Dmitar Tasi¿ is a Research Fellow at the Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. His primary research interests are related to the history of the Yugoslav armed forces, both in the inter-war and post-1945 periods, paramilitary organizations, and paramilitary violence in the Balkans, Yugoslav secret services and special operations units, and Yugoslav involvement and place within Cold War context. From 2000 to 2014 he worked as a Research Fellow at the Military History Institute in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2014, he was awarded the Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and in 2016 he was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2017-2018, he participated in the collaborative project War and Citizenship: Redrawing the Boundaries of Citizenship in the First World War and Its Aftermath at the Department of Humanities, University Frederic II, Naples, Italy.

• Introduction


• 1: Origins


• 2: Demobilization vs. Mobilization


• 3: Balkan borderlands


• 4: New Context + Traditional Methods = Unexpected Outcomes


• 5: The Age of Coups d'état


• 6: Individuals and organisations


• 7: Legacies


• Conclusion

Paramilitarism in the Balkans is a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon of paramilitary violence in the Balkans during the 'Greater War'. By analysing archival and primary source material from across the region, the phenomenon of irregular violence is traced back to its roots in the Ottoman Balkans.