Knowledge Production on the Post-Yugoslav Space

This project focuses on the politics of knowledge production regarding the post-Yugoslav space in International Relations (IR) and other social sciences. It entails support for the work of a collective of women scholars of and from the post-Yugoslav space, working in Global North academia, and support for the creation of a wider network of scholars of/from the region working in this domain. This collective, spread across several continents, has been working on a book that unpacks the representation of the post-Yugoslav space in IR and related disciplines, most frequently portrayed through the prism of wars, violence, and backwardness, and relatedly, the politics of knowledge production at work when those seen as related to the region and expected to be objects of knowledge aim to become epistemic subjects. The work of the collective and the manuscript, using radical reflexivity methodology, also make the case for (co-)creation of knowledge otherwise. In the course of the project, we will organise a workshop that brings together the collective members and other scholars and engages with and contributes towards the finalisation of the book manuscript. We will also work on establishing an international scholarly network of scholars of/from the region. Echoing ISRF’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, the project brings together scholars from various sub-disciplines of IR, Sociology, and Political Science, working on the politics of knowledge production from different angles. The project will contribute to tackling the real-world problems of, on the one hand, coloniality of knowledge and the political consequences thereof and, on the other, the harmful effect of damage-centred research and knowledge extraction on different communities in the region. This contribution is in addition to the contributions to be made, considering the particular position of the post-Yugoslav space, towards actively pluralising our understanding of colonialities of IR and discussions about geopolitics of knowledge production.