FRIEND AND HONORARY CITIZEN OF SARAJEVO Ivo Banac, historian, politician and writer, passes away

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - Historian, politician and writer Ivo Banac passed away today after a severe illness at the age of 74, Index learns.

Banac was a professor emeritus of history at Yale University, where he served two terms as Master of Pierson College.

He served as Minister of Environmental Protection and Spatial Planning in the Government of the Republic of Croatia (2003), President of the Liberal Party (2003–2004), and a member of the Croatian Parliament (2004–2007).

Born in Dubrovnik, studied in New York

He was born on March 1, 1947, in Dubrovnik. He studied at Fordham University in New York and earned his master's and doctorate at Stanford University.

From 1975 to 1977, he was an assistant at Stanford University and San Francisco State University, then an associate professor until 1982, an associate professor until 1988, and then a full professor of history at Yale University.

From 1995 to 1999, he was a professor of history at the Central European University (CEU), holding leadership positions such as director of the Institute for Southeast Europe.

Since 2008, he was a full professor of history at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and from 2018, he was a mentor professor for doctoral students in history at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb. He was also an honorary head of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology (SSST).

Recipient of numerous awards

He was the author and editor of numerous books, articles, reviews, contributions, opinions, and interviews. Among the most significant are the monograph The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (1984, awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for the best North American book in Russian and East European studies published in 1984) and the study With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in the Yugoslav Communist Movement (1988, awarded the Josip Juraj Strossmayer Prize for the best book in social sciences published in Croatia in 1990).

Banac was co-chairman of the Open Society Institute – Croatia, a member of the presidency and president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, general director of the Inter-University Centre for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, and chairman of the council of the Vlado Gotovac Institute. He was also editor of prestigious scientific journals, such as East European Politics and Societies, and has been a corresponding member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1990.

He has been an honorary citizen of Sarajevo since 2004.

For the last ten years, he maintained the Yale University Summer School in Dubrovnik, writes Index.hr