![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In this article, I bring an ethnographic lens to untangling the influence of policy discourses on civil society-initiated projects of history education reform in the Balkans. Drawing on data from a multi-sited project conducted amongst historians, teachers, and NGO personnel, I ask: what are the dominant discourses that impact civil society-initiated efforts to promote history education reform, and how are these discourses made authoritative? How does policy act to organize the work of this cluster of actors, and what kinds of responses does it provoke? While educational policy discourses and their impacts are varied, I argue that such discourses can be profitably viewed as technologies of governance deployed in the service of post-national citizenship formation. In analysing behaviours of “complaisance”, how “competencies” emerge as a slippery signifier whose expansive meaning was exploited to multiple ends, and how the demands of post-national citizenship can, and sometimes do, detract from the goal of addressing controversial history, I map the field of possibilities in which my interlocutors found themselves, and highlight how they navigated their positions as mediators of particular, shifting, social worlds.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to the staff of the Center for Democracy Reconciliation in Southeast Europe and to all the teachers, historians, and EUROCLIO staff involved in the project History that Connects. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for History and Anthropology whose comments and suggestions greatly improved this article.
Funding
This work was supported by the CHESS field studies programme of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with funding from the National Science Foundation [Award Number: OISE-0968575], and by a fellowship from IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board), with funds provided by the United States Department of State through the Title VIII Program.
Notes
1 Everyone I interviewed gave me permission to use his or her full name, and I have chosen to use first names here. All other names of participants in workshops and meetings are pseudonyms.
2 More about EUROCLIO and the JHP can be found at www.euroclio.eu/ and www.cdsee.org/projects/jhp, respectively. While there are, of course, numerous differences between EUROCLIO, CDRSEE, and the projects they implement, I am less interested in drawing out these differences than in highlighting the unique contributions that engagement with each site provided. In its focus on the mundane, ethnography “examines the instability of meaning rather than defining successful outcomes of expert design” (Mosse Citation2011, 55). As this has the potential to appear threatening to professional communities, I emphasize that my research should not be construed as an evaluation of either organization with whom I worked. I support the work of both groups and have enormous respect for everyone who contributed to this project.
3 As a result of the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina is comprised of two entities, Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While Republika Srpska has a centralized government, the Federation is decentralized into ten administrative cantons. The Brčko District is under the direct administrative control of the federal level of government.
4 The History that Connects project focused specifically on the countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Representatives from Albania and Bulgaria also attended the project meetings as observers. CDRSEE's JHP spans the wider region, to include Albania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania, and Turkey. Because of this variation, I use the term “the Balkans” in discussing policy discourses with broad regional impacts and “the former Yugoslavia” where it is important to signal the specificity of History that Connects or educational reform in the former Yugoslavia.
5 As an EU member state since 2004, Slovenia was not included in BCSDN's study, nor was Croatia, as a candidate country that many multilateral donors have left.
6 See http://www.stabilitypact.org and http://www.rcc.int.
7 The Civil Society Facility is a specific budget line of IPA dedicated to civil society development.
8 This and all other translations are my own.
10 Refers to the Council of the EU, one of the EU's three decision-making bodies, along with the European Parliament and the European Commission. Not to be confused with the Council of Europe (CoE), an intergovernmental organization that is not part of the EU institutional structure but whose membership includes 47 countries, including all 27 EU countries.
11 The word count was performed using MaxQDA software. Words were counted that were five characters or longer. A stop-list of common words was applied. I then performed a stem search for high-scoring words, combining and re-ranking words such as “education” and “educationally”. Words are ranked by their absolute frequency.
12 The eight key competencies are communication in the mother tongue; communication in foreign languages; mathematical competence and basic competencies in science and technology; digital competence; learning to learn; social and civic competencies; sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; and cultural awareness and expression (European Communities Citation2007, 3).
13 As noted earlier, the CoE is an intergovernmental organization that includes all EU member states, but also many states which are not members of the EU. History teaching has long been a focus of the CoE in the field of education, and the CoE can be thought of as one of a constellation of international actors relevant to the analysis of educational policy discourses and their impacts in the Balkans.
14 Alexander I was the first king of interwar Yugoslavia. He was assassinated in 1934 by a member of the Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. The dictatorial nature of his rule as well as the role of the Croatian fascist Ustaše in his assassination remains controversial.
15 Largely at the impetus of members of the Montenegrin team, several lessons on select aspects of the Second World War were developed and included in the final project materials.