Tomislav Dulic

Tomislav Dulić is a historian and professor in Holocaust and genocide studies at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University. His research has a inter-disciplinary character and deals with various aspects of the microfoundations of mass violence, including social and social-psychological processes, perpetrator history and geostatistical analysis (GIS) and social memory. He also regularly teaches on a number of courses at the Master Programme in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Tomislav Dulić's doctorate project dealt with the microfoundations of violence in a number of municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina perpetrated mainly by Coatian and Bosniak fascist Ustaša and Serbian nationalist Četnik formations. His research focus has since developed from an original theoretical emphasis on sociology and social-psychology combined with macro/micro-relations, to an approach that seeks to combine these with theoretical models from the field of “civil wars studies”. These issues have been explored in several articles, including one that deals with how the Yugoslav concept of a “General People’s Defence”, which drew upon the experience of partisan warfare during the Second World War and the Marxist notion of guerrilla warfare first formulated by Friedrich Engels, contributed to the war of the 1990s. A more recent article has dealt with counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare and clashes involving Yugoslav Partisans and Regiment Dänemark of the 11th Waffen-SS Panzergrenadier Division “Nordland” in Croatia during the Second World War. His research interest also concerns memory culture and in particular how historical atrocity influences state- and nation-building processes.

Dulić's current project deals with the fate of some 4,500 prisoners that were sent from Yugoslavia to Norway during the Second World War (some of which fled to Sweden). The project seeks to explore the “institutionalized terror” that takes place in camps, where there often develops a form of social interaction between prisoners and guards. As a result, perpetrator organizations seek to establish a camp system that will prevent cooperation and maintain a psychological distance between perpetrators and victims through a variety of means.