Dr Mate Nikola Tokić

January - June 2015
Mail mntokic(at)gmail(dot)com

Mate Nikola Tokić was a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg from January to June 2015. Prior to coming to the Kolleg, Dr. Tokić was a fellow at the Central European University's Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest in addition to being Assistant Professor of European and East European History at the American University in Cairo. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after earning an M.A. from the London School of Economics. Dr. Tokić has also been a Jean Monnet Research Fellow at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Study in Florence and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Freie Universität's Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. In addition to several articles on political violence and radicalization among émigré Croats, he has worked extensively on the relationship between social memory and political legitimacy in socialist Yugoslavia.

Research project at the Kolleg

During his stay at the Kolleg, Dr. Tokić will complete a manuscript entitled For the Homeland Ready! Croatian Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism in the Cold War. The monograph examines for the first time one of the most active but also least remembered groups of terrorists of the Cold War era: émigré Croat separatists. Operating in countries as widely dispersed as Sweden, Australia, Argentina, West Germany, and the United States, Croatian extremists perpetrated more than fifty assassinations or assassination attempts, forty bombings of public buildings and monuments, two guerilla incursions into socialist Yugoslavia, and two airplane hijackings during the height of the Cold War. In Australia alone, Croatian separatists carried out 52 significant acts of violence in one ten year period. In total, émigré Croats committed on average one act of terror every five weeks world-wide between 1962 and 1983. Significantly, émigré Croatian radicals developed perhaps the most far-reaching terrorist network of the Cold War, with a transnational system of actors and organizations that spanned the planet. In the truest sense of the word-and despite its decidedly nationalistic character-Croatian émigré separatist terrorism was a genuinely global phenomenon.

Main areas of research

Political Radicalization and Terrorism
Cold War Era Diaspora Anti-Communism
Patterns of Migration from Southeastern Europe
Ethnic Relations and Nationalism in Socialist Yugoslavia

Positions and Memberships

Member: Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS)
Member: Netzwerk Terrorismusforschung e.V. (NTF)
Member: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Member: American Historical Association (AHA)

Monographs

For the Homeland Ready! Croatian Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism in the Cold War (Under Review)

Edited Volumes

with Claudia Verhoeven, 'Cultures of Radicalization: Discourses and Practices of Political Violence and Terrorism', special issue of Social Science History 36, no.3 (Fall 2012): 311-446.

Book Chapters

'Twentieth Century West Balkan Terrorism, from Sarajevo to the end of State Socialism', in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, edited by Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

'Party Politics, National Security and Émigré Political Violence in Australia, 1949-1973,' in Control of Violence: Historical and International Perspectives on Modern Societies, edited by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Andrea Kirschner and Stefan Malthaner, New York: Springer, 2011, pp. 395-414.

'Hidden, but not Forgotten: "Nationalization" of World War II History in Socialist Yugoslavia and the Return of Ethnic Civil War', in History in the Making: Nations, Nationalism, National Identity, edited by Stephanie Jowett, et al., Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2005, pp. 36-52.

'Bratstvo i Jedinstvo: Tito's Highway and the Rise and Fall of Socialist Yugoslavia', in The Image of the ROAD, edited by Will Wright and Stevan Kaplan, Pueblo, CO: Colorado State University-Pueblo Press, 2005, pp. 272-279.

Articles

'The End of "Historical-Ideological Bedazzlement": Cold War Politics and Émigré Croatian Separatist Violence, 1950-1980', Social Science History, 36, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 421-445.

'Landscapes of Conflict: Unity and Disunity in Post-World War II Croatian Émigré Separatism', European Review of History - Revue européenne d'histoire 16, no. 5 (2009): 739-753.

'Diaspora Politics and Transnational Terrorism: An Historical Case Study', EUI Working Papers - Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies 42 (2009): 1-13.

'La violenza politica del separatismo croato nella Repubblica federale tedesca, 1965-1980', Ricerche di Storia Politica 11, no. 3 (2008): 293-309.