Dušan T. Bataković


Dušan T. Bataković was a Serbian historian and diplomat. His specialty was modern and contemporary Serbian and Balkan history as well as French-Serbian relations. The last post he held was that of Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Biography

Bataković graduated with a degree in history from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy in 1982. He holds an M.A. in history from the same institution. He received his Ph.D. in history from the in 1997 with the thesis La France et la formation de la démocratie parlementaire en Serbie 1830–1914.
Bataković is a specialist for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkan history, as well as for the French-Serbian relations. He has written and published extensively on the modern and contemporary history of Serbia, in particular Kosovo and Albania–Serbia relations, focusing on nationalism, and the origins of religious and ethnic strife. Another area of his research is the impact of communism on the contemporary history of Serbia, Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Bataković writes in Serbian, English and French and his bibliography includes dozens of historical monographs, edited volumes and more than a hundred articles published in various languages.
Bataković is also the author of the historical TV documentary Crveno doba, which aired on Serbia's public broadcaster, RTS, in 2004. Combining testimonies of witnesses with historic narrative the film was the first to open the question of the crimes of the communist Yugoslav authorities against their political and class enemies in post-World War II Serbia and Montenegro.
In October 2005 Bataković became Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and editor-in-chief of the Institute's annual Balcanica journal as well as of its Special editions. In October 2008 he was elected president of the Serbian Committee of AIESEE.
In 2010 Bataković was elected fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Parallel to his academic life, Bataković also pursued a career in politics and diplomacy. As the president of the Council for Democratic Changes in Serbia, he campaigned against Slobodan Milošević. He advocated for cantonisation of Kosovo as the solution to the Kosovo crisis.
in the late 1990s. From 2001 to 2005 he served as Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the Hellenic Republic. In July 2005 he became Advisor for political issues to the President of Serbia Boris Tadić. In that capacity he became a member, in November 2005, of the Serbian negotiating team at the UN-sponsored talks on the future status of the province of Kosovo in Vienna. He was a head of the Serbian Delegation at the International Court of Justice, regarding the advisory opinion on Kosovo status.
Bataković was appointed Ambassador of Serbia to Canada in July 2007 and Ambassador of Serbia in Paris, France in January 2009, where he took office in March 2009 and has completed his mandate in December 2012.
Bataković was reelected Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in February 2013.

Awards and Reception

His decorations include:
In 2006, a study by Frederick Anscombe looked at issues surrounding scholarship on Kosovo which noted that in the 1980s and 1990s Dušan Bataković from a nationalistic perspective published nationalist works on Kosovo that gained generous support. Of those were works such as The Kosovo Chronicles and Kosovo, la spirals de la haine and in all several of those works have been translated into other languages.

Works