Generative Contradictions, Unfinished Worlds: Post-Yugoslav Youth Imaginaries from Ljubljana and Beyond

This paper examines how internationally exposed post-Yugoslav youth imagine futures shaped by inherited uncertainty, digital transformation, mobility, and semi-peripheral constraints. Drawing on two exploratory focus groups, it identifies twelve provisional imaginaries structured by contradictions between roots and routes, commons and commodities, possibility and determinism, knowledge and epistemic drift, accumulation and survival, and periphery and agency. Participants imagine personal advancement alongside collective decline, digital opportunity alongside exhaustion, and mobility alongside unresolved belonging. The paper calls for policies that connect individual opportunities with social infrastructure, meaningful participation, regional cooperation, and stronger forms of collective attachment.