Revisiting Involvement and Detachment: Yugoslavia as an Object of Scholarship

Abstract

I begin by quoting from the concluding paragraphs of the paper I delivered to the conference on ‘Yugoslavia: Antagonism and the Construction of Identity’ in August 1992:

Shortly after the civil war engulfed Croatia I decided to telephone two families with whom I have had long-standing friendships in order to find out if they were still safe. After some difficulty I managed to contact both of them. The difficulty was understandable. One family, which lived near the Borongaj barracks in Zagreb, had been intermittently in the air-raid shelters. The other had been evacuated from Dubrovnik and had found refuge with relatives in Montenegro. I asked each of them if there was anything I could do for them — more as a token of my good will than in any expectation that I would be able to help. Although members of different ethnic groups, by coincidence they both said exactly the same thing to me that evening: ‘Hang on to your objectivity’.¹