Racial Socialism. Racialization and Value in Socialist Red Cross Societies (ERC Consolidator Grant, 2026-2031)
Racial Socialism is an ERC Consolidator research project, starting in November 2026. It 
focuses on humanitarian work in socialist countries to generate new perspectives on racialization. Racialization is the process of constructing certain groups as fundamentally distinct from one another based on allegedly essential biological differences. The role that racialization has played in the historical emergence of capitalism is well understood, as the extraction of socio-economic value has often been justified by the framing of populations as ontologically different along racialized lines. Yet, historical sources also show that people in socialist societies were racialized, too, but little theoretical work has been done to clarify this apparent contradiction.
By studying national Red Cross societies in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, I will examine the ways that racialization was deployed in socialist societies. I propose an anthropology of value as a groundbreaking way of analyzing the contradictions of racialization under socialism. I will approach socialist countries as societies with multiple forms of value that were organized internally according to a particular logic, or a set of competing logics, operating at multiple scales.
The key objectives of Racial Socialism are to:
- undertake original empirical research on whether different groups were racialized in socialist Red Cross societies and, if so, how;
- in the selected socialist countries, identify different registers and struggles over value, including political, economic, social, and cultural value, and their modes of hierarchical integration;
- theorize racialization in socialism, which has typically been understood as part of capitalist social formations. By combining detailed historical research on socialist humanitarian organizations with anthropological theories of value and racialization, I will develop new perspectives on this contradiction.
ReDiGim: Redistributive Imaginaries in Contemporary Europe (2022-2025)
The aim of this project is to investigate the role of the digital in emergent redistributive imaginaries in Europe. Taxation, philanthropy, charity and mutual aid are redistributive forms which enable individuals to ‘pay in’ to their societies. In the contemporary conjuncture, digitization processes are rapidly reconfiguring access to and engagement with these redistributive mechanisms, initiating more social forms of payment and contribution. The emergence of new modes of contribution fostered by digital platforms point to novel forms of participation, solidarity and care for others, but they are also disruptive of established state-mandated forms of social provisioning. ‘Imaginaries’ are semiotic systems that give meaning and shape to lived experience. Redistributive imaginaries provide collective, common-sense ways of understanding the relationship between economic contribution and social solidarity: they give meaning to the structures which enable citizens to make prosocial contributions. This project will interrogate the role of the digital in emergent redistributive forms and imaginaries. By analysing five national contexts representing different welfare state models and philanthropic traditions (UK, Switzerland, Finland, Spain and Montenegro), it will consider the implications of this investigation for the future of prosocial contribution in Europe. As a consortium we are uniquely placed to deliver qualitative research that foregrounds the role of cultural, signifying practices in economic processes and practices and builds on our existing empirical and conceptual expertise. Our mixed-methods approach incorporates discourse analysis, affordance analysis of digital platforms, and ethnography of everyday prosocial practices. The investigation will significantly advance the study of economic imaginaries, and it will deliver evidence-based case studies and scenarios of value to a range of stakeholder audiences in civil society, government and business.
The project is funded by Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE), a joint initiative from the HERA and NORFACE networks, with co-funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Humanitarianism During and After Socialism in Montenegro (2013-2024)
This is an ongoing research of various humanitarian, philanthropic, and developmental actors in Montenegro. It aims to understand how people do – and do not – help others, through contextually specific humanitarian patterns, opportunities, and oppressions.
I have conducted ethnographic research at the refugee camp for displaced persons, which provided housing for people who mostly identify as Roma and Balkan Egyptians, the majority of whom fled from violence in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. I have also conducted archival research in Geneva, Belgrade, and various local archives, looking at how the fall of Yugoslav socialism has affected the meaning and practice of humanitarianism in Montenegro.
Topics: humanitarianism, philanthropy, development, human rights activism, Montenegro
Shared Freedom (2022-2023)
Montenegrin activists often claim that freedom is fundamentally shared, echoing the global activist idea that “No one is free unless we are all free”. The collaborative research project Shared Freedom poses two kinds of questions stemming from this claim.
First, it asks what this idea of freedom as shared can contribute to the anthropological thinking about freedom and morality.
Second, Shared Freedom looks at how trans people and activists in Montenegro can make use of anthropological thinking on freedom in order to advance their socio-political project of liberation.
Building upon the ideas presented in this talk and the 2021 SA/AS article “Minority sexualities, kinship and non-autological freedom in Montenegro”, Shared Freedom presents a collaborative ethnographic study of two instances of collective moral deliberation. One instance is grassroots queer activism where participants reach their decisions through collective deliberation and consensus. Another one takes place during the post-coming out period in the families of trans people, when their parents and siblings often turn to psychiatrists, fortune tellers, and others to seek interpretative frameworks that would help them orient themselves in a new and morally demanding situation.
Shared Freedom aims to offer an ethnographically grounded theorization of how freedom is understood, claimed, and pursued through collective moral deliberation among differently positioned people in everyday life.
In Shared Freedom, trans people produced knowledge about themselves by leading ethnographic diaries and generating visual representations of trans lives. Shared Freedom was supported by a 2022-2023 Wenner Gren Engaged Research Grant won by Čarna Brković.
Rethinking Politics of Favors in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina (2008-2016)
This project started at the University of Manchester as my doctoral research on the ways in which people take care of one another through official and unofficial channels in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over the years and with the support of the CEU IAS in Budapest and GSOSES in Regensburg, it resulted in the book “Managing Ambiguity” (Berghahn 2017).
In “Managing Ambiguity” and various articles, I explore how citizenship was redefined as an ethical category, showing that favors and clientelism offered people a way to navigate the resulting ambiguity over welfare responsibilities. This research also looked at how differences in power and socio-economic status were reflected in what people could do with ambiguity: while most people struggled to navigate ambiguity and to find their way through it, there were some who were able to manage it.
Topics: ambiguity, power, humanitarianism, citizenship, policy, favors, clientelism, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Ethnological Archives in the Balkans (2011-2015)
This research started in 2011, when I won the Wenner Gren grant to organize the conference Anthropology Otherwise, together with Andrew Hodges, Vanja Čelebičić, and Marina Simić.
The discussions the thirty participants had led during this five-day event, held at the Petnica Science Centre, have given me an impetus to look more closely at the history of ethnography at the beginning of the twentieth century in Croatia and Serbia.
In 2014/15, with the generous support of the New Europe College Institute for Advanced Study (NEC IAS), I focused on the ethnological archives organized, collected, and published in the Balkans a century ago. The kinds of things noticed, written down, put on maps, and deemed worthy to be published by the early Balkan ethnographers point to a particular idea about the relationship between “natural” and “social” worlds, whereby a “society” could not be known without knowing “nature”, and vice versa. This research explores the ways in which focusing on “just data” (rather than on theory) allowed early Balkan scholars to leave “nature” and “society” epistemologically undistinguished. It looks into the wider conceptual framework in the Balkans in which “society” and “nature” belonged to the same order of knowledge: they were described and measured through the same terms (and thus prone to “anthropogeographic” or “cultural-genetic” approaches).
Topics: history of ethnology and anthropology, archives, epistemology, Croatia, Serbia
Ambivalence of Nation-Building in Montenegro (2007-2009)
I worked as a junior researcher on the project New and Ambiguous Nation-Building Processes in South-Eastern Europe. It was organized by the Free University Berlin and University of Graz and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and Austrian Science Fund.
As a pre-doctoral researcher exploring senses of national belonging in Montenegro, I conducted ethnographic field research in online communities and NGOs in Podgorica.
Topics: ambiguity, nationalism, internet, NGOs, activism, Montenegro