Students for Kosova 1968-1998

Start - End 
2014 - 2019 (ongoing)
Type 
Department(s) 
Department of Languages and Cultures
Research Focus 
Research Period 
Research Region 

Tabgroup

Abstract

This PhD project, based at the Department of Languages and Cultures, Program for Slavic and East European Studies at Ghent University, examines the Kosova students’ movements between 1968 and 1999.  Designed as an inter-disciplinary project involving history, anthropology, cultural and area studies, the main aim of this project is to tease out the role that students have had in carrying out ideas of independence, freedom, peace and co-existence since the first Kosova students’ movements in 1968 from other factors. Based on the research so far, it becomes evident that fuelled by their desire for knowledge and self-improvement, students played a central role. The students’ contributions to modern day Kosova have generally been appropriated by politicians and public figures who have distorted the students’ ideas by translating them into a straightforward nationalist matrix. However, it is arguably the students who played the critical role during the 1968 and 1981 uprisings, as well as during the social struggles and all-out war in the 1990s. It was effectively the students who led the country to the implementation of the political ideas of self-determination and independence. 

People

Supervisor(s)

Phd Student(s)