The proposed project is an ethnographic study of specific strategies of confronting the past and securing ‘peace of mind’ in contemporary Serbia. After the 1990s wars, Serbs have been called to reconcile themselves to their misdeeds; some of them are, however, increasingly coming to understand the postconflict period not as healing but as shameful and wearing. My research ethnographically addresses the conjunction between the political imperative for Serbs to reassess their recent history and what my informants in Belgrade call, in a more medicalised register, their ‘mental hygiene’. More particularly, I will examine a range of material practices and rhetorical strategies concerned with the militarisation of Serbian psychological security.

In the 1990s, Serbia’s then nationalistic government promoted forms of mental discipline, intended, as they argued, to spiritually fortify the national psyche and safeguard the country's 'national consciousness' as this was assailed by Serbia’s enemies. Deploying a rhetoric that, while highly specific in terms of military strategy, was both esoteric and religious, they asked that Serbia defend itself not just on conventional battlefields but in the minds of its people.

After the wars, most Serbs deplored these ideas as fatally paranoid and atavistic pseudo-science. Today, however, they appear to be enjoying a revival, as they resurface as a set of guidelines encouraging psychic self-help. My research hypothesises these phenomena, which purport to be about war and the country's defences, as ways of dealing with socially precarious situations, including poverty and collective denial.

Using the anthropological method of participant observation, the study will consider a number of anti-war Belgradians who are addressing topics of the local and global crisis by reopening the question of mental hygiene. The project initiates an anthropological treatment of psychological security at a time of upheaval in a highly politicised southern European context.