Introduction
‘Kosovo is Serbia’ (Kosovo je Srbija) – few people in Serbia disagree with this slogan. The government of Serbia devotes a website to it, and it is sported on huge banners waved at protest marches and in football stadiums. Indeed, the occasional Serbian sports personality wears a T-shirt emblazoned with it, and the Serbian tennis star Novak Djoković caused a scandal at the Paris Open in 2023 when he wrote a modified version of the slogan – ‘Kosovo is the heart of Serbia’ (Kosovo je srce Srbije) – on a TV camera. While its current popularity in Serbia goes back to Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, the slogan is older; its first recorded use was at the funeral of the victims of a mass shooting of soldiers of the Yugoslav army in barracks in the town of Paraćin, Serbia, by a Kosovo Albanian recruit in 1987. The Serbian media framed the shooting as an attack on Serbia – even though most victims came from other republics – and the massive crowd that attended the funeral of a killed Serbian soldier shouted slogans such as ‘All Shiptars out of Serbia; Kosovo is Ours’.Footnote 1 A decade later, this is what briefly happened – when Serbian troops and paramilitaries forced more than half of the Albanian population out of the province in 1999, during their war with the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK).
At the end of the 1980s, the fear of Serbia losing Kosovo, which then was designated a socialist autonomous province within the Socialist Republic of Serbia, became a major mobilising instrument used by Slobodan Milošević to strengthen his power after he had become head of the League of Communists of Serbia in 1986. His speech in April 1987 at Kosovo polje – a karst plain in the middle of Kosovo and the scene of a legendary battle between Serbian and Ottoman troops in 1389 – where Milošević sided with Serb protestors against the Kosovo police, and his later speech about Kosovo to the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in June that year, are now considered the first occasions at which Milošević displayed his populist talent. His open embracement of nationalist tropes opened the floodgates for ideas that had previously been limited to right-wing dissident intellectual and Church circles.Footnote 2 Now they found a receptive audience in the increasingly shrill media. When, in 1986, a draft memorandum written by a group of members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU), named Current Societal Questions in Our Country, spoke of the ‘physical, political, legal and cultural genocide against the Serbian population’ of Kosovo,Footnote 3 it created a public scandal at that time. The memorandum was admonished as nationalistic by no one other than Milošević himself. A few years later, though, the apocalyptic undertone of the draft memorandum had become mainstream as anxieties about the future viability of the Serb nation shifted from being an intellectual obsession to a mass syndrome.
Kosovo crystallised these fears over losing territory and people – the two main ingredients of modern nationalism. The link between population and territory is not only crucial for nationalism but also the fundamental starting point of demographic research – and this article will explore the role of demographers in Serbia in the 1980s in making nationalistic claims mainstream. So, it is no surprise that Serbia’s (and Yugoslavia’s) leading demographer at that time, Miloš Macura, was a vocal voice demanding action in Kosovo to prevent it slipping away from Serbian control. Macura, a scientist of international renown, was a member of the commission that drafted the academy’s above-mentioned memorandum. Kosovo’s demographic development became his obsession. For example, in a 1989 English-language publication named Kosovo: Past and Present, Macura contributed with the chapter ‘The Problem of Natality in Kosovo’.Footnote 4 He claimed that there was hardly a bigger and more consequential but less researched problem in Yugoslavia than the ‘natality problem in Kosovo’. By that, he meant the high fertility rates among the Albanian population, which he considered excessive and the result of ‘patriarchal family relations and tradition’. Even worse, high fertility was – Macura stressed – supported by Kosovo’s institutions, which at that time were controlled by ethnic Albanians. He also identified the strong influence of religion (Islam) on reproductive behaviour. Macura claimed that Kosovo’s politicians and religious authorities pursued a pronatalist agenda with the allegedly deliberate purpose to further increase the share of the Albanian population and put pressure on the remaining Serbs and Montenegrins to leave the province. Kosovo’s government was accused by Yugoslavia’s leading demographer of deliberately ignoring federal recommendations and instruments for family planning. He demanded urgent government intervention to prevent an increase in the Albanian population beyond a certain threshold, which he believed would result in an imbalance with the Serb population. He also argued that this intervention was necessary to ensure the continued presence of Serbs in Kosovo.
This article starts with a close reading of such expert discourses on demographic development, and it asks a simple question: to what degree can demographers and other population experts in Serbia be viewed as desk perpetrators of the extreme violence of the 1990s? Did their expertise and policy recommendations help to prepare the ground for ethnic cleansing and even genocide during the wars of Yugoslav succession (without implying that the experts themselves committed crimes)? This question pertains to the responsibility of scholars who employed a population science apparatus to assert an organic link between the survival of the nation and a specific geographic area. Such claims were not unprecedented in Serbia. As Ljubinka Trgovčević demonstrates in her analysis of the role of scholars in the creation of the first Yugoslav state, population specialists from various disciplines were invited to provide arguments for the extent of Yugoslavia’s (and Serbia’s) national territory when borders were redrawn, most notably in the aftermath of the First World War.Footnote 5 A notable example is Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927), widely regarded as the father of modern geography in Serbia, who played a pivotal role in the Yugoslav delegation to the Paris peace conferences following the First World War. In this capacity, he sought to persuade the major powers of the territorial claims of the recently established state by presenting territory as the natural space of an organically understood nation.Footnote 6 The concepts he developed concerning population, ethnicity and mobility would inform generations of Serbian scholars to come.
Population science as an instrument of nationalism and a contributing factor to its excesses was, of course, not exclusive to Serbia, The most egregious example of misuse of demographic expert knowledge was its utilisation by Nazi Germany for the conceptualisation and implementation of population resettlement, mass murder and economic exploitation in occupied Eastern Europe – a by now well-researched topic.Footnote 7 This is also the context where the term ‘desk perpetrator’ comes from.Footnote 8 This does not imply that substantive similarities exist between the policies of Nazi Germany and the 1990s war in ex-Yugoslavia. First of all, the levels of violence were on vastly different scales. There was much less long-term planning involved on the side of nationalists and armed groups in Yugoslavia compared to the meticulously crafted German plans for Eastern Europe. As I will highlight below, radical ideas of population policy had for a long time been restricted to the margins of public discourse in socialist Yugoslavia; almost until its end, the Yugoslav government remained committed to a liberal population approach as mandated by its 1974 constitution.Footnote 9 There was also no Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity) of media and scientists, in neither Yugoslavia nor its successor states. Ethnic nationalism did not become an uncontested framework for humanities and social science scholars in (ex-)Yugoslavia, and for each ardent nationalist intellectual, an anti-nationalist, anti-war one could be quoted.
