Jelena Subotić
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 177502 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jelena Subotić |
| PRENOMES | Jelena |
| SOBRENOME | Subotić |
| ASSINATURA | SUBOTIĆ J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Georgia State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8790-7363 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 57 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 358 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
The Microfoundations of Negotiated Peace
Why do citizens support negotiated solutions to internal conflicts? We develop a theoretical framework drawing insights from prosocial generalized trust orientations and classic models of public opinion. We expect generalized trust—a baseline belief in the trustworthiness of others as members of a shared moral community—to be positively associated with support for negotiated peace. Original survey and behavioral data collected during the peace ta…
Compounded historical trauma and cultural restitution in international relations
This article develops the concept of compounded historical trauma to analytically distinguish a single traumatic incident from a succession of interrelated traumatic events that took place over an extended period. Focusing on the compounded trauma of World War II and communist repression in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically Russia, Poland, and Serbia, I illustrate the enduring legacy of this complex trauma on the region’s contemporary fore…
Restitution of looted art in international politics
Restitution of colonial-looted art has recently regained steam. Accelerated by the Savoy-Sarr report (2018), commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron, several countries have begun negotiations to return all or parts of their colonial collections. This article explains this remarkable development through the framework of international status management. While material objects collected during colonialism and displayed in grand European mus…
Global politics of cultural heritage
Despite the widespread and creative use of heritage politics by a range of international actors, such as multilateral institutions and states, the field of International Relations (IR) has paid insufficient attention to the topic. To the extent that these politics have entered the field’s attention, it has been primarily through instances of highly publicized cultural heritage destruction during armed conflict. This special issue brings together …
The 19th-century ‘antiquities rush’ and the international competition for cultural status
This article examines the 19th-century ‘antiquities rush’ – the frenzy of archaeological digging, scientific expeditions, and straightforward looting of artefacts in the broader Mediterranean – through the framework of international status competition. To do this, I first situate material culture at the foundation of international status-seeking and demonstrate the importance of cultural objects as status symbols for states. I then elaborate two …
Ethics of Archives
In recent years, social scientists have “(re)discovered history” by visiting archives, collecting documents, and analyzing their findings to address concerns about the causes and consequences of violence. Nevertheless, social scientists frequently appear at their archives with little to no training on the methods and ethics of archival research as they increasingly rush to examine primary historical records. This has resulted in a dearth of disco…
The Ontological Security Politics of US Naval Ship Museums
This article explores the politics of United States naval warship museums. Specifically, it investigates the role of museum tour guides in re-embodying and reinforcing, but also contesting and countering, US hegemonic narratives at these popular tourist sites. To explain the politics of these sites, this article is built around three interrelated arguments. First, insights from ontological security studies illuminate identity politics at work, ca…
The Ontological Security-Seeking Paradox
This article theorises the relationship between material environment and state ontological security by analysing how public architecture is used to defend, assert or construct state sense of self in international society. The article articulates the dynamic relationship between the two audiences of public architecture projects – international and domestic – and demonstrates how a project aimed at ensuring ontological security with one audience ca…
Yellow Star, Red Star
There is no greater honor for an author than to respond to such generous and thoughtful engagement with one’s work such as the two commentaries by Mila Dragojević and Tamara Trošt. These commentaries are that much more appreciated as both Dragojević and Trošt have contributed tremendous scholarship on memory politics and historical narratives in the Western Balkans and in many ways Yellow Star, Red Star builds on their own work
Orli Fridman
Article Orli Fridman: Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories was published on September 1, 2024 in the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies (volume 72, issue 3)
Icons and ontological (in)security
What role do national icons play in a political community’s drive for ontological security? And what implications does this have for global politics? This article situates national icons in service of state ontological security. Icons both unify and divide political communities; therefore they serve, but also disrupt, ontological security-seeking of collectives. Building on research on ontological security and status in International Relations, w…
Scholars and the Politics of International Art Restitution
Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Since the 2000s we have grown somewhat accustomed to the headlines describing a ceremonial return to its original owners of a painting looted in the Holocaust, a process that took decades to develop and was initially met with considerable resistance in the art world and in the countries where this art was displayed. 1 In the past few years, however, buil…
