Summary
Tanja Petrović: The Utopia of the Uniform: The Affective Life of the Yugoslav People's Army
Compulsory military service in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) created bonds between young men that transcended ethnic, religious and social divisions. These ties persisted even after the terrible violence of the 1990s, when many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front. In the book The Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrović relies on the memories and archives of dozens of former JNA soldiers to show how the experience of military service shaped ideas about the future, forms of collectivism and relations between the state and the individual that are fundamentally different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Tanja Petrović is a scientific advisor at the Institute for Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana. She is interested in the meanings and use of the Yugoslav socialist heritage in post-Yugoslav societies, as well as the cultural, linguistic and political processes that shape the reality of those societies. She is the author of several books, including Yuropa: Yugoslav Heritage and Future Policies in Post-Yugoslav Societies and Serbia and its South: 'Southern Dialects' between Language, Culture and Politics.
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