To Share or to Keep: The Afterlife of Yugoslavia’s Heritage and the Contemporary Heritage Management Practices

Abstract

This article revisits Yugoslav heritage through the example of the monumen-tal network dedicated to the People’s Liberation Struggle (NOB), now in-terpreted through the lenses of contemporary heritage management practice . The monumental network of the NOB was created as a part of official iden-tity management strategy of the state, and is unquestionably a shared heritage of the former Yugoslav region. The contemporary heritage-interpretation and management practices within the region tend to provide them with a strong national prefix, commonly disregarding their initial shared nature, and con-tribute to the processes of contemporary national identification. The efficient managing of the shared properties of heritage in question poses a substantial practical challenge and a burning issue in need of thorough investigation. For this purpose, this critical intervention offers one possible approach for over-coming the current issues in heritage management and interpretation practices of these memorial sites. The article analyses contemporary heritage-focused approaches which are based on performative and internet-based tools, and gives a special focus to the benefits of implementing user-generated content approaches.