[ Sofia Events ]

Professor Robert Hayden will have a lecture in Sofia on Imagining “Tolerance” in Bosnia since 1990 that will take place on 14 April 2006 (Friday), 17.00 h at the Boris Christoff Centre, 43 Tsar Samuil Str.
In 1990-91, there was general acceptance internationally of the idea that Yugoslavia was an “unnatural” state of incompatible peoples: Serbs, Croats, Muslims and others. Yet there was also international acceptance of the idea that Bosnia was a natural community of the same peoples, who supposedly had a “tradition of tolerance.” This lecture explores the nature of “tolerance” between self-identifying peoples who have long lived intermingled but who have long been in competition with each other for dominance; and of the imagination of “tolerance” as an element in the imagination of a putative community when a large percentage of the population rejects inclusion in a newly defined state.