Author Archives: Čarna Brković

About Čarna Brković

Čarna Brković is a professor of cultural studies and European ethnology at the University of Mainz, Germany. Her first book, Managing Ambiguity (2017), is an ethnographic study of vernacular humanitarianism and medical crowdsourcing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Worldmakings. Realigning Humanitarianism from Yugoslav Socialism to Neoliberal Capitalism in the Balkans, which offers a historical account of how the fall of Yugoslav socialism changed the humanitarian project between the 1970s and the 2010s.

Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s

The Red Cross of Yugoslavia invited the International Red Cross Movement in the 1970s to reconsider its humanitarian principles and include perspectives from the countries belonging to the Non-Aligned Movement. The organization created an alternative humanitarian imaginary that partly challenged and partly reproduced the premises of the humanitarian sector in the West. This largely forgotten episode in the history of humanitarianism presented an attempt at worldmaking, not of a world free from the coloniality/modernity nexus, but of a socialist modernist world that was in many Continue reading → Continue reading →