Nicole Albrecht
Historian of Modern Central-Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia; international, social, economic, development, and medical history. Currently completing the project Peasant Internationalists and the Making of the Yugoslav Third Way; Graduate student at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a visiting researcher at Georgetown University and 2024 Library of Congress Kluge Center Fellow
Contact:
Articles:
“The Search for Legitimacy over Yugoslavia: Rudolf Bićanić and the Power of Gold.”
“Peasant International Cooperation: Social Medicine beyond Socialism, 1931-1958.”
Organizer: Georgetown University Global Humanities Seminar Series 2023/2024
Research
The ESRC-funded project: Peasant Internationalists and the Making of the Yugoslav Third Way.
About the project:
Studies the history of Yugoslav international cooperation between 1920 and 1948 and explores the roots of the Yugoslav third way in foreign policy and political economy, which lay between socialism and capitalism, East and West
Defines a new type of international cooperation – peasant internationalism – capturing the diverse ways in which the Yugoslav health experts, economists, lawyers, diplomats, and educators positioned Yugoslavia in the international hierarchy vis-à-vis international organizations
Peasant internationalists exhibited creative ways of tackling the post-imperial state-building challenges and the problems of delayed industrialization of Yugoslavia. Their actions were characterized by the lack of material resources and centered on the ideas of social justice
The analysis of their lived experience of internationalism demonstrates that the questions of economic sovereignty preceded those of political sovereignty
Exploring the socio-economic aspect of Yugoslav international cooperation reveals a more nuanced understanding of the communist legitimation of power and the Yugoslav prestige in post-WWII technical assistance and development projects and revises the role of smaller states within the international hierarchy