“How to end a war: the case of the NATO intervention against the Yugoslav Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999.“

The aim of this project is to understand the end of the NATO intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1999 and the end of the Kosovo War.

The primary goal is to study the end of the NATO intervention and of the Kosovo War as a historical event, with its context, causes, and developments, producing new knowledge in the field by adopting new archival sources. The focus is on the strategic point of view of the highest political and military officials of FRY and, to a lesser extent, of their USA and UK counterparts. This ambitious goal is possible adopting of, in the first instance, declassified Yugoslav, USA, and UK state documents.

The secondary goal is to proceed with and develop my current research about the causes of the NATO intervention against FRY in 1999, in quality of CAS SEE fellow (Autumn/Winter 2022).  The core of this part of the research aims to a general revision of the causes of the NATO intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in March 1999.

The utmost importance of this research is to advance the state of the art of the discipline because it will add a contribution to our understanding of the end of the Kosovo War and, more broadly, the dynamics of this conflict.

Moreover, it will add new insight into the unfolding of the political, diplomatic, and military efforts to stop extreme violence in the FRY adopting primary sources that have not yet been exploited by scholars.

Finally, it will offer an updated and reliable background to the current relations between Belgrade and Pristina, in the wider European and world context of international relations and security issues.

PhD in Historical Sciences earned in 2013 from the University of Eastern Piedmont with a doctoral dissertation about the political reforms in Serbia and Yugoslavia and the ascent to power of Milošević during the second half of the 1980s. He holds a MA in International Relations and Human Rights from the University of Turin.

Christian was interning at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade in 2011, while in 2012 he spent a visiting semester at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Christian, who has a strong regional focus on the former Yugoslav region, participated in various international conferences, seminars, and summer schools, and lectured at universities.

Between 2013-2016, Christian has written for: East Journal; Geopolitical Review; Mente Politica; EastWest, Geopolitica – Rivista dell’Istituto di Alti Studi in Geopolitica e Scienze Ausiliarie, European Western Balkans and the LSE blog about Southeastern Europe.

Adjunct Professor of Contemporary History and History of Eastern Europe at the University of Eastern Piedmont 2014-2015.

Among his main research interests, related to the recent past, are the causes of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Kosovo War, and the politics in Serbia in the 1990s, while he is also an observer of the current political issues in the Western Balkans.

Christian has been a CAS SEE University of Rijeka Autumn/Winter 2022 fellow and has been awarded the Visegrad Scholarship at the Open Society Archives, Budapest, 2022/2023, where he is currently conducting his research activities.