The “Digital Turn” in Transitional Justice Research
The “digital turn” has transformed the landscape of transitional justice research. A wealth of data has been created through social media channels, and new digitisation tools have made existing data more easily accessible. This article discusses the ethical and methodological dimensions of using digital data and novel technologies in transitional justice research based on innovative research using digital archives, digitised transcripts, social m…
Holocaust memory and political legitimacy in contemporary Europe
This article analyzes how Holocaust memory serves to consolidate political legitimacy in contemporary Europe. In the aftermath of communism, post-communist states performatively adopted the established Western memory canon while rejecting much of its focus on the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Instead, they refocused the gaze on the suffering of non-Jewish national majorities. This approach provided cover and protection to Western governments, w…
Russia, Nato and the view from the East
Holocaust and the Meaning of the Srebrenica Genocide
Over the past year, a series of controversies have erupted regarding the role of Holocaust scholars in determining whether other, more recent mass atrocities (in China, Myanmar, Syria, and elsewhere) amount to the category of genocide. In this Reflection, I turn to one such controversy: the attempt by Bosnian Serb political elites to use international Holocaust experts to determine that the most internationally visible mass crime of the Bosnian w…
Cruelty and Global Politics
Constructing victims
What is the basis of status in world order? Status is assumed to come from strength, even if strength is reconfigured to be social and normative, not just material. Status, however, can also come from perceived weakness - it is conferred to those recognised as 'victims'. We make four theoretical contributions to the scholarship on status in world affairs. First, we examine how the category of victim is produced. Two, we expand the possible source…
Forum
Towards the existentialist turn in IR
Antisemitism in the global populist international
This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and international politics, specifically the potent role that antisemitism plays in the development and maintenance of the global populist international. After briefly sketching the history of modern transnational antisemitism, I make two principal arguments for why antisemitism should be of more direct concern for the scholarship of International Relations. First, antisemitism serves as…
A rkadi Z eltser . Unwelcome Memory
In this deeply researched and detailed book, Arkadi Zeltser embarks on a project of truly enormous scale: to document monuments to victims of the Holocaust put up by surviving Jews across the Soviet Union (1945–91). Even collecting the documentary evidence about these often small and unimposing memorials on the outskirts of Soviet towns and villages is a monumental and hugely valuable task. In Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet U…
Ethics of archival research on political violence
While archival research most often does not include direct interaction with living subjects, ethical issues surrounding this method are no less acute. These issues are even more profound in studies of violence, where the likely questions are often about life, death, murder, culpability, responsibility, punishment, or remorse. Identifying answers to such questions is a process rife with ethical minefields, including possibility of unfair affiliati…
Forum
At stake in this forum are the politics of translation in the study of global politics. More specifically, the following interventions aim to consider the ways that scholars can recenter the utility of language toward more flexible conceptions of relationality. As each contribution reveals, translation is indispensable to individual theorizations of international politics; yet taken together, the forum aims to mitigate the alleged necessity of a …
Cultural heritage as status seeking
This article explores the relationship between cultural heritage politics and international status-seeking. We advance a two-fold typology of status-seeking that explains why states engage in cultural heritage restoration practices at home and abroad. First, cultural heritage restoration can be an easy way to signal state respect of its multicultural past while providing cover for continuing anti-multicultural policies of the present. States with…
Europe is a State of Mind
Why does Europeanization—the process of adopting European rules—advance in some countries, while it stalls in others? What explains different European trajectories of otherwise similar candidate states? This article explains foreign policy choices of EU candidate states with an identity-based theoretical framework. In states where European identity is a widely shared social value, the inevitable short-term costs of Europeanization—economic, socia…
Narrative, Ontological Security, and Foreign Policy Change
While the recent IR “narrative turn” has greatly improved our understanding of how narratives influence state policy choices, we need to deepen our understanding of how narratives explain policy change. If state “autobiographies” provide such powerful explanations of why states do what they do, how can they change their policies and practices? To understand the relationship between policy change and state narrative continuity, I build on existing…
Stories States Tell
Jelena Subotić explores how the states of the Balkans construct their "autobiographies"-stories about themselves-and how these stories influence their contemporary political choices. By understanding where states' narratives about themselves-stories of their past, their historical purpose, their role in the international system-come from, we can more fully explain contemporary state behavior that to outsiders may seem irrational, self-defeating, …
