Citizenship After Yugoslavia - a Book Roundtable

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the citizenship regimes of the new states that emerged out of the break up of Yugoslavia. It covers both the states that emerged out of the initial disintegration across 1991 and 1992 (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Macedonia), as well as those that have been formed recently through subsequent partitions (Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo). While citizenship has often been used as a tool of ethnic engineering to reinforce the position of the titular majority in many states, in other cases citizenship laws and practices have been liberalised as part of a wider political settlement intended to include minority communities more effectively in the political process. Meanwhile, frequent (re)definitions of these increasingly overlapping regimes still provoke conflicts among post-Yugoslav states.

Although all the papers are sole authored, this is very much a collective work, as the CITSEE team have worked together during the first three years of the project’s existence to place a fresh focus on these new citizenship regimes, in part by exposing them to constant comparison to each other. No reflection on any one state is complete without reference to the citizenship regimes of most, if not all, of the other states (not to mention the regimes of the other states of wider South East Europe such as Albania, Bulgaria and Hungary, which have a particular impact on these post-Yugoslav regimes).

This volume shows how important it is for the field of citizenship studies to take into account the main changes in and varieties of citizenship regimes in the post-Yugoslav states, as a particular case of new state citizenship. At the same time, it seeks to show scholars of (post) Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans that the Yugoslav crisis, disintegration and wars as well as the current functioning of the new and old Balkan states, together with the process of their integration into the EU, cannot be fully understood without a deeper understanding of their citizenship regimes.