BB: Volunteering and Democracy in Socialist Yugoslavia

Conventionally, volunteering and voluntary associations are understood to have non-governmental nature and non-profit-orientations. These kinds of operative borders have proven to be quite porous in historical practice. Within the state-socialist contexts, voluntary organisations have often been dismissed as fronts, existing solely to mobilise populations or serving as disseminators of propaganda.

However, new studies investigating voluntary practices in socialist states show that the relationship between state and society cannot be reduced to a simplistic oppositional binary but rather one that was fluid and multidimensional. In Yugoslavia after 1950 socialist democracy became the proclaimed political system with the aim of abolishing the state and based on self-management, citizens’

participation and local self-government. By examining voluntary practices in socialist Yugoslavia this lecture asks what is distinctively socialist about voluntarism? How socialist voluntarism might differ from its liberal counterpart? Should the various forms of voluntarism that formed and existed in socialist Yugoslavia be viewed as a unique phenomenon or do they belong to a distinctively socialist tradition?

Ana Kladnik received her PhD in history from the University of Ljubljana, after being a PhD researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague. She then worked at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam, at the University of Dresden and at the Institute for Contemporary History in Ljubljana.Since 2023, she has been a MSCA Fellow at the University of Graz(2023-25) and University of Maribor (2025-26). She works on modern European history (particularly East Central Europe), political and social transformation processes of the 19th–21st centuries, socialism, democratisation, nationalism, and the history of civil society. She edited Visions and Practices of Democracy in Socialist and Post-Colonial States (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2026) and Volunteering and Voluntary Associations in Post-Yugoslav States (Comparative Southeast European Studies, 2020). Together with Celia Donert and Martin Sabrow, she co-edited Making Sense of Dictatorship.Domination and Everyday Life in East Central Europe after 1945 (CEU Press, 2022) and together with George Bodie Volunteers Across Cold WarBorders: Solidarity and Socialist Internationalism (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026).