Explaining Difficult States
Why has Serbia’s path toward European integration been fraught with so much difficulty? This article explains Serbia’s reluctance to Europeanize by exploring why Serbian elites persistently refused to fulfill the European Union’s principal requirement—full cooperation with the Hague war crimes tribunal—even when it meant getting off the road to Brussels. The article offers a theoretical framework that incorporates domestic political identity, pow…
The Transformation of International Transitional Justice Advocacy
Journal Article The Transformation of International Transitional Justice Advocacy Get access Jelena Subotić Jelena Subotić * * Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 6, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 106–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijr036 Published: 2…
Fantasies of power
This article offers a fresh look at contemporary processes of Europeanization. Using the Eurovision Song Contest as empirical illustration of how states perform Europeanization, this article makes three principal arguments. First, it challenges optimistic accounts of cultural Europeanization and identifies the limits that the Europeanization project faces. Second, it proposes that the process of Europeanization is fundamentally a process of polit…
Cultural heritage as status seeking
This article explores the relationship between cultural heritage politics and international status-seeking. We advance a two-fold typology of status-seeking that explains why states engage in cultural heritage restoration practices at home and abroad. First, cultural heritage restoration can be an easy way to signal state respect of its multicultural past while providing cover for continuing anti-multicultural policies of the present. States with…
Constructing victims
What is the basis of status in world order? Status is assumed to come from strength, even if strength is reconfigured to be social and normative, not just material. Status, however, can also come from perceived weakness - it is conferred to those recognised as 'victims'. We make four theoretical contributions to the scholarship on status in world affairs. First, we examine how the category of victim is produced. Two, we expand the possible source…
Antisemitism in the global populist international
This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and international politics, specifically the potent role that antisemitism plays in the development and maintenance of the global populist international. After briefly sketching the history of modern transnational antisemitism, I make two principal arguments for why antisemitism should be of more direct concern for the scholarship of International Relations. First, antisemitism serves as…
Cultural intimacy in International Relations
In anthropology, the concept of cultural intimacy expresses those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of international criticism for the state, but are nevertheless used to provide insiders with a sense of national comfort, understanding, and self-reflexive, ontological security. Cultural intimacy helps illuminate how states present themselves internationally and how they understand themselves domestically. It can also exp…
Ethics of archival research on political violence
While archival research most often does not include direct interaction with living subjects, ethical issues surrounding this method are no less acute. These issues are even more profound in studies of violence, where the likely questions are often about life, death, murder, culpability, responsibility, punishment, or remorse. Identifying answers to such questions is a process rife with ethical minefields, including possibility of unfair affiliati…
Reproductive rights and the state in Serbia and Croatia
Performing solidarity
Moral Injury in International Relations
The war in Iraq unleashed disastrous global instability—from the strengthening of Al-Qaeda, to the creation of ISIS, and civil war in Syria accompanied by a massive exodus of refugees. The war in Afghanistan is continuing in perpetuity, with no clear goals or objectives other than the United States’ commitment to its sunk cost. The so-called war on terror is a vague catch-all phrase for a military campaign against moving targets and goalposts, wi…
Expanding the scope of post-conflict justice
Over the past two decades, a new international regime of individual criminal accountability has emerged as a dominant regulatory mechanism to address gross human rights violations. At the same time, states are still pursuing claims against each other for human rights abuses in international courts. These two concepts of responsibility - individual and state - are not only fundamentally at odds with one another; they also exclude the third, critic…
Political memory after state death
This article explores the relationship between political memory, state ontological security, and populist movements after state death. When a state dies, ideological space opens up for new state agents to narrate a different version of the past, one that delegitimizes the ideological underpinning of the old state order and creates ontological insecurity in the new polity. Populism becomes an especially attractive ideology, as it feeds on a sense …
Out of Eastern Europe
What is the contribution of Eastern European scholarship to the study of human rights and transitional justice? This essay takes stock of the most significant empirical and theoretical contributions of the study of Eastern Europe, specifically the study of the difficult case of the former Yugoslavia, to the scholarship on transitional justice. I identify three main challenges the scholarship on the former Yugoslavia has presented to the larger fi…
Legitimacy, Scope, and Conflicting Claims on the Icty