Yet, what the example of Nazi Germany’s demographic plans for occupied Eastern Europe can do is to encourage us to ask whether, and under which conditions, scholarly knowledge about a population can contribute to designs for the violent removal of certain people. Susanne Heim and Ukrike Schaz emphasised that once population experts have used their scientific calculations to qualify certain populations as a problem, violence-prone actors may think they have a free pass to remove them.Footnote 10 As I will show, demographers helped to convince the Serbian government to replace its previous laissez-faire attitude towards population development with a newly aggressive population policy, which did not even pay lip service to human rights. The issue of Serbia’s intellectual class’s collective responsibility for extreme nationalism and violence was raised in Serbia immediately after the war in Kosovo endedFootnote 11 – yet it remains unresolved. This article aims to address this question, again.
Demography, Nationalism, Territory
Publications on the demography of Kosovo like those quoted above amplified Serbian fears of Albanians, who were portrayed as expansionist, while the Serbian nation was said to be dying out.Footnote 12 Furthermore, they contributed to a long-standing tradition of depicting Albanians, and Muslims more generally, as one of the significant ‘others’ of the Serb nation.Footnote 13 For that, demographers used their discipline’s claim to objectivity, grounded in numbers, to argue for state intervention. Using the fear of overpopulation, a concept in demographic thinking that has repeatedly led to violent population measures,Footnote 14 demographers presented the Albanians of Yugoslavia as a problematic and essentially unwelcome population. They came up with suggestions on how control over territory could be re-established through population policies. Once the break-up of Yugoslavia became a possibility – and goal for some – these questions became even more urgent and the tone of the experts more radical. Serb voices became particularly incensed, because a significant number of Serbs lived outside of Serbia proper, and in none of these entities did Serbs form a majority. On the contrary, population experts, policymakers and media alike spoke about the threat of marginalisation and even of genocide against the Serbs outside Serbia on what they considered their ancestral lands. Apart from Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina was another flashpoint in these debates – and not coincidentally the place that would see the worst war crimes, together with Kosovo, in the 1990s.
Emergent Serb nationalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina fretted over the change in the republic’s demographic structure. It used to be very plural when Yugoslavia was established, but the share of the Serb population had declined from 43 per cent to 31 per cent in the period between 1961 and 1991, while the share of Muslims grew from 26 per cent to 44 per cent.Footnote 15 In June 1991, Milorad Skoko, an official at the republic’s Institute for Social Planning, produced a detailed analysis of ethnicities across the republic and their development in different municipalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina.Footnote 16 Skoko, who had a PhD from the Faculty of Organizational Sciences in Belgrade, was an early member of the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka, SDS), the main Serb party in Bosnia and Herzegovina founded and led by the future war criminal Radovan Karadžić.Footnote 17 Drawing on the results of the freshly completed 1991 census, Skoko painted a bleak picture of a declining Serb presence throughout the country, correlating the percentage of the three major nationalities in Bosnia – Muslims, Serbs and Croats – to the size of the territory of individual municipalities. He projected that the total share of Serbs among Bosnia’s population would decline to less than 20 per cent under current trends, while that of Muslims would grow to more than 63 per cent. Skoko warned that a decreasing number of municipalities would be under Serb control. Skoko called his findings ‘deeply alarming’ and demanded ‘urgent measures to stop these very negative tendencies’. Otherwise, ‘this nation would very quickly be demoted to the status of a minority people with all the negative consequences that come with that’. Aside from the call to implement ‘differentiated’ pronatalist measures, he also called to safeguard the disproportionally large land ownership of Serb farmers, who were said to own 60 per cent of farmland in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This demand illustrated the paradigmatic concern with ethnic control of territory.
Reports like this were part of the rapidly spreading demographic alarms present among Serb intellectuals and functionaries, who presented the future of their ethnic group as ontologically threatened by other ethnicities said to be demographically expanding.Footnote 18 By the late 1980s and early 1990s, these alarms had become increasingly shrill and linked to calls for radical action, since only this could prevent the death of the nation. The demographers’ community provided a rationale for the concerns expressed, as well as proposed solutions to the identified issue. They linked population frames to contemporary political issues, thus revitalising the long-standing tradition in Serbia of utilising population science to substantiate territorial claims. This strategy effectively garnered public and eventually political attention. While this represented a radical departure from the previous ‘socialist’ framing of demography (see below), it did not necessitate a change in the public personae of scientists. Social sciences had been utilised for state-building throughout the period of socialist Yugoslavia, albeit for different objectives – namely the perfection of socialism until the 1980s.
When reading scholarly publications full of hateful language and racialist conceptions about the reproductive behaviour of certain nationalities and knowing what had happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo in the 1990s, it is difficult to ignore a possible connection. Some influential demographers came to use demography as a fighting science. The representation of the Kosovo Albanians’ demographic behaviour was part of a broader orientalising of Yugoslav Muslims that helped to dehumanise them. With respect to Bosnia, Norman Cigar wrote that ‘Orientalism had such a direct relationship to policy as it has to that of “ethnic cleansing”’.Footnote 19 The planners of ethnic cleansing mobilised ontological fears about the endangered presence of their own ethnic group on certain territories and used such fears to justify their own actions; these fears had also been produced by population experts. So, the guiding question from above can be rephrased as a call to think about the responsibility of scholars, whose concepts can have devastating effects – intended or not. It is also a call to reflect on the role of the social sciences in creating discursive frames and argumentative tropes that were used to dehumanise certain members of society. The following argument is based on a close reading of contemporaneous expert publications and the reconstruction of their political impact based on archival evidence, mainly from the Archive of Yugoslavia as well as from transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). I will also provide some context for the development of demography in Yugoslavia.
