Iva Lučić

My research focuses on modern South-eastern European and East-Central European history. Central research areas in my work include nation- and state-building processes, political mobilization processes, religiosity as social practice during the post-Habsburg transition, post-Ottoman transition in South-eastern Europe, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and bystanders. My current project is entitled “Extracting Nature: Making Peripheries. Global Perspectives on the Balkans as Extractive Periphery 1850–1990”. It addresses two key questions: First, How and why do some regions that are rich in natural resources become economic and ecological peripheries? Second, how does regime change contribute to these long-term transformations? The project focuses on forest exploitation in the Balkans, primarily Bosnia. Bosnia became a global provider of timber in the later 19th century and remained so throughout the 20th century, exporting its oaks, beeches, black pines to destinations like Australia, the Middle East, and across Europe. These trade relations, however, were marked by unequal socio-economic and ecological exchange. I study the processes and dynamics of extraction-based peripheralization under different polities. I examine peripheralization in the transfer of power from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg Empire, and in the consequences of post-imperial state formations and the communist regime of Socialist Yugoslavia.