CITSEE Study

As the case of on-going transformations of sexual citizenship in post-Yugoslav space shows, globalization and EU-isation open up a space for introducing positive practices related to sexual citizenship into the local contexts. However, as this case also reveals, the improvement of citizenship policies may easily be instrumentalised by different actors involved at the national and international arenas. Thus, more attention should be paid to the ways in which LGBT rights intersect with other discourses and relations of power on the global and local levels.

If feminist citizenship in SFRY has to be seen in the context of dissidence, while feminist citizenship in the context of nation-building needs to be assessed by its relationship to belonging and borders, then the post-Yugoslav feminist citizenship has to be understood in terms of political re-appropriation and re-politicization of Yugoslav socialist heritage. This re-politicization needs to be seen in the context of rigorous critique of socio-economic relations brought by neoliberal capitalism, but within the specific post-conflict and post-socialist circumstances. 

The weakness of all three states in the face of global economic competition has increasingly put pressure even on the revered model of citizen-soldier. In times of indebtedness and austerity, there is a greater competition for state resources and contestations of the current schemes of redistribution. The pressure to contribute economically is very much present, and the perfect citizen is no longer the soldier-citizen but the working and consuming citizen. The implications of this statement go much beyond the former Yugoslavia. In the age of corporate soldiers and wars fought by drones, there is a risk that states stop caring about the quality of their ‘stock’, adding yet another reason to shed state responsibility for their populations.

Romani minorities in the post-Yugoslav space had uneven access to citizenship, which was specific to their socio-economic and also culturally stigmatised condition as the Subaltern, who was not able to voice its plight or it was ignored. Romani individuals who were positioned as non-citizens at their place of residence were in the most unfavourable position. However, even those minority individuals, who were able to access citizenship at their place of residence, found themselves in uneven position in comparison to other citizens. All post-Yugoslav states, also due to the dialogue with international organisations and EU integration processes, introduced legislation for minority protection, which included also Romani minorities. However, in most cases (excluding Slovenia), Romani minorities were included into the generic legal acts on minority protection, which did not recognise the fact that they are culturally stigmatised as well as have a different socioeconomic position than most other minorities. 

One of the problems of equating polities with ethno-majoritarian territories, the paper argues, is their unidimensionality. This is especially true for those polities without historical precedents or strong functional logic that would underpin the territorial boundaries. This, as some of the cases illustrate, can cause numerous problems for the viability of these polities and cement ethnicity as the only criterion defining political membership as well as rights in the long run. A few cases of multi-ethnic polities still exist but these are exceptions rather than the rule.