Arsenije "Arso" Jovanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Арсо Јовановић; 24 March 1907 – 12 August 1948) was a Yugoslav partisan general and one of the country's foremost military commanders during World War II in Yugoslavia.

Educated through the Yugoslav Royal Army academies, Jovanović was one of the best-educated generals among the partisan forces in Yugoslavia, speaking French, Russian and English.

He was killed by Yugoslav border guards while trying to escape to Romania with two other Montenegrin dissidents, Vlado Dapčević and Branko Petričević, who were captured alive.

Arso Jovanović was born in the village of Zavala near Podgorica, Principality of Montenegro on March 24, 1907,[1] into a family belonging to the Piperi clan.

[3] His father was, until 1910, an officer of the Royal Serbian Army, stationed with the artillery regiment in Topčider, a suburb of Belgrade, capital of the Kingdom of Serbia.

[4] He returned to Sarajevo where he became a commander of the cadet company at the School for Reserve Infantry Officers, until the Nazi German Invasion of Yugoslavia.

Following the breakdown of the front at Sarajevo on April 15, and the entry of a German armoured group into the city, Jovanović did not go forward to support Colonel Mihailović who was being attacked near Derventa.

All fought then in the Royal Yugoslav Army that renounced the country's capitulation to the invaders, and later alongside the partisan units commanded by Peko Dapčević, Vlado Ćetković, Jovo Kapičić and others.

He thought that he would be relieved of duty, but (instead of Captain Branko Poljanac) Jovanović was appointed on December 12, 1941, as head of the Supreme Command of Yugoslavia's partisan forces.

When Joseph Stalin broke with Josip Broz Tito in 1948, Jovanović, along with other political and military personnel sided with the Soviet Union.

[7][8] According to the scholars Vlatka Vukelić and Vladimir Šumanović, in the initial years after the war Jovanović was "one of the most influential and most quoted figures of the restored Yugoslav state" but that after accepting the informbiro resolution in favor of the Soviet Union, he was declared an "enemy of the state" and "was literally cut out of the official Yugoslav account of World War II".