Within the span of three months in 2012/2013, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down three major acquittal verdicts: two Croatian Army generals, three members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and a high ranking Serbian army general. This article analyzes the political fallout from the acquittals to make three principal arguments. First, in the absence of broader transitional justice framework in the former …
Remembrance, Public Narratives, and Obstacles to Justice in the Western Balkans
Twenty years since the onset of the traumatic wars of Yugoslav secession, the countries of the Western Balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. In this essay, I develop an argument for understanding the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. To illustrate this relationship, I explore ways in which education and memorialization projects contribute to justi…
The Paradox of International Justice Compliance
Journal Article The Paradox of International Justice Compliance Get access Jelena Subotić Jelena Subotić *Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 3, Issue 3, 1 November 2009, Pages 362–383, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijp011 Published: 27 July 2009
Icons and ontological (in)security
What role do national icons play in a political community’s drive for ontological security? And what implications does this have for global politics? This article situates national icons in service of state ontological security. Icons both unify and divide political communities; therefore they serve, but also disrupt, ontological security-seeking of collectives. Building on research on ontological security and status in International Relations, w…
Truth, justice, and reconciliation on the ground
Scholars and the Politics of International Art Restitution
Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Since the 2000s we have grown somewhat accustomed to the headlines describing a ceremonial return to its original owners of a painting looted in the Holocaust, a process that took decades to develop and was initially met with considerable resistance in the art world and in the countries where this art was displayed. 1 In the past few years, however, buil…
Towards the existentialist turn in IR
The Cruelty of False Remorse
Biljana Plavšić, the former president of Republika Srpska, was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. After she plead guilty and issued a remorseful statement, the prosecution dropped the genocide charges and she was sentenced to 11 years in prison, and subsequently granted early release. While in prison, she published lengthy memoirs in which she retra…
Reproductive rights and the state in Serbia and Croatia
The Paradox of International Justice Compliance
Journal Article The Paradox of International Justice Compliance Get access Jelena Subotić Jelena Subotić *Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 3, Issue 3, 1 November 2009, Pages 362–383, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijp011 Published: 27 July 2009
Humanitarianism at a Crossroads
Humanitarianism is going through a transformation. The scope and intensity of humanitarian action is vastly expanding. The number and budgets of humanitarian aid organizations are on the rise, private donations are at an all time high, and the global presence of humanitarian groups is increasingly visible. At the same time, the very purpose, mission, and methods of humanitarianism are under the microscope. Humanitarian organizations are becoming …
Hijacked justice
"What is the appropriate political response to mass atrocity? In this book, Jelena Subotić traces the design, implementation, and political outcomes of institutions established to deal with the legacies of violence in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars."--[book jacket]
Explaining Difficult States
Why has Serbia’s path toward European integration been fraught with so much difficulty? This article explains Serbia’s reluctance to Europeanize by exploring why Serbian elites persistently refused to fulfill the European Union’s principal requirement—full cooperation with the Hague war crimes tribunal—even when it meant getting off the road to Brussels. The article offers a theoretical framework that incorporates domestic political identity, pow…
No Escape from Ethnicity? Confessions of an Accidental CNN Pundit
As a political scientist with expertise in human rights and the Balkans, I was invited to provide critical commentary and analysis of Kosovo's declaration of independence in February 2008 for CNN International. I offered an analysis rooted in the understanding and interpretation of international law, foreign policy, and domestic politics of Serbia and Kosovo. While I was not surprised that my analysis was not popular in Serbia—after all, I did ar…
Fantasies of power
This article offers a fresh look at contemporary processes of Europeanization. Using the Eurovision Song Contest as empirical illustration of how states perform Europeanization, this article makes three principal arguments. First, it challenges optimistic accounts of cultural Europeanization and identifies the limits that the Europeanization project faces. Second, it proposes that the process of Europeanization is fundamentally a process of polit…
Europe is a State of Mind
Why does Europeanization—the process of adopting European rules—advance in some countries, while it stalls in others? What explains different European trajectories of otherwise similar candidate states? This article explains foreign policy choices of EU candidate states with an identity-based theoretical framework. In states where European identity is a widely shared social value, the inevitable short-term costs of Europeanization—economic, socia…
Expanding the scope of post-conflict justice
Over the past two decades, a new international regime of individual criminal accountability has emerged as a dominant regulatory mechanism to address gross human rights violations. At the same time, states are still pursuing claims against each other for human rights abuses in international courts. These two concepts of responsibility - individual and state - are not only fundamentally at odds with one another; they also exclude the third, critic…
