Easter Semester Convocation

PROFESSOR and Chair of Politics Mila Dragojević SHARED THE BELOW REMARKS AT THE EASTER CONVOCATION ON FRIDAY, JAN. 16, 2026.

Easter Convocation story | Full text of Professor Dragojević's remarks:

Thank you, Vice-Chancellor Pearigen, for giving me the opportunity to speak today. We are celebrating both the academic excellence of our students who are inducted into the Order of the Gown and the installation of our new dean of the College, Jennifer Cooley. I am pleased to continue the tradition of faculty speakers following my accomplished colleagues Stephanie McCarter and David Haskell.
 
I stand before you today as a professor of politics who once had very little interest in politics. My early passion was the study of languages—English, German, French, and Latin—but the course of events of my life led me to a path neither I nor my family could have foreseen when we became refugees the summer of 1991. Yugoslavia, the country of my birth, fell apart in a war that lasted for four years. My interest in languages brought me to the United States as an international student only a year later and my host family in Virginia became my second family.
 
While my professional journey since then has been a winding one, I was eventually able to find a path that is directly related to my experience of witnessing a community unravel before my eyes. How do people who once lived side-by-side peacefully suddenly become deadly enemies? How do cultural characteristics, such as religion, race, ethnicity, or language become the sources of political divisions? How does a political conflict escalate into mass violence? These are the questions I pose today as a scholar and a member of this community for the past fifteen years.
 
As I talk a bit about my background and my work, I will be highlighting three main areas in which I think all of us can make a positive contribution toward peace in our unique ways. First, we may feel powerless in light of external forces that are outside of our control, but our power comes from being members of a community where our humanity, or a concern for the well-being of each other, remains unshaken. Second, knowledge matters. Understanding the sources of past conflicts and how they can be inflamed helps us avoid mistakes that are within our power to avoid. Third, we don’t need academic or professional titles to be leaders in our respective communities. We can lead with our integrity, compassion, and our particular expertise, among other individual qualities we choose to nurture within ourselves.
 
A few months before the war arrived in our hometown in eastern Croatia, I still didn’t understand that my parents’ ethnicity would make us the targets of threats. The changes happened suddenly. One day, I saw a group of skinheads in the tram on my way from the city center and my father asked me to start returning home before the dark. Another day, my parents asked my brother and me to move our Cyrillic magazines to a less visible place in the living room when we have visitors. The day I saw a tank at the intersection on my way home from the local beach, I found my mother standing behind the curtain of the kitchen window waiting for me. The bags were already packed in the car and a two-week summer vacation with my maternal grandparents turned into an indefinite displacement from the place I called my home and the people I considered my community, which included my paternal grandparents, my childhood friends, my school friends, and my neighbors.
 
Several years after the war ended, when I was just slightly older than you students here today, reflecting on my own experience, I wrote a poem about the endings of wars. I would like to share an excerpt from this poem with you today.

In the end,
we always ask what is left.
 
What is left at the end of each battle,
what is left at the end of the war.
 
In the end, 
a desert where people forgot
how to begin again.
A prison cell where the winners
are trapped, too frightened to move outside the walls,
too frightened to trust one another.
 
In the end, 
all hearts close up.
And those who stayed alive
at the end of this war
should let others win
so they can learn how to begin again.
 

This was a grim view, but it was also a moment when I first started questioning the inevitability of the suffering caused by wars. These experiences also inspired my research and the classes I teach at Sewanee. Each of my major research projects resulted in a book, a trilogy of sorts, capturing a facet of what happens after, during, and before a war. 

I analyzed the aftermath of a war through the study of refugees’ social and political integration in The Politics of Social Ties: Immigrants in an Ethnic Homeland. More specifically, as part of the aftermath, I studied the refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina who arrived in Serbia between 1991 and 1995. Given that they were culturally indistinguishable from the majority of native population, why did many of them still prefer to socialize with other refugees? Why did they still feel like outsiders? I found that refugees formed a community more easily with people with whom they shared a similar experience of being uprooted and didn’t have to explain themselves over and over. They talked about daily complaints, but also about solutions to similar types of existential problems. The locals, in turn, said that the newcomers simply had different customs, as many of them came from rural areas into cities. The locals also suspected that refugees’ networks gave them an edge in accessing employment or housing.
 
