New Publication by Ulf Brunnbauer

4 November 2025

We are pleased to announce that Ulf Brunnbauer’s article “Demographers as Desk Perpetrators? Population Experts and Serbia’s Kosovo Obsession in the 1980s and Thereafter”  has recently been published in Contemporary European History (First View, 2025).

The article investigates the role of Yugoslav/Serbian demographers in the political climate leading up to the Yugoslav Wars, showing how demographic research became deeply entangled with nationalist narratives and territorial claims. By analysing the work of influential population experts—above all Miloš Macura—and the institutions he established, Brunnbauer traces the radicalisation of demographic thinking in the 1980s. Concepts such as the “demographic threat” posed by Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, or claims of “genocide” against Serbs, were propagated through demographic discourse that increasingly linked ethnicity, fertility, and territory.

Based on expert literature, policy documents, archival sources, and international debates on demography and development, the study demonstrates how demographic arguments were widely circulated in public and political spheres, shaping collective consciousness and helping prepare the ideological ground for conflict.

The full text is available here.