In the context of the emergence of a global information society, access to the means of symbolic production, including control over historical narratives, serves as one of the criteria for the political subjectivity of an actor claiming the status of a sovereign player in international relations. Long-term territorial conflicts are aggravated by the discrepancy between collective memories and the parties involved in them, and are transformed into conflicts of values, which greatly complicates their subsequent resolution. As part of the announced scientific and practical seminar, participants, using the example of the Western Balkans – the most important region in geopolitical terms – discussed the phenomenon of securitization of memory, the use of historical arguments in interstate interaction, as well as the problems of building a narrative of “state biography” in the construction of national identity. Part of the workshop was a discussion of NATO aggression against the FRY in 1999 in the historical memory of Serbia, as well as changes in the nature of coverage of sanction pressure on Yugoslavia in Russian academic discourse.
Western Balkans; historical narrative; “memory wars”; “state biography”; sanctions.