Producing and Cracking Kosovo Myths. The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Emergence and Critique of a New Ethnonationalism, 1984 – 1990

Abstract The author analyses how the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) has gained significance for the new leadership of the League of Communists in Serbia since the mid-1980s. With its authority as a scientific institution, the SANU legitimised the political measures implemented to centralise and consolidate authoritarian rule. The new perception of the Yugoslav crisis, marked by ethnicisation and self-victimisation, used Kosovo as the focus and became the dominant stance on the war and authoritarian rule of the 1990s. However, as the author shows, a critique of these developments needs to be included in the analysis in order to adequately grasp the tense dynamics.