“The Position of the First World War in the History of Europe”. International conference at University of Sarajevo, june 2014

Sarajevo: where all began. The city University is planning to host the international conference on the 19th-21st June 2014. And it goes without saying that the focus of the presences of 120 scholars from 26 European countries and from USA and Canada will be on the war outbreak. We already stated that there’s no war without politics wanting the war and it’s worth to point out the emphasis that the panel is giving to political accents of the First World War. In Italy we have for example a book clearly entitled “Political History of the First World War” by Piero Melograni. Do we have something similar in other countries? We guess so. We often forget the obvious link between politics and the First World War. A special attention will be given to the position and roles of the smaller countries before the conflict.

The preparation process of this conference started four years ago, in 2010. This is why great expectations are put on it. The way historiographies and school textbooks have told the war will be under analysis. And also this one is another key point, because we guess that a renewed process of knowledge will be possible with the comparison (and even confrontation) of different historiographies. The target is to bring new dynamism inside the international debate dedicated to World War I, both in its symptoms and its legacy.

In the presentation of such ambitious yet necessary conference professor M.Sc. Amir Duranovic said that “as far as the structure of the participants is concerned, the Conference will be a combination of youth and experience, on the one hand the experience and recognition of top historiography, and on the other hand, young forces that are emerging and which will be given the chance to meet and share their findings at this Conference, and thus open up new roads for future historiographical meetings”. Also this "combination of youth and experience" sounds new to our ears.

Organisers:
The University of Sarajevo Institute for History (Sarajevo)
Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (Regensburg)
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Center for the Humanities (Budapest)
Institute for Balkan Studies and Trakology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia)
The Institute for National History (Skopje)
The Institute for Contemporary History (Ljubljana)
Croatian Institute of History (Zagreb)
Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz (Graz)

Here is the link to web page of the University of Sarajevo.