Eric Gordy

Eric Gordy is a political and cultural sociologist concentrating on south-east Europe, especially the states of the former Yugoslavia. His first book, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives, represented an effort to offer an understanding of nationalist-authoritarian government and its staying power that concentrated not on political leaders and preconceived “ethnic” categories, but on the experience of everyday life, blockage and distraction under conditions of constraint.

This bottom-up approach to large-scale political events was developed further in Guilt, Responsibility and Denial: The Past at Stake in Post-Milošević Serbia, which explored ways in which dialogue about public memory and understanding of the wars of the 1990s both moved forward and met obstacles, and both efforts at opening discussions of memory and efforts at denial were transformed in response to ongoing events.

He coordinated and acted as principal investigator for the research project INFORM: Closing the Gap Between Formal and Informal Institutions in the Balkans, which has been funded with 2.3 million Euros by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research programme. Involving a network of 40 researchers in 9 countries, the project probes the limitations of legal and structural reform, investigating ways in which people have blocked, circumvented and otherwise tried to cope with transformations directed from above in both the Communist and neoliberal periods.