Transformations of gender, sexuality and citizenship in South East Europe

Abstract

This collection of essays was conceived gradually and in many phases, between Scotland and different parts of the former Yugoslavia, during the course of 2012 and 2013. The bulk of the work has been carried out within the research project “The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia” (CITSEE) at the University of Edinburgh. This ERC-funded project led by Professor Jo Shaw and Dr. Igor Štiks has been established to explore changes in citizenship regimes which occurred after the break-up of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, with special attention being paid to the influences of the EU accession process on the new states of South East Europe. The editors of this special issue – Oliwia Berdak, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Katja Kahlina and Adriana Zaharijević – were members of a cluster of researchers focused on issues of gender and sexuality within the project, which had the aim of investigating transformations in gender and citizenship regimes from a comparative perspective. We wanted to shed light on the different ways in which the categories of gender and sexuality at the same time inform and draw on larger socio-political processes. The processes of democratisation, post-conflict reconstruction, and transformation from socialist to capitalist political economy, which have influenced shifting notions of citizenship in the post-Yugoslav space, were especially under scrutiny.