Serbian nationalism in the context of Karađorđe

The Yugoslav coup d'état took place on 27 March 1941 in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, when the regency led by Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was overthrown and King Peter II assumed full monarchical powers. The coup was planned and conducted by a group of pro-Western Serbian nationalist Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers formally led by the Air Force commander, General Dušan Simović, who had been associated with several putsch plots from 1938 onwards. Brigadier General of Military Aviation Borivoje Mirković, Major Živan Knežević of the Yugoslav Royal Guards, and his brother Radoje Knežević were the main organisers in the overthrow of the government. In addition to Radoje Knežević, some other civilian leaders were probably aware of the takeover before it was launched and moved to support it once it occurred, but they were not among the organisers. Peter II himself was surprised by the coup, and heard of the declaration of his coming-of-age for the first time on the radio.

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia played no part in the coup, although it made a significant contribution to the mass street-protests in many cities that signalled popular support for it once it had occurred. The putsch was successful and deposed the three-member Yugoslav regency (Prince Paul, Radenko Stanković and Ivo Perović) and the government of Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković. Two days prior to its ousting, the Cvetković government had signed the Vienna Protocol on the Accession of Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact (Axis). The coup had been planned for several months, but the signing of the Tripartite Pact spurred the organisers to carry it out, encouraged by the British Special Operations Executive.

The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence and insurgencies that took place from 1991 to 2001 in what had been the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFR Yugoslavia). The conflicts both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which began in mid-1991, into six independent countries matching the six entities known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia (now called North Macedonia). SFR Yugoslavia's constituent republics declared independence due to rising nationalism. Unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries led to the wars. While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.

During the initial stages of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought to preserve the unity of the Yugoslav nation by eradicating all nationalists in the governments of the republics. However, it increasingly came under the influence of Slobodan Milošević, whose government invoked Serbian nationalism as an ideological replacement for the weakening communist system. As a result, the JNA began to lose Slovenes, Croats, Kosovar Albanians, Bosniaks, and Macedonians, and effectively became a fighting force of only Serbs and Montenegrins. According to a 1994 report by the United Nations (UN), the Serb side did not aim to restore Yugoslavia; instead, it aimed to create a "Greater Serbia" from parts of Croatia and Bosnia. Other irredentist movements have also been brought into connection with the Yugoslav Wars, such as "Greater Albania" (from Kosovo, idea abandoned following international diplomacy) and "Greater Croatia" (from parts of Herzegovina, abandoned in 1994 with the Washington Agreement).

The term Greater Serbia or Great Serbia (Serbian: Велика Србија, romanized: Velika Srbija) describes the Serbian nationalist and irredentist ideology of the creation of a Serb state which would incorporate all regions of traditional significance to Serbs, a South Slavic ethnic group, including regions outside modern-day Serbia that are partly populated by Serbs. The initial movement's main ideology (Pan-Serbism) was to unite all Serbs (or all territory historically ruled, seen to be populated by, or perceived to be belonging to Serbs) into one state, claiming, depending on the version, different areas of many surrounding countries, regardless of non-Serb populations present.

The Greater Serbian ideology includes claims to various territories aside from modern-day Serbia, including the whole of the former Yugoslavia except Slovenia and part of Croatia. According to Jozo Tomasevich, in some historical forms, Greater Serbian aspirations also included parts of Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Its inspiration comes from the medieval Serbian Empire which existed briefly in 14th-century Southeast Europe from 1346 to 1371, prior to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Some territories intended to be incorporated in the Greater Serbia exceeded the boundaries of the Serbian Empire, however.

Young Bosnia (Serbian: Млада Босна, romanized: Mlada Bosna) refers to a loosely organised grouping of separatist and revolutionary cells active in the early 20th century, which sought to end the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Its members, primarily Bosnian Serbs but also Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats, were driven by various ideologies, prominently Serbian nationalism as well as Yugoslavism, the unification of South Slavic peoples into a single Yugoslav state. The group drew inspiration from a diverse range of philosophical influences, including German Romanticism, anarchism, and Russian revolutionary socialism. Young Bosnia's activities were influenced by historical events such as the Battle of Kosovo and figures like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Romani people in Kosovo (Albanian: Romët në Kosovë) are part of the wider Romani people community, the biggest minority group in Europe. Kosovo Roma speak the Balkan Romani language in most cases, but also the languages that surround them, such as Serbian and Albanian. In 2011 there were 36,694 Romani, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians living in Kosovo. However, the minorities are unrelated to each other and were only put together based on appearance.

Many Romani were targeted by the Kosovo Liberation Army along with Serbs during the Kosovo War as they were considered to be allied with Serbs and Serbian national interests. Romani in Kosovo are much depleted from their former numbers, and have been in both stationary and nomadic residence there since the 15th century. The Kosovo Liberation Army were reported to have expelled 50,000 Romani from Kosovo, forcing them to take refuge in central Serbia, but many of them have since returned to Kosovo.

In the earliest dated samples of statutes and regulations of the clandestine Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) discovered so far, it is called Bulgarian Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Committees (BMARC). These documents refer to the then Bulgarian population in the Ottoman Empire, which was to be prepared for a general uprising in Macedonia and Adrianople regions, aiming to achieve political autonomy for them. In thе statute of BMARC, that itself is most probably the first one, the membership was reserved exclusively for Bulgarians. This ethnic restriction matches with the memoirs of some founding and ordinary members, where is mentioned such a requirement, set only in the Organization's first statute. In fact, the founders of IMRO were sympathetic to Bulgarian, but hostile to the Serbian nationalism, which led them to establish in 1897 a Society against Serbs. The organization's ethnic character is confirmed by the lack of any mention of Macedonian ethnicity. The name of BMARC, as well as information about its statute, was mentioned in the foreign press of that time, in Bulgarian diplomatic correspondence, and exists in the memories of some revolutionaries and contemporaries.

Due to the lack of original protocol documentation, and the fact its early organic statutes were not dated, the first statute of the Organisation is uncertain and is a subject to dispute among researchers. The dispute also includes its first name and ethnic character, as well as the authenticity, dating, validity, and authorship of its supposed first statute. Moreover, in North Macedonia, any Bulgarian influence on the country's history is a source of ongoing disputes and sharp tensions, thus such historical influences are often rejected by Macedonian researchers in principle. Certain contradictions and even mutually exclusive statements, along with inconsistencies exist in the testimonies of the founding and other early members of the Organization, which further complicates the solution of the problem. It is not yet clear whether the earliest statutory documents of the Organization have been discovered. Its earliest basic documents discovered for now, became known to the historical community during the early 1960s.