Demographic Research in Socialist Yugoslavia
When Miloš Macura offered his thoughts in the piece ‘The Problem of Natality in Kosovo’ for the 1989 book, which targeted an international audience, one of his main arguments was economic. He mobilised a Malthusian frame for making sense of demographic trends: birth rates in Kosovo were too high considering the limited absorption capacity of the province’s labour market. Kosovo recorded the highest unemployment rate in Yugoslavia, with forty-three jobseekers for every one hundred employed persons.Footnote 20 ‘Excessive’ fertility would only exacerbate these problems and intensify political discontent. What is interesting was the direction of causality suggested by Macura: he considered the idea that aid for economic development would reduce natality levels a fallacy both ‘from the theoretical as well as from the economic policy standpoint’.Footnote 21 According to him, such a view – promoted especially by voices from Kosovo – ignored the ‘non-economic factors’ in the demographic transition. Macura pointed to countries with substantially lower income levels than Kosovo that nevertheless had a considerably lower fertility rate, such as China, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. He suggested any intervention should act in the opposite direction: ‘excessive’ fertility should be brought under control to make economic progress in Kosovo possible. Yet, Kosovo’s official economic planning documents hardly problematised population growth and ‘birth control and restriction of population growth remain among the low-priority tasks [of the province’s government] which as such are not implemented’.Footnote 22 Other Yugoslav demographers made similar arguments, such as Dušan Breznik, another leading expert:
Reducing the natural growth of the population is not only possible by economic development. An efficient population policy is needed which would be a component part of the development policy and whose measures would also support the development policy.Footnote 23
Such statements marked a substantial reversal from the Yugoslav demographers’ previously held belief that economic development had to come first and demographic adaptation would follow automatically. In international forums such as the World Population Conferences organised by the United Nations and within the UN’s specialised institutions for demography, the Yugoslavs were part of a group who consistently criticised activities to reduce fertility in ‘developing countries’ as a precondition for development.Footnote 24 They rejected such neo-Malthusian approaches as colonial. At the most recent World Population Conference, held in Mexico City in August 1984, the leader of the Yugoslav delegation gave a plenary talk in which he stressed that socio-economic development was the precondition for successful population policy (and not vice versa).Footnote 25 The Yugoslavs noted that the talk was met with approval by the audience and the Mexican press. The report, which had been authored by Macura, also stressed that the Yugoslav delegation worked in close tandem with the Non-Aligned countries, that is, the so-called Third World.
We do not know why, at some point, Macura concluded that in the case of Yugoslavia’s Albanians, reproductive behaviour was determined not by socio-economic factors but by cultural ‘traditions’ and political agendas. It seems that membership in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and proximity to policy-making circles in Belgrade made him receptive to nationalist sentiments. His anti-Albanian statements cast a dark shadow over what has been a remarkable academic career.Footnote 26 Macura had almost singlehandedly established demography as a separate discipline in Yugoslavia. In 1959, he initiated the first specialised demography study programme at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. In 1962, the Centre for Demographic Research was established upon his initiative at the Institute for Social Sciences in Belgrade.Footnote 27 Macura was the first head of the Centre and instrumental in launching its journal Stanovništvo (Population) in 1963. Macura, as the first editor-in-chief, stressed the centrality of demographic knowledge in a fast-changing society in the editorial to the journal’s first issue. He emphasised the importance of demographic analysis and demographic projections for the formulation of plans for social and economic development, but also for policies in other domains.Footnote 28 Like at its inception in the nineteenth century, demographic scholarship also in Yugoslavia was closely wedded to an evolutionary concept of purposeful modernisation, to which it would make an important contribution.Footnote 29
Yugoslav demography was intimately linked to the idea of planning; it was to play the role of evidence-based guidance for policymakers and function as an instrument to identify developments considered deficient. Demography thus played an important role – including in its self-perception – in the ‘scientisation of the social’, to use Lutz Raphael’s influential concept.Footnote 30 Even more so, since very personal acts and life-cycle events (conception, birth, death) are the fundamental events that demography aggregates, and so demographic guidance had an innate tendency to reach literally into people’s bedrooms. It is an instrument used to ‘scientise’ the intimate. Demography as a discipline is therefore particularly liable to produce knowledge justifying state intervention in social and private practices. As Susan Greenhalgh has stressed, demography ‘has had to struggle especially hard to manage the tensions arising from this duality [as a social and policy science]’.Footnote 31 It found it particularly difficult to shed the legacy of Malthusian ideas of overpopulation,Footnote 32 as evident in the way Yugoslav demographers would present the demographic development of Yugoslavia’s Albanians in the mid- to late 1980s. Yet, the relationship between policy agendas and demographic expertise is not a one-way street in which demographers design their research in line with politically fixed goals, not least to acquire funding. Demographic experts can also feed new ideas into the policy world and make the case for policy changes.
This was, for example, the case when after the Second World War, population experts in the United States and elsewhere, as well as in the nascent bodies of the United Nations, sounded the alarm about the ‘population bomb’ in the Global South. They managed to convince private sponsors such as the Ford Foundation – and from the 1960s also the US government, especially through the now-defunct USAID – to allocate substantial funding to family planning initiatives in ‘developing’ countries. US representatives in particular at the UN population bodies were vocal advocates of initiatives aiming to reduce population growth in the so-called Third World as a precondition for ‘development’.Footnote 33 These international debates were an important context that shaped the development of demography in Yugoslavia, and again it was Macura who linked the two. He occupied a crucial position during these years, directing the United Nations Population Division in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs from 1967 to 1972.Footnote 34 Macura thus worked at the United Nations just when the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was conceived. It is reasonable to assume that he functioned as a channel of knowledge transfer between Yugoslav and international population experts regarding the link between demography and economic development, as this was one of the guiding agendas of the UNFPAFootnote 35 – and development was the policy mantra of Yugoslavia.
