The Security History Network is pleased to announce a forthcoming lecture by Dr. Jovo Miladinović, Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Konstanz.
Hosted by The Security History Network
Date/Time
Wednesday 9 Decemebr 2026,
17:30-19:00, walk-in at 17:15
Location
Drift 25 – 102, 3512 BR Utrecht
How did allied empires negotiate authority when their claims over people crossed the boundaries of military occupation? Drawing on his new book, Heroes, Traitors, and Survivors in the Imperial Borderlands: Military Mobilizations in Southeastern Europe, 1908 to 1923 (Routledge, 2026), Dr. Miladinović examines Southeastern Europe as a crucial intersection of imperial projects linking Central Europe and the Middle East during the First World War.
Between 1916 and 1918, battlefield losses, blockade, and scarcity pushed Habsburg, Bulgarian, and Ottoman authorities to secure manpower beyond their borders, often competing to recruit, exempt, protect, and retain the same military-age men. Istanbul invoked former Ottoman subjecthood, confessional protection, the caliphate, and jihad to claim the military obligations of Muslim inhabitants in allied occupation zones, while Habsburg and Bulgarian officials asserted territorial jurisdiction. Germany, though not claiming these men’s service, shaped the contest through diplomacy and its own commercial and imperial ambitions.
Dr. Miladinović argues that cooperation and rivalry remained intertwined within the Central Powers. By following negotiations between governments alongside the encounters of consuls, occupation officials, military entrepreneurs, recruits, and households, he reveals how alliance politics and the everyday exercise of imperial power took shape. In doing so, Dr. Miladinović also exposes a central problem of imperial governance: occupying territory did not secure exclusive authority over the people living within it.
Dr. Jovo Miladinović is a historian of European, Mediterranean, and transimperial history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. He is also the author of The Enemy at the Border: Ottoman-Serbian Mutual Military Intelligence Activities, 1880–1912 (Kronik Yayınları, Istanbul, 2024, in Turkish). His research addresses Venetian, Ottoman, Habsburg, French, and British entanglements; the Central and Eastern Mediterranean and Morocco; commodity history; and the global history of the Greater War, 1908–1923. His articles have appeared in Slavic and East European Review, Central European History, The Hungarian Historical Review, and the Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies.
