The Non-Alignment of Student Migration to Yugoslavia during the Cold War

• In Event: Marxist Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Marxist Sociology Section Roundtable 4

Abstract

Students from postcolonial Africa and the Middle East, who left their countries in large numbers to study abroad in the context of the Cold War have been analyzed through a political lens and conceptualized as “new elites” and “modernizing cadres.” Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement, have both been the object of the same kind of political reductionism until a new generation of post-Yugoslav scholars and recent developments historicizing the Cold War “from below” started to challenge this status quo. This is the position from which I ask: could there have been such a thing as ordinary non-alignment, which was not necessarily politicized, and what might a sociological reading of postcolonial students’ transnational trajectories reveal?
I examine the narratives of those who left newly decolonized states to pursue education in Yugoslavia between 1965 and 1982 with the hope of becoming physicians and often remained there. Staying in Yugoslavia meant deviating from family norms, plans and aspirations; and sometimes even defying laws and bilateral agreements between the concerned nation-states. Drawing on cross-referenced sources (archives, federal statistics, photographs and a dozen biographical interviews), I analyze how the interviewees relate to their families’ educational backgrounds. Thus, following Charles Wright Mills’ definition of sociological imagination, I construct study abroad into an object of sociological inquiry at the intersection of biography, history and social structure. Furthermore, in line the conference theme, I suggest how sociological inquiry into non-alignment might advance our understanding and practice of social change today.

Author

• Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin, Stockholm University