The interpersonal trust that developed in the refugees’ social circles over time became the fertile ground for parties aiming to gain political support among this population, ultimately explaining the question that I focused on in my book. Why were former refugees more susceptible than locals to the political discourse of the extreme nationalist party? This party, the Serbian Radical Party, showed great concern for the plight of refugees and promised them housing and other forms of support. By the time many of the former refugees began seeing the reality of these promises, they had already found themselves in half-finished housing lacking basic infrastructure. One of my conclusions was that while the political discourse aimed at refugees may have been strategic, the susceptibility to this discourse was more of a function of the socialization among the like-minded people who shared similar living conditions and experiences.  
 
The interviews with former refugees further shed light on the extent to which some ethnically diverse communities can break down quickly and how civilians can become the targets of violence even by their own neighbors. This led me to focus on the following question in Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War. What made violence against civilians more prevalent in some ethnically diverse areas of the same country during the same war? Here, I identified two processes in the communities with greater levels of wartime violence. The first process was the raising of physical barriers, such as barricades or checkpoints separating residents into respective ethnic identities while limiting movement for everyone. The second process was the elimination of moderate voices through threats or violence.
 
“It’s easy to emphasize individuality” in times of peace, my respondents from a Croatian region with a high level of wartime violence said, but back then, “you had to be with your own people” or “you have to flee.” In contrast, in the regions where residents quickly removed physical barriers and managed to distance themselves from local leaders expressing distrust and making disparaging comments toward neighbors of different ethnicity, people remained in their own homes throughout the war. There, individuals promoting inter-ethnic trust and tolerance succeeded in gaining influence over their communities. While ethnic difference itself was not the cause of violence in Croatia, there were some underlying causes related to ethnic identities that had to be examined further.
 
This investigation required going further into the past, two decades before the war erupted, in my effort to gather more knowledge. I did this in the forthcoming book An Uncertain Spring: Reform, Protest, and Suppression in Croatia, 1968-1971. The younger generation of leaders of the ruling Communist party initiated a series of reforms in the late 1960s seeking, among other issues, greater economic and political autonomy from the Yugoslav federal government. The reforms set off a mass movement that escalated with the strike of university students in Zagreb in the fall of 1971 before it was suppressed by Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito. I explored a number of questions, but the following ones were the most pertinent to the puzzle of how ethnic differences became politicized. How do political leaders in ethnically diverse states going through major reforms gain the necessary political support? What challenges do they face and what can we learn from their experiences? My conclusion is that the questions of recognition, rights, and interests of all relevant cultural groups, majorities, as well as minorities, should not be ignored because unresolved inequities can be mobilized by exclusivist nationalist parties. 

In the end, the mass movement did not attract major support among ethnic Serbs in Croatia who continued to view it as unwelcoming to them. After the progress was not achieved by the reformists, just two decades later, a war erupted in Croatia. This war, like many other wars, probably could have been avoided. Before and during the early years of the war, there were many brave individuals, true leaders, who tried to stop the escalation of violence and reverse the social polarization.
 
Among the three I will highlight, two were killed by the more extreme members of their own group and one survived and was successful in preventing the escalation of violence. The first one was my hometown’s police chief, Josip Reihl-Kir, who attempted to mediate between Serb and Croat villages at the very beginning of the conflict in the summer of 1991 when the first barricades were raised. He was killed during this time by a group of Croat extremists. The second person was Dmitar Obradović, the president of Virginmost municipality in central Croatia, who attempted to build bridges with local Croats. He was killed by a group of Serb extremists. The third person, Franjo Starčević, was a former teacher and a local activist who survived and succeeded in dismantling the first barricades. He traveled on foot to local Serb villages in his region of Gorski Kotar in northwestern Croatia and kept the communication open between local Croat and Serb communities. Then, while the war was still going on, he founded the School of Peace that gathered children of all ethnicities and taught them about the importance of dialogue and a non-violent resolution of conflict.
 
What can we learn from these examples? What can we do as ordinary people to reclaim our power to prevent political violence? I believe we can start by viewing ourselves as a community. Not a community defined by a particular cultural trait. Rather, a community of people who trust one another more than the rumors and political discourse trying to divide us. Then, understanding that wars are not inevitable, but that they are essentially failures of resolving political conflict non-violently, we need to study past conflicts. The knowledge of past mistakes can be put to service in our efforts to prevent the escalation of violence in our societies today. Finally, we can be leaders for peaceful coexistence in our own ways by nurturing our most valuable individual qualities, such as compassion for each other, honing our particular skills and expertise, and practicing personal integrity so that we can serve as the role models for future generations. 

As we begin 2026 and a new semester, I wish you all the best as you learn, grow as a community, and discover how to lead in your own worlds.