The Transformation of International Transitional Justice Advocacy
Journal Article The Transformation of International Transitional Justice Advocacy Get access Jelena Subotić Jelena Subotić * * Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 6, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 106–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijr036 Published: 2…
The Cruelty of False Remorse
Biljana Plavšić, the former president of Republika Srpska, was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. After she plead guilty and issued a remorseful statement, the prosecution dropped the genocide charges and she was sentenced to 11 years in prison, and subsequently granted early release. While in prison, she published lengthy memoirs in which she retra…
Diverging Paths in the Western Balkans
Croatia has bought its ticket to Brussels, and Montenegro could be next, while Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo are stuck in a crowded, smoky waiting room
Remembrance, Public Narratives, and Obstacles to Justice in the Western Balkans
Twenty years since the onset of the traumatic wars of Yugoslav secession, the countries of the Western Balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. In this essay, I develop an argument for understanding the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. To illustrate this relationship, I explore ways in which education and memorialization projects contribute to justi…
Cultural intimacy in International Relations
In anthropology, the concept of cultural intimacy expresses those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of international criticism for the state, but are nevertheless used to provide insiders with a sense of national comfort, understanding, and self-reflexive, ontological security. Cultural intimacy helps illuminate how states present themselves internationally and how they understand themselves domestically. It can also exp…
Stories States Tell
Jelena Subotić explores how the states of the Balkans construct their "autobiographies"-stories about themselves-and how these stories influence their contemporary political choices. By understanding where states' narratives about themselves-stories of their past, their historical purpose, their role in the international system-come from, we can more fully explain contemporary state behavior that to outsiders may seem irrational, self-defeating, …
Legitimacy, Scope, and Conflicting Claims on the Icty
Within the span of three months in 2012/2013, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down three major acquittal verdicts: two Croatian Army generals, three members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and a high ranking Serbian army general. This article analyzes the political fallout from the acquittals to make three principal arguments. First, in the absence of broader transitional justice framework in the former …
Post-Communist Transitional Justice
Taking stock of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, this volume explores how these societies have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes. It focuses on the most important factors that have shaped the nature, speed, and sequence of transitional justice programs in the period spanning the revolutions that brought about the collapse of the communist dictators…
Narrative, Ontological Security, and Foreign Policy Change
While the recent IR “narrative turn” has greatly improved our understanding of how narratives influence state policy choices, we need to deepen our understanding of how narratives explain policy change. If state “autobiographies” provide such powerful explanations of why states do what they do, how can they change their policies and practices? To understand the relationship between policy change and state narrative continuity, I build on existing…
Truth, justice, and reconciliation on the ground
Out of Eastern Europe
What is the contribution of Eastern European scholarship to the study of human rights and transitional justice? This essay takes stock of the most significant empirical and theoretical contributions of the study of Eastern Europe, specifically the study of the difficult case of the former Yugoslavia, to the scholarship on transitional justice. I identify three main challenges the scholarship on the former Yugoslavia has presented to the larger fi…
For the Love of Homeland
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Between Justice and Stability
Terrorists are Other People
This article analyzes the contested remembrance of the assassination of Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian radical Gavrilo Princip in 1914 in Sarajevo. I place the politics of the assassination centennial commemoration in the context of Serbian and Bosnian contemporary anxieties about their respective ontological insecurities. In Serbia, these anxieties centre on Serbia's fear of losing its international reputation as a state that was s…
Foreign Policy Stories from the White House
It is somewhat astonishing that we needed until 2015 to get a comprehensive study on the enduring power of narratives in foreign policy. Narrative and the Making of US National Security by Ronald Krebs provides a much needed theoretical synthesis of the existing work on narrative in International Relations (IR) from a variety of often mutually hostile traditions. Krebs blends, often seamlessly, insights from realism, constructivism, and strands o…
Performing solidarity
Political science (48 obras) · Sociology (42 obras) · Law (39 obras) · Politics (39 obras) · Law (34 obras) · Political economy (20 obras) · Balkans: History, Politics, Society (14 obras) · International relations (13 obras) · Computer Science (12 obras) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (12 obras)