Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement

In September 1961, Socialist Yugoslavia formally established a partnership with states in the Global South called the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement understands the NAM as a site for transnational cultural exchange, and explores the movement’s decolonial alternatives to global inequalities.

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After a summit in Belgrade in September 1961, socialist Yugoslavia, led by President Josip Broz Tito until his death in 1980, initiated a movement with states in the Global South. The Non-Aligned Movement not only offered an alternative to the Cold War polarization between NATO and the Warsaw Pact but also expressed the hopes of a world emerging from colonial domination.

Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement investigates the Non-Aligned Movement both as a top-down, interstate initiative and as a site for transnational exchange in science, art and culture, architecture, education, and industry. Re-invigorating older debates by consulting newly available sources, the volume challenges studies that marginalize the role of socialist Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement. Contributors address topics such as women’s involvement, antifascism and anti-imperialism, cultural and educational exchange, tensions in Yugoslav diplomacy, competing understandings of economic development, the role of the Yugoslav construction company Energoprojekt, Yugoslav relations with Latin America and Africa, and contemporary support for refugees and asylum seekers as a kind of practical and affective afterlife of Yugoslavia’s non-aligned commitments.

Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement offers an innovative approach to one of the twentieth century’s most important international movements and confronts issues of economic, social, and cultural rights that remain relevant today.