Description
The breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the post-war realities have been the focus of a vast amount of literature in International Relations, a small part of which has reflected how researchers’ positionality affects knowledge production. This paper examines the dynamics of knowledge production and cultivation on and in the post-Yugoslav region by analysing the positionality of six female scholars from and of the region. We examine expectations that exist both ‘in the field’ and in Global North academia and the associated emotional labour that comes with (justifying) researching a region where one has an assumed personal stake. We focus on the role of gender, age, ethnicity, class, and related assumptions of research participants and scholars, contributing to the literature on positionality, reflexivity, and decoloniality in IR. The article shows how debates about postcolonialism are complicated by ‘the Balkans’ as a subject of inquiry, and as Europe’s imagined periphery.
