ABSTRACT
Dealing with conspiracy theories has its own historical and political underpinnings and only superficially neutral usage in public discourse, already studied as the ‘pathologizing effect’ in the name of so-called universal and rational subjectivity (Pigden 2007; Bratich 2008; Blanuša 2011a; Dentith 2014). By focusing on the Balkans as a specific region that has experienced a shared psychic and cultural normalisation, it is important not to amplify the same pathologising effect by studying the region through the prism of conspiracy theories. Such an ‘order of knowledge’ (Foucault 1980: 128), which belongs to a European rationalist and colonial tradition and tries to divide universal normality from insanity, described the Balkans as a geopolitical region that has produced in the last few centuries more history than it can bear and consume. It was usually perceived as Europe’s inner ‘Other’, the bloodiest part of ‘Restern’ Europe, or an intermediate area, permeated by political instability, wars, changes of borders and ‘spheres of influence’ between imperial powers and emerging nation-states, with the climax in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav wars in 1990s. The rocky road of problematic political consolidation and accession to the E.U. was perceived as its normalisation, permeated by internal turmoils, conflicts and international frictions in the last two decades. Moreover, most of the Balkan countries are still troubled by their violent pasts from the Second World War, the post-war Socialist period and recent wars.
