POLITICAL HISTORY OF SLAVS: between myth and reality
Šuljagić, Sanja (ed.). 2019. Political History of the Slavs: Between Myth and Reality. Belgrade: Institute for Political Studies. ISBN 978-86-7419-315-0
Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference held on November 15, 2019
Due to their turbulent history filled with appropriation, destruction, alteration and disappearance of many primary historical sources and artifacts that testify to the history of the Slavs, the Slavs have largely lost awareness of their common historical heritage that originated and continues since ancient times, although they hold an intuitive awareness of it in their collective memory based on similarities in language, script, religion, historical experience and remaining historical evidence of it. However, there is not enough (geo)political support for institutional and synchronized academic research into the origins and development of the Slavic civilizational identity, which is reflected in the discontinuity in the academic exchange of Slavic and non-Slavic scholars researching the history of the Slavs. Therefore, it is interesting at the present time to investigate how much knowledge, apart from knowledge about their common Christian Orthodox faith and the experience of coexistence with members of other traditional religions, as well as the similarities of their languages and scripts, scholars from the Slavic-Balkan-Black Sea states have acquired and preserved so far regarding the origins of their ethnic and civilizational identity and the history of the Slavs in general.
In this sense, in a relatively short period of time, fifteen scholars from Russia, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Greece, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Serbia managed to present and exchange their views on the political history of the Slavs in the form of an International Scientific Conference and the accompanying conference proceedings. This type of conference on the political history of the Slavs as a joint academic synthesis of analyses of the past, present and future of the Slavic-Balkan-Black Sea states could be defined as an exceptional event, due to the unarticulated but continuous passivity of the academic communities in these states regarding the organization of similar events and the rare direct academic exchange between these scholars. Therefore, the international conference “Political History of the Slavs between Myth and Reality”, held in November 2019 in Serbia and organized by the Institute for Political Studies in Belgrade, was a good opportunity for scholars from today's Slavic-Balkan-Black Sea states to exchange their scientifically argued views on the history of the Slavs, distancing themselves from the calculations of daily (geo)politics that are constantly imposed on them and try to influence them. At the same time, this conference proceedings are a documented “sign of the times” and an overview of the historiographies taught in the official educational systems and public discourse of the Slavic-Balkan states. It would be good if this conference were also a small starting point for some future consultations and conferences of this type among scholars from the Slavic-Balkan states. The papers of the conference participants are presented according to the chronological order of the selected topics of their works and in the form of two thematic sections: 1. “Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the politics of Slavic history” and 2. “Geopolitical challenges and problems within Slavic-Balkan political thought from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century”.
