Sources — Yugoslavia

General works

Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The standard single-volume history, covering both Yugoslavias. Start here.
Djokić, Dejan, ed. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992. London: Hurst, 2003. On the idea itself, which is the thing most accounts assume rather than examine.
Calic, Marie-Janine. A History of Yugoslavia. Trans. Dona Geyer. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2019. The best recent survey, strong on the economy and on the social history.
Malcolm, Noel. Bosnia: A Short History. London: Macmillan, 1994. Written during the war, explicitly to demolish the ancient-hatreds thesis. Polemical, well-evidenced, and contested in Serbia.
Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Tanner, Marcus. Croatia: A Nation Forged in War. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Chapters I–III

Banac, Ivo. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. The foundational study of how the first Yugoslavia was assembled and why it did not work.
Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945. 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, 2001. The definitive account of the occupation, the Ustaša state and the Chetniks. Two enormous volumes and worth every page.
Hoare, Marko Attila. Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941–1943. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Ramet, Sabrina P. The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918–2005. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Đilas, Aleksa. The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Chapters IV–VII

Đilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger, 1957. By the vice-president who became the most famous dissident in the communist world for writing it, and went to prison twice.
Đilas, Milovan. Wartime. Trans. Michael Petrovich. New York: Harcourt, 1977. The Partisan war from inside the leadership, including Sutjeska.
Woodward, Susan L. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. The best book on how the economy actually worked and why self-management produced the outcomes it did.
Rusinow, Dennison. The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948–1974. London: Hurst, 1977. Contemporary, sympathetic and extremely well informed. The best account of the system as its participants understood it.
Pirjevec, Jože. Tito and His Comrades. Trans. Emily Greble. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. The best modern biography, built from newly available archives.
Ivanović, Vladimir Unkovski-Korica. The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito's Yugoslavia. London: I. B. Tauris, 2016.

Chapters VIII–X

Silber, Laura, and Allan Little. The Death of Yugoslavia. London: Penguin/BBC, 1995; rev. 1996. The book of the BBC series, built from interviews with nearly every participant while they were still willing to talk. The single most valuable source on the dissolution.
Woodward, Susan L. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington: Brookings, 1995. Argues that international policy and the debt crisis did as much as nationalism. The most serious structural account.
Glenny, Misha. The Fall of Yugoslavia. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1996. Reporting from the ground as it happened.
Gow, James. The Serbian Project and its Adversaries. London: Hurst, 2003.
Honig, Jan Willem, and Norbert Both. Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime. London: Penguin, 1996.
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). Srebrenica: A 'Safe' Area. Amsterdam, 2002. The Dutch official inquiry, which brought down a government. Exhaustive and freely available online.
Independent International Commission on Kosovo. The Kosovo Report. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. The source of the illegal but legitimate formulation.
Judah, Tim. Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Memory

Kirn, Gal, and Robert Burghardt. “Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Hybrid Memorial Architecture and Objects of Revolutionary Aesthetics.” Various, 2012–. The corrective to the mysterious-concrete-objects reading of the spomeniks.
Niebyl, Donald. Spomenik Monument Database. London: Fuel, 2018; and spomenikdatabase.org. Several hundred monuments documented with the specific history each one marks. Take it with you on the third route.
Kempenaers, Jan. Spomenik. Amsterdam: Roma, 2010. The photographs that made them famous, and which are the thing the two entries above are arguing with.
Volčič, Zala. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1 (2007): 21–38.
Ugrešić, Dubravka. The Culture of Lies. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. London: Phoenix, 1998. Essays by a Croatian writer driven out of Croatia for refusing the national line. The best writing on what nationalism did to ordinary language.
Drakulić, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague. London: Abacus, 2004.

The record

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Case records, judgements and transcripts, 1993–2017. Icty.org. 161 indicted, 90 convicted, and a public evidentiary archive of several million pages. The nearest thing to established fact that this subject has.
The Death of Yugoslavia. BBC television, 1995. Six parts. The interviews behind the Silber and Little book, with the participants on camera. Available in full online.
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Memorandum (draft), 1986. The document usually identified as the intellectual charter of Serbian nationalism. Leaked rather than published; read it before accepting anyone's characterisation of it.
The Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1974. The decentralisation that made the federation ungovernable after Tito, and the autonomy for Kosovo that Milošević revoked in 1989.
West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. London: Macmillan, 1941. Twelve hundred pages of travel writing from 1937, magnificent and deeply partial towards the Serbs. Read it as a period document, not a guidebook.
Andrić, Ivo. The Bridge on the Drina. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. London: Allen & Unwin, 1959. The Nobel laureate's novel of four centuries at a bridge in Višegrad. The best single book for understanding what a mixed Bosnian town was.