Dr. Jovo Miladinović Book Talk - Heroes, Traitors, and Survivors in the Imperial Borderlands: Military Mobilizations in Southeastern Europe, 1908–1923 (Routledge, 2026)

Heroes, Traitors, and Survivors in the Imperial Borderlands redefines Southeastern Europe’s role in modern military history, approaching a region long dismissed as a “powder keg” instead as a crucial laboratory of military mobilization, governance, and state formation in the early twentieth century. Moving across the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Monarchy, Montenegro, Serbia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, it shows how mobilization was negotiated between states, military brokers, local communities, and families rather than simply imposed through coercion, while highlighting the often overlooked roles of women, non-combatants, and military entrepreneurs. Drawing on multilingual archival research and a transimperial and multiscalar approach, the book uses Southeastern Europe to rethink broader relationships between empire, nation, militarization, and the transformation of wartime and post-war societies.

Jovo Miladinović is a historian at the University of Konstanz working on Europe and the Mediterranean from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His research combines global military, transimperial, maritime, and environmental history to explore how empires mobilized people and resources, governed borderlands, and shaped processes of empire- and nation-building.