Also, on a practical level, UNFPA played an important role in shaping demographic research and family planning activities in Yugoslavia. This was a country perennially searching for external funding, and it received money from the UNFPA for projects that addressed all aspects of the UNFPA’s terms of reference, that is, ‘the entire range of population activities, including advice in the formulation of population policies, assistance in demographic studies, in applied and basic research, in education and training and support for family planning projects’.Footnote 36 Archival documents point to a regular stream of UN funding for such projects. These grants were substantial, sometimes amounting to more than 100,000 US dollars, which went a long way in Yugoslavia. Some projects addressed the connection between reproductive behaviour and economic development. One project submitted by the Economic Faculty in Skopje in 1981 received a 175,880 US dollar grant for three years to study the Basic Determinants of Reproductive Population Behaviour in the Economically Underdeveloped Rural Regions in SR Macedonia and a Programme for Its Adaptation to Family Planning.Footnote 37 The project stressed that most underdeveloped regions of Macedonia were settled by ‘heterogeneous ethnic and religious groups’ (actually Albanians, Turks, Slavic-speaking Muslims and Roma), which necessitated a differentiated approach to achieve the desired ‘human, rational demographic development’. The project justification nicely illustrated the prevailing thinking about the importance of demography for economic progress:
Economic development as a base for achieving wider social aims is closely related to population development, to its biological reproduction and spatial distribution. This is why success in achieving the economic aims of social development depends mainly on scientific knowledge about demographic migration and mutual coordination between the planned economic development and expected changes in the population number.Footnote 38
Yugoslavia repeatedly applied for support from UNFPA, including for its family planning activities in Kosovo. In 1979, for example, UNFPA provided co-financing to the tune of 99,600 US dollars for the project Evaluation of Previous Work for Family Planning and Training of Cadres for This Work in Kosovo. The project was interrupted in 1980 by the wave of protests in Kosovo but resumed its work afterwards, even though it seemed to have yielded few practical results.Footnote 39 The Yugoslav authorities – especially the Socialist Union of the Working People of Yugoslavia (SSRNJ), that is, the largest mass organisation in Yugoslavia, which organised the family planning activities – lobbied UNFPA for additional support for activities in Kosovo. In September 1989, a representative of UNFPA, Silvie Rhodes, was even brought to Kosovo and informed about Kosovo’s specific problems with population development, that is, the ‘excessive’ birth rate of the Albanians.Footnote 40 One outcome of the visit was a plan for a new project named Family Planning in the SAP Kosovo, which was to be submitted for funding to UNFPA. This project proposal was completed in December 1989, when Kosovo had already lost its autonomy.Footnote 41 This project’s description now used concepts that mirrored the language demographers came to use when they referred to reproductive behaviour in Kosovo: it was described as ‘irrational’, producing high population growth that was a drag on social and economic development. The project proposal quoted statisticians who made the projection that Kosovo’s population would grow by a further one million people by the year 2000, making it the most densely populated territory of Yugoslavia. All this, according to the authors of the grant proposal, warranted a comprehensive family planning campaign to change attitudes towards reproduction and provide women with easy access to contraceptives.
Such a project was a departure from the previous position of Yugoslav demographers; it also went beyond the spirit of the constitution, which upheld reproductive freedoms, including the right to choose. Some of this turnaround may have been motivated by personal convictions, but it can also be seen as a logical consequence of the changing political winds. Yugoslav demographers generally faced a similar situation to demographers elsewhere: ‘to gain access to funds for its work, markets for its products, and even data to analyse (most demographic data have been produced by governments), demography has had to operate primarily as a policy-relevant field’.Footnote 42 At a time when nationalism became the new political paradigm, and when Kosovo came to be seen as an existential issue in Serbia, demographers apparently felt that they could leverage their knowledge in exchange for financial support from the state, if they framed their findings in terms of the newly hegemonic narratives. And as for the UNFPA, such a framing was not new at all, but was in line with its long-standing support for family planning activities for the sake of development.
The Kosovo Obsession
How did nationalism hijack concerns about demographic developments? Or was it the other way round: did demographers hijack nationalism? Had the demographers become frustrated with the government’s neglect of their dire warnings, even though they believed to have identified deeply worrisome trends? In her insightful book The ‘White Plague’ Among the ‘Serbs’, anthropologist Rada Drezgić describes the process through which the media, experts and pseudo-science spread population panic in the 1980s.Footnote 43 In a time when the public mood in Serbia became increasingly nationalistic, demographers added to the emerging obsession with Kosovo by portraying the high population growth of the Albanian population as a grave danger. Demographers were not alone: leading cultural figures such as the dissident writer Vuk Drašković bemoaned the high fertility level among Albanians. He wrote: ‘This Muslim Arnaut [a derogatory word for an Albanian person] will fare badly before Allah without having at least ten children’. This line featured in his 1984 book Ruski konsul (Russian Consul), which was subtitled A Novel about Kosovo. Nationalist thinkers, demographers among them, became convinced that something had to be done about Kosovo and the Albanian population there.Footnote 44
Demographers spoke of the bifurcating fertility in Yugoslavia and Kosovo, respectively, with some nationalities (especially Albanians) displaying high fertility rates, whereas most of the country had already completed the demographic transition towards fertility well below replacement level. In Kosovo, this development was compounded by the emigration of parts of the Serbian and Montenegrin population from the 1970s onwards; according to the census of 1971 and 1981, Serbs and Montenegrins recorded a net emigration from the province of around 46,000 people, and another 18,376 Serbs from Kosovo registered in Serbia proper between November 1982 and August 1989.Footnote 45 Serbian nationalists framed this process as ‘genocide’ and explained it in terms of the mistreatment of non-Albanians by the Kosovo authorities.Footnote 46 In the second half the 1980s, these developments gained increasing public salience not least because of the authority lent to such claims by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). Through relentless repetition and an increasingly Manichaean language, the ‘Kosovo problem’ was presented as more important than all other problems of Serbian society at that time. As Dubravka Stojanović has observed, it helped to create hegemony for a politics that spoke in the name of ‘the people’ – the Serbian people, of course – instead of the ‘working class’.Footnote 47
According to Drezgić, the demographers’ warnings about Kosovo’s ‘population explosion’ were initially limited to expert circles, that is, until Slobodan Milošević assumed power in 1986.Footnote 48 Under Milošević, voices from the – nationalistic – fringes quickly became mainstream, once he had discovered the mobilising power of the Kosovo issue. Demographers were among those intellectuals who produced scientific justifications for the abolition of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989–90.Footnote 49 Their erstwhile critique of government inaction on demography transformed into affirming government policies, once these had changed. This was a dialectical process: those obsessed with Kosovo used the new importance attributed to their warnings to embolden their own status and to justify claims to financial support. Equally, Milošević could exploit the authority of academics and intellectuals to legitimise his own agenda. The result was a hodgepodge of voices from academia, arts, media and politics that created increasingly self-referential rhetoric about Kosovo and rendered Kosovo a powerful explanation for a variety of ‘problems’ intriguing Serbian nationalists.Footnote 50 As Jasna Dragović-Soso observed, by the end of the 1980s, ‘national stereotyping of Albanians had reached such proportions that all their actions were seen as part of an orchestrated plot to achieve the secession of an “ethnically cleansed” Kosovo’.Footnote 51
