We are deeply saddened to report the passing of our colleague Miroslav Svirčević, whose work we have been privileged to publish in the past, and whose last article, “Serbian Radical Party 1881–1903: Ideology and Its Sources,” appears in this issue of Serbian Studies. Read the full issue here.
Born in Belgrade in 1970, Dr. Svirčević attended high school in Pančevo and completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Faculty of Law at the University of Belgrade. There he achieved an average of 9.80 and was awarded an internship at the prestigious Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., in 2009. His Master’s thesis, The Dawn of Democracy in Westminster, and his doctoral dissertation, Development of Local Government and the Development of the Modern Serbian State, were published in 2001 and 2011, respectively.
Dr. Svirčević’s professional appointments included that of Research Associate at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in which capacity he investigated the influence of Western European ideas on the development of legal and political institutions in Serbia and other Balkan countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also pursued studies of the development of modern libertarianism and the Austrian school of economics. A dedicated and tireless scholar, Dr. Svirčević published dozens of scientific papers in national and international journals, as well as reviews and articles. He was a participant in numerous winter and summer institutes, scientific symposia, and congresses on Balkanology and Libertarianism in Serbia and abroad.
Dr. Svirčević passed away on August 10, 2014