Work group
Human Rights
Una Blagojević earned her PhD in Comparative History from Central European University, Vienna. Her dissertation explored the intellectual history of Marxist Humanism and the concept of the human in the face of crisis. She holds Master's degrees in History from Central European University and Philosophy from KU Leuven. Her research interests include the intellectual history of socialist Yugoslavia, the history of philosophy, and the intersections of socialist thought, human rights discourses, social and gender history. She is an affiliated member of the ERC project The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women's Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929-2001 (HERESSEE) at the University of Vienna and the STEPPE project (Scaling the Transnational: Entangled Political Imaginaries and Practices in East and West Europe): She is a co-editor of East Central European Crisis Discourses in the Twentieth Century: A Never-Ending Story? (Routledge, 2024).
Research Project
Constructing Universalisms and Particularisms: Discourses of Human Rights in Socialist Yugoslavia (1960s-1980s)
The project examines the interplay between universalist and particularist claims in Yugoslav human rights discourses from the 1960s to the 1980s. Building on my doctoral research on Marxist humanism, ethnonationalism, and conceptions of the human, it explores how intellectuals in socialist Yugoslavia articulated and contested human rights within a Marxist ideological framework. While scholarship has incresingly recognized socialist contributions to human rights, the Yugoslav case remains understudied. As an active participant in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Yugoslavia engaged with human rights beyond the East-West binary. By highlighting the tensions between universalism and particularism, the project sheds light on how Yugoslavia's unique synthesis of Marxist thought and international solidarity shaped its approach to human rights, complicating dominant narratives of socialist transformations.