Strangers Either Way

Croatia gained the world's attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book offers a diverse insight into Croatia in the 1990s by dealing with one of the consequences of the war: the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, their "ethnic homeland." This important study shows that at a time in which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Refugees who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population, were treated as foreigners; indeed, as unwanted aliens.

Jasna Čapo Zmegač is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb and adjunct professor at the University of Zagreb. She has a multi-disciplinary background in ethnology, cultural anthropology, demography and French literature. She studied at the University of Zagreb before doing her MA and PhD at Berkeley. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Strasbourg and Vienna, a Humboldt Fellow in Munich and Berlin, and a visiting fellow at various European universities. Her current research interests are in the field of anthropology of migration, especially forced and labor migration, and the politics of identity construction in diaspora settings. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume (with C. Voß and K. Roth) Co-ethnic Migrations Compared: Central and Eastern European Contexts (Munich: Kubon & Sagner, 2010), as well as refereed articles and chapters published in English, French, German, Croatian, and other European languages.