Legacy of the 1990s Discourses and Everyday Life

We launched the project “Legacy of the 1990s: Discourses and Everyday Life” in 2019 with the idea of researching the 1990s as the decade (we call it a “zero decade”) in which many processes that still determine Croatian society took shape. These ideas arose based on insights that emerged through work on the edited collection of studies named Devedesete kratki rezovi (The Nineties. Short cuts). The results of that editorial work highlighted a need to conceptualise experiences of social instability and the radical change in political and economic system during the last decade of the twentieth century. We hope that the resulting knowledge will prove to be applicable, not only to the societies created by the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but also to Eastern and Western Europe.

The project’s starting assumption is that the social processes that occurred in Croatia during the 1990s were not specifically “Balkan”. Indeed, they are not characteristics exclusive to socialist and post-socialist societies, but they are of a more universal nature.

The project’s focus will be on the problems that emerged as focal points key to the processes in question. The topics considered include ideological conversion, the emergence of the new elites, the consequences of changes in fundamental legal paradigms and judicial practices, new justifications of violence, changes in the dominant affective economies, and related topics. The project will also deal with the link between engaged science and “borderline” methodologies, which is the term we use to highlight the intertwining of social and academic methods of research and agency.