From Statistics to Ethnic Cleansing: Nationalist Mobilization and Demographers in Socialist Yugoslavia

• In Event: Anxieties of Ageing and Demographic Nationalism in Southeastern Europe

Abstract

Socialist Serbia developed cutting-edge demographic research in the 1960s. Yet, by the 1980s, the demographers' most audible contribution was to warn about “excessive” and “irrational” natality among the Albanian population of Kosovo. In other multiethnic places as well (Bosnia, Macedonia), demographic experts grew anxious about ethnic differences in reproductive behavior. In may paper I will trace these developments asking whether expert discourses prefigured the nationalist politics of ethnic segregation and ultimately "ethnic cleansing" of the 1990s.

Author

• Ulf Brunnbauer, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (Germany)