Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Ana Dević
2022-2023
Home institution
University Business Academy Novi Sad
Country of origin (home institution)
Serbia
Discipline(s)
Sociology
Theme(s)
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance
Peace & conflict
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Ana Dević, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow with the KU Leuven LINES institute, is a historical-political sociologist who obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, MA from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, and a BA in Economics from the University of Novi Sad. As an associate professor of sociology, Dr. Dević previously worked at Fatih University in Istanbul, University of Glasgow, University of Aarhus and Brown University.
Dr. Dević’s areas of specialization are nationalism, knowledge and memory, right-wing mobilization, social movements, gender, cinema and theatre. She has an extensive field experience in the post-Yugoslav space, where she conducted numerous projects on nationalism, post-war reconstruction and peace-building, with the funding and research grants received from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Norwegian Research Council, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the U.S. Social Science Research Council. Her current project is dealing with Turkish aid for the reconstruction of cultural monuments and educational development in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.
Dr. Dević is also and experienced pedagogue: in the past ten years she supervised more than twenty master theses and co-supervised two doctoral theses, the majority of which required a comprehensive guidance in field work and qualitative methods generally. As a visiting professor at the University of Bologna, Dr. Dević has designed and taught master courses on the politics of cinema and visual perspectives on nationalism. She serves as anonymous reviewer for a number of journals: Signs; Southeast European and Black Sea Studies; Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies; Nationalities Papers; Europe-Asia Studies; and Women's Studies International Forum.
Research Project
Failures of a Cultural Theory and the Rising Radical Right, East and West: Liberal Multiculturalism and Its Transplants
The project’s task is to, first, theorize the applications of the model of multiethnicity or liberal multiculturalism, as it was grafted in the peace treaties administered by Western actors in regions of ethnonationalist violence in order to create viable democratic polities. My cases are drawn from studies in (post-)Yugoslav postwar spaces, such as the peace agreements for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, and Kosovo.
The second step is to establish a link between the international politics that fixed the multiculturalist ethnonational schemes for practicing citizenship and emerging/strengthening radical anti-immigrant right-wing movements that base their political views on the same ethnonational premises. The aim is to make a link between the peace agreements in the post-Yugoslav space and the growing body of networks between the radical right groups in the ‘core’ European Union and those in the postsocialist region (focusing on France, Germany, Russia and Serbia) as another dangerous impasse of the ethno-cultural framing of citizenship. The project is methodologically based on the critique of the Kymlicka’s model of liberal multiculturalism. To strengthen the theoretical and methodological framework, I go beyond the genealogies of ethnonationalism in Western liberal multiculturalist model, by including the forms of official nationalisms as they existed in East and Southeast European countries during socialism.
Research Interests:
Liberal multiculturalism critique; post-Yugoslav peace agreements; radical right transnational networks; ethnonationalism and citizenship