Slobo the Redeemer: The Rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic and the Construction of the Serbian “People”

Abstract

This essay argues that the use of mytho-historic allusions may contribute to the normalization of ethnic violence in that these discourses can mask modern issues both for the audience directly addressed as well as for a larger international community that might be compelled to intervene in the early stages of such violence. I assert that at least a part of the reason that ethnic violence was normalized in the former Yugoslavia was due to the mythic constitutive appeals and rhetorical strategies employed by Slobodan Milosevic to hail an exclusive Serbian “people.” An analysis of Milosevic's political rhetoric offers insight into the centrality of Kosovo as a unification device for the Serb people as well as insight into the way in which Milosevic appeared to break from the confines of Titoism to offer the Serbs a new future by adopting the persona of a reformer and a redeemer.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.