Paul Stubbs

During his fellowship, Paul Stubbs will work on a book-length manuscript exploring socialist Yugoslavia's internal and external politics, and the inextricable links between them, in what he terms “the long 1970s.” This was a kind of “interregnum” or—in Gramsci’s terms—“open historical period” in which the collective voice and agency of the Global South was increasingly assertive and cohesive in global governance and geopolitics at the same time as a global capitalist order began to consolidate in terms of neoliberalism, structural adjustment, and a move away from the UN towards the International Financial Institutions. Specifically, Stubbs explores the many contradictions and contingencies of socialist Yugoslavia's commitment to a politics and practice of decolonial solidarity in this period, delineating Yugoslavia’s semi-peripheral “liminal” position and its understandings of the politics of global raciality. He intends to focus on six separable yet interlinked themes: Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement; Socialist Yugoslavia and the New International Economic Order; Socialist Yugoslavia’s continued support for decolonial liberation movements; Socialist Yugoslavia in relation to circuits of decolonial feminism; Socialist Yugoslavia’s increasing turn to Europe and the Helsinki process; decolonial politics of dissident intellectuals, gathered around the Praxis Group and the Korčula Summer School.