Paper accepted on 27 December 2024
https://doi.org/10.18485/sres.2024.3.2.5
ABSTRACT: The paper looks at Serbia’s relations with Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo in the context of creating strategic narratives on bilateral relations, its political logic, and deeper cultural roots. It uses the definition of strategic narratives and their classification proposed by Alister Miskimmon and others to try to position the utilitarian nationalist narrative of Serbian officials in the last decade. The text argues that nationalist rhetoric is not deployed across the board, consistently, but only occasionally, in context-specific political events, and it is driven more by political pragmatism than a coherent ideology. Finally, it concludes that the utilitarian national strategic narrative is identitarian and issue-related and that further research is needed to investigate its internal variations.
KEY WORDS: narratives, foreign policy, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo.