Miloš Macura was instrumental in introducing demographic research at the institution that became the top academic advocate of Serbian nationalism, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). A corresponding member since 1974, he became a full member in 1981 and acted as vice secretary of the academy’s department of social sciences (until 1985) and thereafter as its head. From 1989 to 1994, he was member of SANU’s presidency.Footnote 52 In 1982, he established the Council for Population Research at SANU, which also aimed to reach a non-academic audience, thereby strengthening the position of the social sciences at the academy, which had played a subordinate role in this scientific field to date. According to Nenad Stefanov, concerns about demographic and economic development in Kosovo were among the reasons for the establishment of the council.Footnote 53 At SANU, Macura led a large-scale project named the Emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo, which surveyed emigrants from Kosovo and stressed the forced nature of their departure. The results of this project were published in Serbian in 1989 and in English in 1992.Footnote 54
The demographers’ fifteen minutes of fame came in 1987, when the parliament of the Socialist Republic of Serbia announced the elaboration of a set of measures to solve the ‘demographic problems of Kosovo’. Based on Macura’s systematic development of demography at SANU, the academy took upon itself the task of providing scientific advice for these political efforts. To that end, it organised a conference on the ‘Problems of the Policy of Population Renewal in Serbia’ in Belgrade in February 1988. Miloš Macura provided the position paper to be discussed at the conference.Footnote 55
This conference proved to be a low point in the politicisation of demography in Serbia, as the published proceedings make clear. Serbian demographers and other speakers did not mince their words and denigrated the Kosovo Albanians. Macura highlighted that in Kosovo, the population was differentiated by not only ethnicity, language and religion but also demography. The high population growth of the Albanians puts pressure on the other nationalities. This ‘explosive demographic process’, which no one has so far tried to slow down, enjoys the ‘moral support by secessionist ideology that rests on ideas of national exclusivity and the slogan of an ethnically clean Kosovo’. Macura deplored that the ‘demographic expansion of the Albanians’ and the ‘demographic dispersion of all other populations’ have so far been a political taboo.Footnote 56 The sole Kosovo Albanian voice at the conference, the economist Musa Limani from the University of Prishtina, dismissed Macura’s position as unacceptable, unscientific and non-Marxist. According to him, Kosovo’s main problem was not high fertility but a lack of economic progress. The demographic behaviour of its population matched its level of development. Furthermore, demographic transition among the Albanians had already begun. Limani criticised the Serbian media for their alarmist and inflammatory language about Kosovo Albanian fertility, and he called Macura a chauvinist (which was the end to their friendship).Footnote 57 This was a courageous stance – speaker after speaker blasted Limani for that. One accused Kosovo’s political leadership and intellectuals of pursuing an ‘irrational population policy’ because of their ‘obscure national aims’, which led their own people into destitution while asking the rest of Yugoslavia to ‘pay the bills’ and ignoring their ‘well-meaning advice’.Footnote 58 Another speaker criticised the head of Kosovo’s family planning council, a professor of law at the University of Prishtina, for having five children.
Demographic knowledge, models and projections became part and parcel of the Serbian nationalist, revanchist discourse on Kosovo. It helped to revitalise organic understandings of the nation, as demographers presented the nation as a living (or dying) body. In his widely cited book Kosovo: The Counterrevolution That Continues, the journalist Vuksan Cerović presented the reproductive behaviour of Albanians as part of their ‘counterrevolutionary’ efforts to undermine socialism and detach Kosovo from Europe.Footnote 59 In his view, this was a deliberate plot against Serbia: ‘The demographic expansion … creates the conditions for future deviant and excessive situations, for the growth of nationalism and separatism and pressure on the Serbs and Montenegrins to leave the homes of their grandfathers’.Footnote 60 Cerović quoted from demographic projections that by 2030, Kosovo might have more inhabitants than Serbia proper. On top of that, ‘excessive’ fertility prevented economic development and reproduced poverty, despite the large sums of money allocated to Kosovo from the federal budget. Nonetheless, the author complained that there was no family planning in Kosovo.Footnote 61 Macura, in his above-mentioned contribution to the book Kosovo: Past and Present similarly characterised the ‘natality problem’ as one of the ‘more serious and far-reaching’ problems that prevented the modernisation of Kosovo’s society and economy.Footnote 62 Here one can see the dominance of the fertility transition theory, according to which natality decline was part and parcel of modernisation – but the Albanians seemed to fall outside the theory. Such representations served to orientalise Albanians; they became part of a broadly popular image of the Albanians as backwards, as barbarian and unassimilable to Yugoslav modernity. The emphasis on the fact that Albanians had the highest fertility in Europe suggested that they were an essentially non-European population. This was part of the larger efforts of Serb intellectuals to present Yugoslavia’s Muslims as a threat to European civilisation.Footnote 63
The alarmist discourse of leading Serbian demographers, especially of Macura, was amplified by media reports about Serbia’s alleged double demographic crisis: low fertility and ageing in Serbia proper and high fertility among the Albanians in Kosovo.Footnote 64 Demographers produced population projections that predicted the share of Kosovo among Serbia’s total population to reach 30 per cent by 2021 (from 16 per cent in 1981) and considered this a matter of grave concern.Footnote 65 Kosovo’s demographic development was one of the reasons why Serbia’s political elite felt uneasy about the 1974 constitutional arrangement that gave wide-ranging autonomy to the provincial authorities and even furnished Kosovo with a seat on the federal presidency. In 1981 Kosovo had already been rocked by large-scale and massively repressed protests, led by students who demanded republic status for their province (with some even asking for unification with Albania). Serbia’s leadership feared that ‘demographic expansion’ would only aggravate such demands. Such demographic concerns helped to quickly make the ‘Kosovo problem’ a dominant theme of Serbia’s and then Yugoslavia’s policy-making in the second half of the 1980s, while before 1985 it was limited to marginal voices.Footnote 66
Concerns about the ‘differentiated’ reproductive behaviour of Serbs and Albanians, who in these discourses were always presented as monolithic blocs, marginalised almost all other demographic issues. ‘Balanced’ demographic development – that is, raising fertility in so-called low-fertility regions and reducing fertility in so-called high-fertility regions – was the population policy catchword of the day. By exploiting growing political tensions between the governments in Belgrade and Prishtina, demographers made a push to transform the prevailing laissez-faire population policy paradigm into a more directly interventionist one; one that would also raise the profile of the demographers. The push for fertility-damping demographic policies in Kosovo also implied infringing on the province’s autonomy because local authorities would never have agreed. So, the propagation of an existential demographic threat against the Serbs justified extraordinary measures by the repressive forces of the Serbian state.
