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Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’: Everyday Modes of Transport in Post-Socialist Serbia

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Abstract

The collapse of the Yugoslav socialist state changed the lives of its citizens radically.1 The state’s disintegration was accompanied by wars in Croatia (1991–95), Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–95) and Kosovo (1998-99), conflicts in Slovenia (1991) and the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (what is now Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999. Serbia was faced with international isolation and a radical impoverishment of the population that brought with it many turbulent changes in people’s everyday lives. The period from 2000 onwards is usually understood as a ‘period of recovery’ (e.g., Greenberg 2011). However, although the crisis after the turn of the millennium was a far cry from the severity of the 1990s, most people still felt that the situation was more of a ‘road to normality’ than of stability. Thus, most people I worked with in Serbia in 2005-06 the mid 2000s perceived the situation in the country as still politically and economically unstable, as some kind of prolonged transition whose end was yet unseen.

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© 2014 Marina Simić

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Simić, M. (2014). Travel and the State after the ‘Fall’: Everyday Modes of Transport in Post-Socialist Serbia. In: Burrell, K., Hörschelmann, K. (eds) Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137267290_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137267290_9

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