Dr. Ivo Pilar was a respected attorney, politician, publicist, sociologist, and is considered the father of Croatian geopolitical science
Dr. Ivo Pilar (19 June 1874, Zagreb – 3 September 1933, Zagreb)
Having studied law in Vienna and Paris, Pilar practiced law in Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Zagreb until his unexplained and controversial „suicide“ in 1933. He was one of the founders of the Croatian National Union for Bosnia and Herzegovina (1907). During the First World War, he advocated for preserving the integrity of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, including the Croatian lands and Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the war, he was an opponent of the Greater Serbian regime and supported the idea of the federalization of Yugoslavia.
In 1910, he published his first significant political brochure, Archbishop Stadler and the Croatian National Community. He considered Bosnia and Herzegovina to be Croatian lands, and saw the solution to the Croatian question as part of a federally organized Habsburg Monarchy in which all Croatian lands would be united (World War and the Croats, 1915; The South Slavic Question and the World War – Die südslavische Frage und der Weltkrieg, 1918; The South Slavic Problem in the Habsburg Empire – Das südslavische Problem im Habsburgerreiche, 1918).
After World War I, he was no longer publicly involved in politics, but he continued to collaborate with leading Croatian politicians, especially members of the Croatian Peasants’ Party. Until the end of his life, he consistently opposed Yugoslav unitarism, as evidenced by his work Always Again Serbia (Immer wieder Serbien, 1933). He devoted a number of works to the economy, particularly banking. He was the first Croatian author to engage with geopolitics (Political Geography of Croatian Lands, 1918) and one of the founders of the Zagreb Sociological Association. He also studied the sociology of religion in depth (Bogomilism as a Religious-Historical and as a Social and Political Problem, 1927), and his works touched on psychology and philosophy as well (The Struggle for the Value of One’s “I”, 1922). He often published under pseudonyms (D. Juričić, L. von Südland, Florian Lichtträger).
The Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences is proud to bear his name.
Pilar Gallery
