Scholars have documented a tendency of (semi-)authoritarian regimes to undermine university autonomy, mainly through organizational (de jure) changes. This paper presents a case study of a publicly ...triggered plagiarism investigation by the University of Belgrade into the doctoral thesis of the Serbian Minister of Finance, one of the key members of the increasingly authoritarian regime. The analysis finds a proceduralized and delayed response of the university’s leadership, which indicates lowered de facto autonomy from politics, despite the university’s continually high de jure autonomy. The investigation was closed only after a mobilization within the academic community which resulted in a university’s blockade that forced its leadership to retract the contentious thesis. The case study shows that, in contexts of democratic backsliding, political capture can extend farther than usually thought, impacting even the implementation of internal university standards. On the other hand, the analysis also shows that political capture is not necessarily irreversible and that academic community can mobilize to ‘undo’ it. This reinforces the notion of academic communities as value-driven groups capable of exerting peer pressure to override even authoritarian pressures. In order to understand the dynamic of the plagiarism inquiry in its entirety, we apply insights from theory of power to complement and overcome the limitations of the conventional theoretical frameworks on democratic backsliding and academic autonomy.
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CEKLJ, DOBA, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
A review essay covering books by 1) Sergey Aleksashenko, Putin’s Counterrevolution (2018), 2) Andrew Monaghan, Power in Modern Russia (2017), 3) Matthew Light, Fragile Migration Rights. Freedom of ...Movement in post-Soviet Russia (2017) and 4) Alexandar Mihailovic, The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia (2018).
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The normalization of relations between Belgrade and Moscow in the mid-1950s and the Yugoslav authorities' decision to develop closer relations with the West coincided with Yugoslavia's intention to ...seek its own way forward, characterized by self-management at home and a lead role in the international Non-Aligned Movement. Later, following the establishment of official relations between the European Community and Yugoslavia in 1968, the Community accepted that Yugoslavia remained where it stood ideologically and continued to provide it with new trade agreements. However, a careful examination of official debates and archival collections reveals that it did not take long before the appreciation for the policy of non-alignment was overshadowed by uncertainty (due to the death of President Tito, but also the end of the Cold War and collapse of communism), with the movement eventually losing its significance with the outbreak of the Yugoslav state crisis and consequent policy-making preferences.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper examines the repercussions of the 2015 European migrant/refugee crisis, which culminated with the 2018 dispute between Italy and France. It is concerned with the Dublin Regulation and the ...New Pact on Asylum and Migration, which are critical to the division and consequent polarizations across the EU. The Member States' failure to show solidarity and agree to share the burden in relation to the distribution of immigrants and asylum seekers has brought the European integrationist project into question. In addition to considering the general theoretical explanations, the paper also looks into the African-origin migration/displacement as a proper trigger of widespread disagreements among European governments. The deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the local inhabitants - largely through the use of the French Treasury-tied Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA) franc - exposes the neo-colonial nature of the current practices and thus jeopardizes all those discourses and policy initiatives focused on the provision of peace and stability.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In 1992 Yugoslavia finally succumbed to civil war, collapsing under the pressure of its inherent ethnic tensions. Existing accounts of Yugoslavia's dissolution, however, pay little regard to the ...troubled relationship between the Yugoslav Federation and the European Community (EC) prior to the crisis in the early 1990s, and the instability this created. Here, Branislav Radeljic offers an empirical analysis of the EC's relations with Yugoslavia from the late sixties, when Yugoslavia was under the presidency of Josep Broz Tito, through to the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in 1992, after the rise of Slobodan Milosevi? and the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars. Radeljic explores the economic, political and social elements of these discords, and also places emphasis on the role of Slovenes, Croats and other diasporas - focusing on their capacity to affect policy-making at a Europe-wide level. Radeljic argues convincingly that a lack of direction and inadequate political mechanisms within the EC enabled these non-state actors to take centre-stage, and shows how EC paralysis precipitated a bloody conflict in the Balkan region.
A review essay covering books by 1) Riccardo Mario Cucciolla (Ed.) The Power State Is Back? The Evolution of Russian Political Thought After 1991 (2016), 2) Lena Jonson, Art and Protest in Putin's ...Russia (2015) and 3) Svetlana Stephenson, Gangs of Russia. From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (2015).
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article examines Russia's involvement in the Kosovo question. It shows that the Russian leadership has generally favored the Serbian authorities, but more importantly for its own influence, that ...it felt the urge to oppose the 1999 NATO intervention and the post-interventionist Western rhetoric. The argument that Russia has been primarily concerned with strengthening its own position and that involvement in the Kosovo question was expected to serve such an ambition can also be better understood by looking at some recent discrepancies. Namely, the fact that Russia has strongly insisted on the principle of territorial integrity in the case of Serbia but then completely ignored it in the case of Ukraine shows that its loud advocacy of Serbian territorial integrity was merely a strategic instrument to be deployed in European official debates, especially when the post-1999 discussions about Kosovo's final status took place.
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BFBNIB, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article examines the position of Serbia as a small state in the context of external pressures, largely reflecting an ambition to balance the East and the West. While clearly interested in offers ...and benefits from collaboration with both geostrategic realms, Serbia’s authorities have always left space for possible alternatives—a trend that is expected to serve power preservation or to inform external players to what extent Serbia is keen on balancing and juxtaposing great powers in the region. While analyzing the limited case of the Covid-19 pandemic and the never-ending case of Kosovo, additionally actualized by the Russo-Ukrainian war, the present study suggests that Serbia is at the crossroads between growing ambitions and the real limitations of what its smallness can achieve. The paper concludes that Serbian foreign policy contains all the prerogatives of movement without a goal, a search for strategic partnerships, but without a coherent political vision—an approach that generates suspicion of being labelled as distracted and unreliable.
The Russian intervention in Ukraine in February 2022 has served as a catalyst or actualizer of a long-standing trend in NATO: that of justifying its existence by its geographical expansion. This is ...both in organic terms, through the incorporation of new states into its structure, and in operational terms, through the execution of so-called out-of-area operations, and the intensification of its rivalry with Russia. This dynamic, which has been firmly established since the mid-1990s, has been overridden by the growing contradictions between the interests of its members, the successive changes in US administrations, and the transformation of the international system, characterized by an inexorable trend toward multipolarity. Altogether, these factors explain the extent to which NATO is facing a definitive choice. Starting with the implications of the war in Ukraine for NATO, this article provides a historical analysis of this phenomenon, noting the vicissitudes of NATO's enlargements and operations over the past thirty years, and how these activities have enabled the alliance to weather the successive internal crises it has faced. Ultimately, the authors argue that the war in Ukraine marks the end of this dynamic and of NATO's masculinist dilemma either to limit its operations to the defense of its members (in line with the collective security clause enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty) or to complete pending enlargement processes, thereby endangering international peace and security.
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