Responsabilidad social y debate artístico en el día de hoy. Los artistas enfrentados al conflicto armado en la antigua Yugoslavia (1989-2008)

This dissertation is concerned with a period unfortunate for the citizens of former Yugoslavia, but influential for its artists, who used their feeling of responsibility to leave valuable testimonies about their time. The research began in 2007 for the purposes of obtaining an advanced academic degree and was entitled Responsibility of the Artist Facing Social Conflicts: the Case of Yugoslavia (1989–2003). A part of it was presented in 2008, at the Women’s Worlds Congress held at Complutense University in Madrid (in cooperation with my mentor Dolores Fernández Martínez). This dissertation implied a broader scope of research on the topic of Social Responsibility and Artistic Debate Today. Artists in the Face of Armed Conflict in Former Yugoslavia (1989–2008), thus aiming to study the case of Serbian visual artists under Milosevic (1989–2000) and later, during the democratization of the Serbian society. The period in focus ends in 2008, except for the works in the group Monument where it stretches up to 2012.

Rational choice, social identity, and beliefs about oneself

Social identity poses one of the most important challenges to rational choice theory, but rational choice theorists do not hold a common position regarding identity. On one hand, externalist rational choice ignores the concept of identity or reduces it to revealed preferences. On the other hand, internalist rational choice considers identity as a key concept in explaining social action because it permits expressive motivations to be included in the models. However, internalist theorists tend to reduce identity to desire—the desire of a person to express his or her social being. From an internalist point of view, that is, from a viewpoint in which not only desires but also beliefs play a key role in social explanations as mental entities, this article rejects externalist reductionism and proposes a redefinition of social identity as a net of beliefs about oneself, beliefs that are indexical, robust, and socially shaped.