About the Project
This website is part of the project Advancing Serbian-Albanian Friendship: Making Available Joint Educative and Reconciliatory Content via Multilingual Portal, The project is implemented by the NGO Aktiv from Kosovska Mitrovica and Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory from Belgrade, in cooperation with the European movement in Serbia, with the support of the Swiss Embassy in Prishtina. This website has been initially launched in 2019 a part of the initiative “Towards the Politics of Serbian-Albanian Friendship“ of the European Movement in Serbia and IFDT, realized through support from the European Fund for the Balkans. This initiative presented a final phase of an ambitious wider project „Democratization and Reconciliation in the Western Balkans“ that has been implemented in 6 countries of the region.
Within this project, in 2019 a short book about love and friendship among Serbs and Albanians, called When Serbs and Albanians Loved Each Other, has been published in Serbian and Albanian. Its contributors were reputed local intellectuals (http://www.emins.org/en/event/book-presentation-when-serba-and-albanians-loved-each-other/). This book has been published in 30 000 copies and distributed free as a supplement to the daily newspapers Danas in Serbian and Koha ditore in Albanian.
The aim of the current project is to contribute to reconciliation between Albanians and Serbs by providing an open access online web portal that will provide comprehensive visual, textual and documentary knowledge on Serbian-Albanian relations, which will be available in 3 languages: Serbian, Albanian and English. The portal is designed to challenge currently entrenched hostile perceptions through presenting stories about persons and events which tell different stories from the commonly present, offering evidence of cooperation and collaboration.
This website contains a large open-access internet database that provides comprehensive textual, visual and documentary knowledge on Serbian-Albanian relations, and contains material in 3 languages: Serbian, Albanian and English. The information available on this website have been presented within 6 basic segments:
1) Books about Serbian-Albanian relations, including over 50 full-length publication available either in full or in part, among which particular attention is given to those publications that have an affirmative or reconciliatory character;
2) List of several dozen Serbian and Albanian authors, mostly younger or middle-aged, all residing in the region and who were recently or are currently writing on or researching Serbian-Albanian relations;
3) Articles of the said authors, which includes several hundreds of publications (mostly scientific or popular articles) from all fields and aspects of Serbian-Albanian relations;
4) Video database containing the interviews with 12 prominent Serbian and Albanian intellectuals, who offered their views on the topics regarding the possibilities of historical reconciliation, friendship and improving cooperation between Serbs and Albanians;
5) A segment Serbian-Albanian dialogue that contains a rich material published in the media in Serbian and English from 2018 to date. These texts follow the developments within the Serbian-Albanian dialogue, i.e. negotiations between Serbian and Kosovo officials regarding the final and overarching political solution between them.
6) Various archival material, like well-known documentaries or movies, TV content and the like.
This portal is designed to challenge currently entrenched hostile perceptions by offering comprehensive knowledge about persons and events which tell a different story than commonly heard nowadays, about love and friendship between Serbs and Albanians, and making them accessible to a wide audience.
We aim to show that beyond the hostilities between the Balkan nations, there resides a plethora of common undertakings and experiences which can lead to friendlier relations between the nations. Hence, we purport to offer a number of examples of friendship, cooperation, alternative relations, realized or unfulfilled political projects, that characterizes the Balkan region and speaks alternative stories to the ones too often nourished in the media, education and scholarly discourse, in the West and within the Balkan itself alike.
This database thus contains interviews with representative public figures from the region, educative content on Serbian-Albanian relations, documents and texts of common interest and other related material that we purport to popularize and make widely accessible to the general public, journalists, lecturers and researchers worldwide, and empower them to combat present hostility on a long term basis.