This was made clear by demographic publications: in 1992, which was after the outbreak of war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also after the first instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’ especially by Serb forces, the Centre for Demographic Research in Belgrade released the book Demographic Problems and Population Policy of Kosovo and Metohija.Footnote 67 Unsurprisingly, the publication did not include any voices from Prishtina. At that time, Kosovo’s autonomy had already been revoked and a large-scale purge of ethnic Albanians who refused to swear allegiance to the Serbian state had begun, which affected the public sector, including academic institutions. The above-mentioned Musa Limani was one of them (like so many other Kosovo Albanian scholars, he moved to a parallel, non-recognised university in Prishtina once he had lost his state job).Footnote 68 The authors of the book stressed again the need for state policies to reduce population growth in Kosovo, allegedly for its own sake. The study projected that Kosovo’s population would reach more than four million people in 2050 if there was no change. Culture and nationalism were said to be the main reason for the Albanians’ high fertility rate. The authors used clearly discriminatory and alarmist language, describing Albanians’ demographic behaviour as ‘irrational and deviant’, ‘disturbed’ and ‘expansive’. Such a framing suggested urgent intervention. The facts that Kosovo had lost its autonomy, that the Albanian majority faced repression and that human rights violations were endemic were not mentioned once.Footnote 69 The ignorance (to say the least) of these authors, most of them solid scholars, towards the political instrumentalisation of their research is reminiscent of an observation made by Norman Cigar about the role of Serbia’s oriental specialists during the Bosnian war:
Now, however, their arguments appeared against the background of harsh measures that were actually being inflicted against the Muslims and, as such, provided direct scholarly explanation and vindication for war crimes, rather than simply having an abstract academic flavor.Footnote 70
Demographic Fears and Escalating Violence
Demographers in Yugoslavia understood their trade as a contribution to rational planning. Yet while many demographic projects were carried out in tandem between researchers, social organisations and state authorities – some of them funded by the UNFPA – Yugoslavia continued to pursue an essentially laissez-faire approach towards population till the late 1980s, thereby limiting the societal impact of the demographers’ research and recommendations. Article 191 of the 1974 constitution enshrined the right of each person to freely decide about procreation.Footnote 71 The constitutions of the individual republics and autonomous provinces reiterated this provision, which precluded direct state intervention into reproduction. This was a striking contrast to Yugoslavia’s communist neighbours, where governments pursued pronatalist policies from the late 1960s, some going to extreme lengths.Footnote 72 Ceaușescu’s Romania, for example, brutally enforced an almost total ban on abortion after 1966.
In Yugoslavia, instead, the government supported ‘humane reproduction’ by informing about and providing access to modern contraceptives; family planning was framed in a language of human rights and women’s emancipation, and the welfare of mothers and children was clearly prioritised.Footnote 73 Despite various debates about population policy since the early 1970s, the government did not link family planning initiatives with a pro- or anti-natalist agenda. Restrictions on abortion were not considered despite their high number, nor were family-based welfare transfers motivated by a pronatalist agenda. When in 1983 the Yugoslav government was asked to provide information to the United Nations for its Fifth Population Inquiry among Governments, the responsible federal secretariate (de-facto ministry) replied to the question about the government’s view on the level of fertility that ‘the government has not expressed a view on this matter’. The secretariate also notified the UN that there was ‘no explicit policy’ directed at fertility levels, nor were there any quantitative targets.Footnote 74 At this time, family planning was framed in Yugoslavia as a quality of life and human rights issue, as highlighted for example by Mijat Šuković, head of the Yugoslav delegation, in his speech to the Fourth World Population Conference in Mexico City in 1984.Footnote 75
However, in the Socialist Republic of Serbia (and of Macedonia as well), political concerns over the reproduction of population were increasingly amplified by expert assessments. A first materially inconsequential resolution on population policy was passed by the parliament of Serbia proper in 1983. The proposed measures did not contain any repressive elements but aimed at better welfare protection.Footnote 76 The government of Serbia also commissioned the Economic Institute in Belgrade to study the question of population development and ageing, which led to yet another resolution. But the Serbian leadership was still constrained by, or felt committed to, what Rada Drezgić called the liberal metatheory dominant on the federal level.Footnote 77 By the late 1980s, though, this liberal framework had crumbled in Serbia, more specifically, in the case of the autonomous province of Kosovo. The above-described worries about the ‘excessive’ fertility of Albanians and its alleged negative impact, as described by scholars, resulted in the government’s departure from non-interventionism. Parallel to Serbia, the same thing happened in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, where in early 1988, the municipality of Tetovo enacted harsh and unconstitutional measures that discriminated against families with three or more children – families that in all likelihood were of Albanian ethnicity.Footnote 78 The radical demographers’ warnings, which helped to ostracise the Albanian community, finally seemed to be heard by the government.
