The human right to self-determination and rights-talk in late socialist Yugoslavia, 1966- 1989.

My thesis will assess rights-talk in late socialist Yugoslavia, focussing especially on the right to self-determination, a
central tenet of socialist human rights. This will contribute to recent studies on 'socialist rights' in the Eastern Bloc as
serious competitors to their Western counterparts, and impact understandings of Yugoslavia's destructive breakup.
Socialist Yugoslavia was uniquely positioned outside of the Eastern Bloc, yet has barely been studied in human rights
historiography, with self-determination analysed only in relation to the 1990s secessions of constituent republics. I will
investigate the rights-talk deployed by Yugoslav intellectuals, students, and workers from 1966 to 1989, in ways that both
legitimated and challenged the state. I hope to identify the simultaneous presence of different notions of selfdetermination, how these interacted with other rights, and how different strata of society engaged in rights-talk. Fluent in
Serbo-Croatian, I will study sources from Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I will assess intellectual rights-talk via
philosophical journals; student rights-talk via youth magazines and research publications; and worker rights-talk (absent
from much historiography) via publications addressing workers, official workplace periodicals, workers' letters to the
federal and republic governments, and relevant newspaper coverage. I have discussed supervision with Dr Celia Donert,
who has published on rights-talk in socialist Czechoslovakia.