04/06/2026
Guest Lecture in the Project Seminar “WestOst” by :
Čarna Brković (Professor ):
“Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s”
This talk explores a humanitarian imaginary inspired by the political vocabularies of socialism and the Non-Aligned Movement.
In the 1970s, the Red Cross of Yugoslavia initiated a series of actions to encourage the International Red Cross Movement to reconsider its humanitarian principles and include perspectives from the countries belonging to the Non-Aligned Movement. The Yugoslav proposal provoked discussion in the International Red Cross Movement over the meaning of “humanitarianism,” “neutrality,” and “peace.” The push for the perspectives of non-aligned countries to be better represented within the International Red Cross Movement resulted in an ambivalent humanitarian imaginary that both challenged and reproduced the premises of the humanitarian sector in the West.
This largely forgotten episode in the history of humanitarianism can best be understood as an attempt at worldmaking, not of a world free from the coloniality/modernity nexus, but of a socialist modernist world that was in many aspects different from the one that had been built since the 1970s.
*
Prof. Dr. Brković studies how people cope with situations in which their agency is suspended; how they navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, and failure; and how power and inequality operate in the complex conditions that abound in Southeast Europe, a region undergoing multiple, simultaneous socio-political transformations. This has led her to ethnographically and historically research diverse fields such as clientelism, activism, social care, and humanitarianism. She is also interested in historically diverse projects of integrating the world differently, such as socialist humanitarianism and alternative forms of Europeanization.
June 11, 12:15–1:45 pm CEST
@ IfEE and via Zoom
For room & Zoom info, please contact: [email protected]
Everyone is welcome!
![IfEE – Institutskolloquium - “[New?] Paternalisms: Authoritative Practices in the Name of Doing Good“ – session 2 - summ...](https://img4.glunis.com/136/928/1763479441369287.jpg)