In Kosovo, diverse measures were taken, or at least suggested, to achieve what the demographers called for, that is, a lowering of the birth rate among the Albanian population. As the constitutional right to reproductive self-determination was still in place, the authorities tried to achieve this through indirect means. A 1988 operative programme for family planning, for example, stressed the need to enforce compulsory education for girls – certainly a worthwhile goal in a province where women’s educational achievements were notoriously poor – but the stated goal was to prevent early marriage and thereby ‘shorten the period of utilisation of the reproductive functions [of young women]’.Footnote 79 In the spring of 1989 the federal parliament of Yugoslavia passed a special programme for social policy and family planning in Kosovo. Its goal was to bring population growth in Kosovo in a ‘socially acceptable’ line.Footnote 80 This was the first time that the Yugoslav national assembly would express an explicit goal regarding family size, which was called to be limited to three children. As Hivzi Limani has stressed, these restrictive population policies were supported by the committees of all levels of the League of Communists, the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Kosovo, Serbia and Yugoslavia, as well as federal, Serbian and Kosovar institutions for health, labour and social policy.Footnote 81 Such a policy could still meet opposition in Kosovo, though, as the province’s autonomy had not yet been fully dismantled. In a discussion of the Council for Family Planning of the Socialist Council of the Working People of Kosovo in January 1989, most members opined that preferential treatment of families with two and three children would hurt the poorest segments of Kosovo’s population who had more kids, most of them Albanians, and it violated the constitutional principle of reproductive autonomy.Footnote 82
With the eventual end of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989 and the later establishment of a Serb-controlled police state in the province, the regime in Belgrade started to take more radical measures to solve the ‘demographic problem’. Observers have described the system put in place by Milošević in Kosovo as apartheid.Footnote 83 In vital areas of social, economic, cultural and political life, the Serbian regime introduced laws and decrees that transferred powers from Prishtina to Belgrade and clearly discriminated against its Albanian population.Footnote 84 At least one of these new laws had a demographic goal: the Law on Public Care for Children from July 1992 introduced a system of child allowances that was regressive from the fourth child onwards – Albanian families were much more likely than Serb and Montenegrin ones to have so many children. Municipalities with negative population growth, on the other hand, were allowed to grant special benefits to families with four children. Such municipalities were likely not predominantly Albanian. For school-age children, the payment of allowances was dependent on them going to school – but many Albanian families did not send their kids to state schools anymore, as these were now run by Serb administrators.Footnote 85 Whether such micro-measures had any immediate demographic effect is unclear, but fertility levels in Kosovo declined precipitously in the early 1990s, alongside an increase in political oppression and socio-economic marginalisation of the majority Albanian population. The total fertility rate in 1990 was calculated to be 3.6 (live births per woman in her lifetime) and fell to 2.6 only four year later. Annual crude birth rates declined from twenty-eight per one thousand people to twenty-one, that is, a 25 per cent decrease in the same period.Footnote 86 Beyond the worsening living conditions in Kosovo, high emigration from Kosovo also played an important role in the fall of the birth rate. According to UN data, at the end of 1992, 300,000 Kosovo Albanians had already left.Footnote 87
The Serbian regime also tried to use settlement of Serbs as an instrument to reverse the decline of their share of the population in Kosovo (recycling a policy that had been carried out already after the First and the Second World Wars). The so-called Yugoslav Programme for Kosovo from 1989 already provided some 3,300 free apartments and almost 1,500 free plots for the construction of houses for settlers from Serbia to Kosovo, while at the same time, more than 6,000 unemployed Albanians were pushed to seek employment in other parts of Yugoslavia.Footnote 88 Serbs who wanted to move to Kosovo received all kinds of benefits and assistance from the state. Once war broke out in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, producing a stream of Serb refugees, the government of Serbia formulated even more ambitious resettlement plans. The goal was to settle 100,000 Serbs in Kosovo. The real number of Serb refugees settled in Kosovo was much smaller, though – by 1996, around 16,000 people had actually been accommodated in the province, some against their will (such as in the case of Serb refugees from Croatia, after Croatian troops reconquered Serb-held territories in August 1995).Footnote 89
The most radical attempt to alter the ethnic composition of Kosovo was carried out by the Serb leadership during the escalating fight against the Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës, UÇK) and the NATO bombing campaign in 1999. The indictment of the ICTY against Milošević stated that the armed forces of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) deported 740,000 Kosovo Albanian civilians from 1 January 1999, until the end of fighting in early June the same year.Footnote 90 These actions became one of the reasons why Milošević was charged with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. According to the ICTY’s prosecutor: ‘The operations targeting the Kosovo Albanians were undertaken with the objective of removing a substantial portion of the Kosovo Albanian population from Kosovo in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over the province’.Footnote 91
There is no evidence implicating demographers in these events (but also no indication that they protested). It is also unlikely that members of the Serbian armed forces had read demographic treatises before they were deployed to Kosovo. Yet demographic fears propagated by experts played a crucial role in the creation of ontological anxieties that were used to justify radical – that is, violent – measures. This much becomes clear from transcripts of the ICTY case against Milošević. In particular, the trope of the forced expulsion of Serbs and Montenegrins in the 1980s because of deliberate policies by the Kosovar authorities was a constant element of Serbian anti-Albanian propaganda. This assumption, which had been promoted by not only the Serbian Orthodox ChurchFootnote 92 but also scholars such as Macura in the 1980s, suggested the need for remedial action. It was quoted by expert witnesses for the defence as one of the reasons why Serbia had to regain control over Kosovo. Slavenko Terzić, a prominent historian at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts called to testify in the Milošević trial, included a chapter titled ‘Albanian Ethnic Cleansing of Kosovo and Metohija’ in his expert witness report.Footnote 93 He wrote that ‘the intensity of ethnic cleansing grew stronger as Kosovo and Metohija expanded and strengthened its autonomy’.Footnote 94 Terzić did not fail to highlight the much higher rate of population growth of the Albanians compared to any other of the major Yugoslav nationalities. He repeated the debunked claim of the ‘frequent rape of young Serbian girls, women, and nuns’ by AlbaniansFootnote 95 – another powerful and widespread narrative in the 1980s used to present (male) Albanians and their sexual behaviour as an existential threat to the Serb nation. Like many inflammatory Serbian authors of that time, Terzić classified the events in Kosovo as ‘genocide’ against the Serbs.
An interesting cross-examination between the prosecution and another defence witness of Milošević, the erstwhile prominent philosopher Mihailo Marković, also highlights the salience of demographic expertise.Footnote 96 Marković, who had been one of the leading voices of the dissident Praxis group of philosophers before he was expelled from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1975, had become a vocal supporter of Milošević and was vice president of his Socialist Party.Footnote 97 The exchange at the tribunal in the Hague deserves to be quoted at length:
Q [prosecution]. But now let’s deal with this question of the expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo. You gave a figure yesterday, and I think it’s a figure that matched a figure given by an earlier witness, Professor Avramov. I must deal with this point of detail. How many do you say were expelled from Kosovo?
