Resumen de Where is Serbia? Traditions of spatial identity and state positioning in Serbian geopolitical culture

Bojan Savic'

• This article studies the geopolitical traditions of spatial imagining of Serbia amongst the country�s political elites since the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It examines some of the socially dominant discourses of spatial positioning of Serbia as a historical-political narrative. The study argues that one can identify five distinct geopolitical traditions that, in variably overlapping or mutually contradicting ways, address two questions: �Where is Serbia� and �How is its perceived smallness felt and described�? A first tradition is that which attributes sacred, divine and martyr-like features to the country, its small earthly �Serbian lands� and people. A second tradition conveys spatially maximised and biopolitical visions of �Serbdom�, amounting to variable designs of a �Greater Serbia� anxious about its felt frontiers and smallness. The final three traditions are the mutually exclusive positioning of Serbia around an East-West axis as either Eastern or Western, or a geographically unique and exceptional bridge between the two, whereby each positioning recasts smallness as a crucial feature of geopolitical exceptionality. The article concludes with some general observations on the challenges of studying geopolitical cultures.