<i>Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army</i> by Tanja Petrović

The socialist regime in Yugoslavia required mandatory conscription of all young men to be served away from their home republics. The title of Petrović’s book is drawn first from the deliberately homogenizing and equalizing effect of the military uniform, but even more so from “brotherhood and unity,” the Communist Party’s now seemingly utopian belief that all of Yugoslavia’s peoples could learn to live together in peace and harmony.The wars of Yugoslav dissolution resulted by the mid-2010s in a wave of scholarship on Yugonostalgia, but Petrović’s excellent monograph takes a slightly different approach. In place of the term nostalgia, which focuses on leftover feelings from the past, she adopts afterlives to refer to “endings that are not over” and may influence, or at least “unsettle,” the future (5). Petrović thus argues that Yugoslavia’s universal military conscription provided soldiers of widely varying backgrounds with an emotional framework that later allowed them to imagine alternative futures of the post-Yugoslav existence that had “flattened” their biographies to mere ethnic identities. Describing the Yugoslav People’s Army (ypa) as equally concerned with peacetime projects as military defense, Petrović sees it as “deeply linked to multiethnic Yugoslav citizenship” (41). Moreover, she argues, it was precisely the tedious, ritualized, and restrictive requirements of daily life in the military that created an infrastructure within which radically different men could live and work together, generating “feelings of solidarity, care, love, and friendship” (191).The book’s first five chapters provide background and describe daily life for soldiers within the ypa, mainly during the 1970s–1980s. She explains how conscription was carried out, its connection to citizenship, and how the soldiers lived—their daily routines, training, education, and drills. Specific chapters focus on the soldiers’ self-perceptions and the role of the uniform. The book’s last chapters describe the decline of Yugoslavia into war, how it affected currently enrolled and former soldiers, and what happened to them in the aftermath of the war. Those two sections of the book are held together by an emotionally wrenching Interlude that details the wartime fate of several ypa soldiers.Petrović’s methodology is widely interdisciplinary, as she includes historical, anthropological, literary, artistic, psychological, and philosophical sources. Besides traditional archives from the ypa, she relies most heavily on oral histories and personal archives from ypa soldiers that include material culture such as photographs, postcards, film, artwork, literature, and poetry; she also interrogates the meaning of celebrations, commemorations, and social media. Indeed, Petrović’s work is compelling precisely due to the personal accounts, photographs, art, literature, and film that reveal how the young Yugoslav soldiers experienced and documented their lives as conscripts and their relationships with others. They support her argument that the daily requirements, restrictions, and rituals of military life created and cemented lasting bonds among young men from very different social, economic, educational, and ethnoreligious backgrounds. By the end of their time together, the young men had formed lasting friendships, never to be forgotten. At the same time and despite the homogeneity created by the uniform, Petrović also explores the individuality of each soldier. Although some adapted easily to military life, others clearly struggled, and yet others fought against it. Military life itself was no utopia, only a tool for its creation.As one note of caution, though the use of so much art, poetry, and literature makes Petrović’s work absorbing, its very existence might lead one to question how representative her subjects were. Petrović acknowledged that she came to most of them through people that she knew, suggesting elite bias among the subject pool. Yet, although a broader pool of sources may have been preferable, I would not on that basis discount Petrović’s research or her conclusions. This monograph will certainly be of interest and value not only to scholars from multiple disciplines with interests in Yugoslavia and its successor states, but also those working in broader fields of military, gender, and identity studies.