Dušan T. Bataković

Dušan T. Bataković
Born (1957-04-23)23 April 1957
Belgrade, FPR Yugoslavia
Died 27 June 2017(2017-06-27) (aged 60)
Belgrade, Serbia
Occupation Historian, academic and diplomat

Dušan T. Bataković (Serbian Cyrillic: Душан Т. Батаковић; April 23, 1957 – June 27, 2017) was a Serbian historian and diplomat. His specialty was modern and contemporary Serbian and Balkan history. The last post he held was that of Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Biography

Bataković graduated with a degree in history from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy in 1982. He holds an M.A. in history from the same institution (1988). He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne in 1997 with the thesis La France et la formation de la démocratie parlementaire en Serbie 1830-1914 (France and the Formation of Parliamentary Democracy in Serbia, 1830-1914).

Bataković is a specialist for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkan history, as well as for the French-Serbian relations. He has written and published extensively on the modern and contemporary history of Serbia, in particular Kosovo and Albania–Serbia relations, focusing on nationalism, and the origins of religious and ethnic strife. Another area of his research is the impact of communism on the contemporary history of Serbia, Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Bataković writes in Serbian, English and French and his bibliography includes dozens of historical monographs, edited volumes and more than a hundred articles published in various languages.

Bataković is also the author of the historical TV documentary Crveno doba (The Red Epoch), which aired on Serbia's public broadcaster, RTS, in 2004. Combining testimonies of witnesses with historic narrative the film was the first to open the question of the crimes of the communist Yugoslav authorities (the "red terror") against their political and class enemies in post-World War II Serbia and Montenegro (1944-1947).

In October 2005 Bataković became Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and editor-in-chief of the Institute’s annual Balcanica journal as well as of its Special editions. In October 2008 he was elected president of the Serbian Committee of AIESEE (Association Internationale d'Etudes du Sud-Est Europeen).

In 2010 Bataković was elected fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science(WAAS).

Parallel to his academic life, Dušan T. Bataković has also pursued a career in politics and diplomacy. As the president of the Council for Democratic Changes in Serbia (a pro-democracy NGO), he campaigned against Slobodan Milošević in the late 1990s. From 2001 to 2005 he served as Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later Serbia and Montenegro) to the Hellenic Republic. In July 2005 he became Advisor for political issues to the President of Serbia Boris Tadić. In that capacity he became a member, in November 2005, of the Serbian negotiating team at the UN-sponsored talks on the future status of the province of Kosovo in Vienna. He was a head of the Serbian Delegation at the International Court of Justice, regarding the advisory opinion on Kosovo status (2009-2011).

Bataković was appointed Ambassador of Serbia to Canada in July 2007 and Ambassador of Serbia in Paris, France in January 2009, where he took office in March 2009 and has completed his mandate in December 2012.

Bataković was reelected Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in February 2013.

Criticism

In 2006, a study by Frederick Anscombe looked at issues surrounding scholarship on Kosovo which noted that in the 1980s and 1990s Dušan Bataković from a nationalistic perspective published nationalist works on Kosovo that gained generous support.[1] Of those were works such as The Kosovo Chronicles (1992) and Kosovo, la spirals de la haine (1993) and in all several of those works have been translated into other languages.[1]

Works

References

  1. 1 2 Anscombe, Frederick (2006). "The Ottoman Empire in Recent International Politics - II: The Case of Kosovo". The International History Review. 28 (4): 761. "Even if some Serbian historians have not promoted a consciously nationalistic view, history as practised in Serbia has observed the constraints imposed by state-sponsored nationalism. As suggested in Part I, nation-building states in former Ottoman territories have used their influence over education, support for and dissemination of research, and the media to draw implicit, and sometimes explicit, boundaries for acceptable historical interpretation. Minor variations on the established narrative may be allowed, but even less overtly ideological historians remain chroniclers of the nation. As in most other post-Ottoman states, few historians in Serbia are able to read Ottoman texts: the focus of their research is confined to Serbs and Serbian lands under 'the Turks'. In the 1980s and 1990s, overtly nationalist Serbian scholars such as Dušan Bataković received the most generous support for the publication of their work. [2] The focus of much of such nationalist history was Kosovo. Footnote: [2] Bataković wrote a series of nationalist works on Kosovo, of which several (The Kosovo Chronicles [Belgrade, 1992] and Kosovo, la spirals de la haine [Paris, 1993]) have been translated into other languages."

Sources

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.