority of Serbs. The aim was to contribute to the 'internal equalisation and strengthening' of the new ethnically and religiously heterogeneous country, by using culture as a 'soft power'. French cultural diplomacy in the Kingdom of SCS is analysed in its local, regional and European context and in a short- and long-term perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serbia's foreign policy choices reflect a profound identity crisis. While Serbia denies the independence of Kosovo, it simultaneously pursues membership in the European Union. My approach to understanding these tensions offers an alternative to the mainstream, liberal perspective whereby Serbian foreign policy claims are reduced to purely ideological explanations, thereby, ignoring the complex interplay between social identity crisis and political processes. I evaluate this seemingly contradictory nature of Serbian foreign policy choices from a constructivist and critical geopolitical perspective by bringing to the fore the body of international relations (IR) literature on ontological security and Stefano Guzzini's conceptualisation of the return of geopolitics in Europe. This allows for a more nuanced analysis that recognises no government would be able to establish a coherent policy unless the underlying identity crisis and foreign policy anxieties are at least mediated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the former Yugoslavia and some of its successor states as a case study, this article examines the concepts of ethnicity and mother tongue (with a side glance at religion) as employed in recent population censuses. A special focus is on the sometimes considerable discrepancies between the ethnic and linguistic affiliations of the respondents, a phenomenon commonly disregarded but potentially opening the door to manipulation of census returns in the service of particular interests. It is shown that, while having separate rubrics for the two features is in itself a useful methodological tool, their mutual relationship should be carefully investigated rather than simply taken for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political literature customarily defines secession as a movement developing in the periphery against the centre. This article questions this common assumption by raising the possibility that secession may be propelled by the centre. A working definition of ‘central secession' (or ‘secessionism by the centre') will be limited to those cases where a powerful nationalist movement operates from within the core or dominant nation(ality). The focus will be on the break-up of Yugoslavia – the disintegration of which was consistently and widely perceived as a conflict of secessionist republics opposed by, and confronted with, a unitary state. A brief geo-political excursus of recent secessionist movements will serve to highlight the singularity of the Yugoslav ‘model'. In the case of Serbia, the rhetoric was adamantly unitarian, anti-secessionist, even anti-nationalist. It emphasised the defence of territorial integrity at all costs. In this way, the centre could cast itself as the spotless saviour of the country's integrity versus a ‘treacherous' periphery. In fact, the hidden agenda of the regime was ethnic separation – of Serbs from non-Serbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Serbian publishing is inextricably tied to Serbian and Yugoslav history in general. The author discusses publishing in the territory from the beginning, concentrating on the period 1990-1999. She deals with statistics, and basic themes and problems from this period. She then compares censorship in communist Yugoslavia to that in 1990-1999. Finally, the article lists leading Serbian publishers from this recent period and their profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]