Tag: non-alignment

Funded PhD Studentship: ‘Cold War Socialism, Non-Alignment and Anti-Colonialism in the Yugoslav Press, 1961 – 1979’

Published on by CIGH Exeter

‘Cold War Socialism, Non-Alignment and Anti-Colonialism in the Yugoslav Press, 1961 – 1979’: AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) PhD Studentship Ref: 5853

Deadline 5 May 2026

About the award

Supervisors

Dr Ljubica Spaskovska University of Exeter – Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Milan Grba, the British Library

The University of Exeter and the British Library are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from 1 October 2026 under the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.

The project Cold War Socialism, Non-Alignment and Anti-Colonialism in the Yugoslav Press, 1961-1979 proposes an innovative investigation into Yugoslavia’s multifaceted role during the Cold War, specifically its involvement with the Non-Aligned Movement and anti-colonial efforts.

This project will be jointly supervised Dr Ljubica Spaskovska and Professor James Mark at the University of Exeter and by Milan Grba and Savka Andic at the British Library.  The student will spend time with both the University of Exeter and the British Library and will become part of the wider cohort of AHRC CDP funded PhD students across the UK.

The University of Exeter and the British Library are keen to encourage applications from a diverse range of people, from different backgrounds and career stages, and particularly welcome applications from Global Majority students and those currently underrepresented in doctoral student cohorts.  

The Research Project

The project centres on Yugoslavia’s global role in the Cold War, emphasizing its advocacy of non-alignment, anti-colonialism, and support for newly independent nations and liberation movements. The project will draw upon the recently digitised and largely unexamined Joint Translation Service (JTS) bulletins, a sole archive housed at the British Library. The project’s core purpose is to apply advanced digital methods and interdisciplinary research to the Joint Translation Service Archive, uncovering fresh insights into Cold War socialism and anti-colonialism from a Yugoslav perspective, and aiming to understand how Yugoslavia, a founding Non-Aligned Movement member, forged a ‘third way’. The student will be engaged in creating a fully digitally searchable Joint Translation Service resource, deriving new datasets, and helping to establish a global network of Non-Aligned Movement-related archives with a view to creating a digital repository. The successful applicant would be able to build upon this and develop their own specific approach and themes. In addition to the focus on the JTS archive, applicants could potentially bring this material into dialogue with other archives and primary materials.

Continue reading “Funded PhD Studentship: ‘Cold War Socialism, Non-Alignment and Anti-Colonialism in the Yugoslav Press, 1961 – 1979’” →

Non-Aligned Punk: The Last Yugoslav Generation

Published on by CIGH Exeter2 Comments

Ljubica Spaskovska
University of Exeter

‘As a regular reader of NME I feel insulted by the way you write about Yugoslavia in your issues of May 3 and May 17′, wrote a New Musical Express reader from Zagreb in 1975.

In your ‘Teazers’ column you worry about »How will the Communist Bloc take to British pub rock when Kilburn And The High Roads tour Yugoslavia and Poland in August.« Now try to get this: Yugoslavia does not belong to any bloc, so you better don’t try to make jokes about something that may be irrelevant to you, but is of principal meaning for Yugoslav people […] This is not fair toward your Yugoslav readers and many other rock fans in our country. The same singles, albums, groups and singers that top the Pop Polls in Britain are very popular in Yugoslavia, too.[1]

Similarly a Tomaz Domicelj from Ljubljana complained in a 1978 issue of Melody Maker that he was ‘fed up with reading again and again about Yugoslavia being behind the Iron Curtain. We are, if anything, on the border of that Curtain, which MM staff and other British people involved in the music business should know by now. Remember 1948, when we told Stalin off? If not, ask some historians about that.’[2] Two years later, Melody Maker columnist Chris Bohn visited Yugoslavia, a visit that he summarised in a two-page article entitled ‘Non-aligned punk’.[3]

The geopolitical positioning of Yugoslavia had a significant impact on the way the youth conceptualised and articulated their self-identification and sense of belonging in wider global terms. It also enabled the development of a burgeoning youth culture. Continue reading “Non-Aligned Punk: The Last Yugoslav Generation” →

The “Spirit of Bandung” at Sixty

Published on by CIGH Exeter5 Comments

World leaders, including 22 Heads of State, marching to relive a 60-year old historical conference on human rights, sovereignty and world peace, April 2015, Bandung, Indonesia.
World leaders, including 22 Heads of State, marching to relive a 60-year old historical conference on human rights, sovereignty and world peace, April 2015, Bandung, Indonesia.

Michael R. Anderson
University of Texas at Austin

The 60th anniversary of the Asian-African Relations Conference has brought renewed global attention to the themes that animated the first major gathering of Asian and African heads of state in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. At a recent commemorative gathering (19-24 April 2015), delegates from 109 Asian and African countries convened once again in Bandung and ruminated upon an ambitious agenda: “Strengthening South-South cooperation to Promote World Peace and Prosperity.” Delegates in 2015 renewed a commitment to the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership (launched in 2005 during the 50th anniversary commemoration of the first Bandung Conference), and they also worked to further initiatives in economic cooperation, most notably through the Asian-African Business Summit. The “spirit of Bandung” may have endured, but the historical context of such cooperative ventures has shifted dramatically over the decades. Continue reading “The “Spirit of Bandung” at Sixty” →

Defying Decolonization: Anticolonial Nationalism and the Greek-Cypriot Liberation Movement

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Brian Drohan
U.S. Military Academy-West Point

In April 1955, Archbishop Makarios III—head of the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus—arrived at the airport in Bandung, Indonesia to little fanfare. The real excitement, in the form of the first Asian-African Conference, was already underway. Representatives from twenty-nine newly independent African and Asian states attended the Bandung Conference. Many of the major personalities of what would later become known as the “Third World” and the Non-Aligned Movement—such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egyptian President Gamal Adbel Nasser—dominated the proceedings. Attendees straddled both sides of the Cold War divide, and tensions between the political Left and Right emerged as a key topic of discussion at the conference. The other major point of discussion was colonialism. It was this topic that most concerned Archbishop Makarios.[1]

Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus
Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus

But Makarios was not from the “Third World,” nor did he represent a newly independent state. He was the only European leader to attend the conference and Cyprus was the only colony represented. Besides, Makarios and his fellow Greek-Cypriot anticolonial nationalists did not seek independence at all, but rather the union of Cyprus with Greece—an idea called enosis. This desire for enosis drew significant support from the conservative yet politically-active Greek Orthodox clergy, which colonial officials viewed as an unlikely group of revolutionaries. As one scholar has noted, “that such a political movement was led by an Archbishop, and backed by priests, was viewed in many British circles . . . as little short of weird.”[2]

Makarios’s presence at Bandung and the enosis movement challenge historians to reconsider the standard assumption that anticolonial nationalism was an Asian and African phenomenon in which the ultimate goal was the creation of independent states. Continue reading “Defying Decolonization: Anticolonial Nationalism and the Greek-Cypriot Liberation Movement” →