Beyond fact-checking obviously false claims, of what use can professional historians be to society? In an age of denialism, one has to embrace history’s political potentials instead of reducing them to the task of safekeeping facts.
Edin Hajdarpasic
Associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914 (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Articles
What does the death of Slobodan Milosevic mean for the future role of the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague? Edin Hajdarpasic warns against narratives focusing too much on Milosevic the person. Much more was at stake while Milosevic was alive and on trial, and is still at stake after his death. The international community, writes Hajdarpasic, is faced not only with the problem of holding future state leaders accountable, but also with the deeply unsettling possibility of legitimating the way that new nation-states were created in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.