The first working meeting of the research group of the scientific research project The Habsburg Bureaucracy and Local Communities: Counties of Banal Hrvatska (CBC); Zagreb, 12/02/2026
On 12 February 2026, the first working meeting of the research group engaged in the scientific research project Habsburg Bureaucracy and Local Communities: Counties of Banal Hrvatska (IP-2025-02-1386) was held at the Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences, contracted between the Institute and the Croatian Science Foundation for implementation in the period from 29 December 2025 to 28 December 2028. The project leader is Željko Holjevac, PhD, Director of the Pilar Institute
In addition to the project leader, three other historians from the Pilar Institute, ten historians (two of whom are experts in legal history) from other institutions in Zagreb, Rijeka, Varaždin, Bjelovar and Osijek, and two historians from Budapest are engaged in the project.
The project is dedicated to the scientific research of eight Croatian-Slavonic counties in the period from the last autonomous Croatian law on the organization of counties in the Habsburg period in 1886 to the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918. The general goal of the project is to investigate how the bureaucratic apparatus operated in the counties, what effect the management of public affairs had in local communities, and the extent of self-government in the counties at that time. The research focus is on three specific aspects: county civil service (profile and careers of county civil servants), duration and changes in local communities (in areas such as education, health, forestry, construction and similar public affairs in the domain of counties) and county self-government (county assemblies and county legal acts).
The meeting analyzed the dynamics of joint and individual activities on the project, in accordance with the approved work and financial plan: research in archives, libraries, museums or collections in Croatia and abroad, familiarization with key sources and professional literature on bureaucracy, civil servants, public administration and local elites, working meetings and research workshops, trips with a presentation or poster on the project topic to scientific conferences in Croatia and abroad, research data management plan, information and visibility of the Foundation and writing and publishing scientific papers in Croatian A1 journals and/or foreign journals in the WoS and/or SCOPUS databases.
The meeting also accepted the proposed project logo, which will be applied where applicable.