A [Marković]. The number of Serbs expelled from Kosovo mentioned somewhere in the memorandum is 200,000 for the period from late 1960s to the 1990s. That means 200,000 in 20 years.
Q. Have you checked these figures against the Yugoslav survey, statistical survey itself, ever?
A. Well, one of the authors of the memorandum is our leading demographer, Professor Miloš Macura. He knows these things and he’s responsible for these figures.
Conclusion
As Wendy Bracewell has noted, the sense of demographic doom fed into the overarching fear among Serb nationalists that Serbia might lose Kosovo.Footnote 98 Population fears became part and parcel of the ideological justification of violence, so that its perpetrators could claim to act in the name of a worthwhile, even necessary, cause to prevent said loss.Footnote 99 So much became clear also in one of the best-known ICTY trials – that against Radovan Karadžić but also against other members of the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs. Alan Trieger, speaking for the prosecution, diagnosed Karadžić – a trained psychologist – with an ‘obsession with the Muslim birth rate and with Muslim demographics and its purported implications’ in his closing argument. Before the war Karadžić emphasised to his followers that the Muslims ‘will overwhelm you with their birth rate and their tricks’.Footnote 100 In 1991, Milutin Najdanović, another leading member of Bosnia’s main Serb party (SDS) justified the need for a state for Bosnia’s Serbs without Muslims with the claim that ‘they would overwhelm us with their birth rate’.Footnote 101 Serb ‘experts’ compiled crude demographic reports about population trends in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the eve of the war.Footnote 102
What can demographers do after such an event in which some members of their trade provided ideas that would prove lethal? Heim and Schaz have argued that demographers in general have been loath to account for their contribution to the ‘scientific preparation and endorsement of unprecedented crimes’.Footnote 103 Demographers in Serbia are no different; so far, they have not reflected on why demographic research could so easily be lined up by aggressive nationalism and, even more so, had promoted ethnic division before it became a dominant policy. The country’s leading demographer was at the forefront of attacks against the Albanian population of Kosovo, and Serbia’s most important demographic research institution participated in demographic colonialism (vis-à-vis Kosovo). The alignment with nationalism highlighted the pitfalls of demography being a policy-oriented discipline: it often depends on policy relevance for funding.Footnote 104 Framing population trends in terms of economic development (and the impediments to it), state security and eventually national existence were strong arguments by demographers to justify their claims in the turbulent years of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Yet there is an even more fundamental problem: the innate tendency of demography to make populations, that is, to aggregate individuals into coherent collectives and organic bodies that can become the objects of statistical measurement and political intervention.Footnote 105 Such a discursive operation lends itself to a language of (ethnic) nationalism, which also makes claims in the name of, and about, certain ‘populations’. The nation is turned into an individual entity. As demonstrated by Olivera Milosavljević, this phenomenon was prevalent among Serb authors in the 1990s, transforming separatism into a fear of bodily harm.Footnote 106 Why was it that high fertility in Kosovo was considered an ‘Albanian’ thing and not primarily one of class and marginalisation, which affected members of other nationalities as well? Demography was one of the tools used to produce in- and out-groups along ethnic lines, helping to turn ethnicity into the dominant mode of political mobilisation and group constitution in the late 1980s. In doing so, it effectively utilised a well-established cultural repertoire of ethnic ‘otherness’ and tropes of the nation’s death and revival, which were deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of Serbia.
Such ethno-collectivist visions of ‘population’ neglected welfare in the name of certain greater, almost eschatological goals – which were never achieved, though. Kosovo, for example, today is lost to Serbia, even though neither its government nor most of its people want to acknowledge it. Population renewal also remained elusive; on the contrary, Serbia faces a steep population decline because of outmigration and negative natural population growth. Yet, the alarmist demography of the 1980s and 1990s has left a lasting legacy, as it frames such demographic trends invariably in a nationalistic discourse. It feeds into a long-standing victimology underwriting ethnic nationalism in Serbia, torn as it is between visions of a Greater Serbia and of an ethnically homogenous state. Even without the Albanians as a threat, this frame continues to evoke images of a dying nation whose existence is jeopardised. As law professor Marko Mladenović, the founder of an association committed to fighting depopulation, wrote in the first issue of the association’s journal:
We cannot ignore the matter whether in 50 years we experience the fate of Kosmet [this acronym for Kosovo and Metohija is popular among Serbian nationalists], and in 100 years the fate of the Khasars, the Inka and Maja … From the south, other peoples are approaching, because they exploit our weaknesses and occupy the vacated land, land without youth, with the oldest people in the world and soon a land without people. Three Serbias are killed by legal abortions, four million Serbs were killed in wars, and four million ran from the country.Footnote 107
As observed by Bracewell almost thirty years ago, such propaganda presents childbirth as a patriotic duty, thus rendering reproductive decisions a collective matter and pushing back against women's rights. Demographic fears have encouraged anti-feminism and tie in with ethnic nationalism as sponsored by the state and the Serbian Orthodox Church, evident for example in their opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and their stress on traditional gender roles. The remedy of choice continues to be pronatalism and calls on women to have more children, for which the state and municipalities in Serbia provide substantial material benefits.Footnote 108 These have had predictable results, however, given the country’s broader economic and political malaise: the decline in fertility has not been stopped. On the contrary, the political-ideational and socio-economic mess left by ethnic nationalism in Serbia continues to motivate people to leave in droves and to not have children – thereby reinforcing the fears of demographic doom that contributed to the present predicament in the first place. Demographers would do well to revisit the Yugoslav legacy. By doing so, they might rediscover the welfare and human rights frames that once dominated population thinking in Yugoslavia. Such frames might suggest policies that improve the lives of real people instead of formulating Manichaean visions for imagined ‘populations’.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Cynthia Buckley, Olga Manojlović Pintar, Alissa Klots, Kathleen Beger, Konrad Clewing, Nikola Gajić, Rory Archer, Attila Melegh and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am grateful to Nikola Gajić for his help with the ICTY files and to Hikmet Karčić for sharing unpublished documents from Bosnia.
Funding statement
Research for this article was funded by the VolkswagenStiftung funded project Transforming Anxieties of Aging in Southeastern Europe. Political, Social, and Cultural Narratives of Demographic Change (Grant No. 9C121).
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