ARRS code: N6-0173

Period: 1. 12. 2021–30. 11. 2024

Lead project partner: ZRS Koper, Institut for Historical Studies

The project aims to explore religious transformations in 20th century Slovenia and Yugoslavia marked by various kinds of religious agency that cuts across established norms, legal frameworks, and cultural expectations. This constitutes one of the first study in the region using a broad-based understanding of religious conversions to probe the religious changes in Slovenia and Yugoslavia and the process of formation or reformation of religious minorities. The interdisciplinary project combines historical, anthropological and other relational approaches, and offers a perspectival shift from limitations of nation-centred history to provide a comprehensive transnational study and a more nuanced understanding of mechanisms driving religious change and state-religion relations in Slovenian and Yugoslav context. The position of former Yugoslavia and Slovenia in particular is unique in Europe to perform such research, as it is marked by frequent changes of political regimes, recent experience of war, and social tensions based on ethnic and religious grounds that have only been intensified by internal and international migrations.

The project consists of case studies exploring conversion of convenience, atheization, mass conversion, reconversion and conversion of conscience based on multi-site archival research of material that has either not yet been explored or not from the proposed point of view.