Interview with ANASTAZIJA ANTANASIJEVIĆ, ANDRÁS JUHÁSZ, and ISKRA KRSTIĆ

Serbia has been engulfed by a wave of protests since November 2024. The protest repertoire includes university blockades (covering more than 60 faculties in all major universities in the country), mass demonstrations (including the biggest protest in Serbia’s history on 15.03.2025, which gathered hundreds of thousands of people), marches between towns and villages across the country (students traversing the country on foot and on bicycles), door-to-door campaigns (such as the “Student in every village” action). The occasion that unleashed the wave of discontent was the collapse of the canopy of the freshly renovated railway station in Novi Sad on 01.11.2024, resulting in the death of 16 people, and the subsequent violence committed by state authorities against a peaceful assembly to commemorate the victims. Beyond this specific trigger, the underlying reasons for the accumulated anger can be sought in the consistent failure of the political system to address the needs of the Serbian society even to the extent of not being able to guarantee the right to life.

The student blockades represent democratic forms of direct self-governance, organised around plenary meetings – plenums – where plans are drawn and decisions are made collectively. The immediate demands of the protest movement are: (1) publication of the full documentation on the public procurement of the Novi Sad station; (2) trials for those implicated in police violence; (3) release of imprisoned protesters; (4) a 20% increase in the expenditures for higher education. The broader goal – and vision – of the protesters is to fundamentally change the existing system of governance in the country.

We turned to our comrades from Mašina (a Serbian online platform for critical left journalism) with questions about the Serbian experience of translating radical notions of the future into immediate practice today. On 02.04.2025 we held a conversation with Anastazija Antanasijević, a journalist at Mašina and a student at the Department of Sociology in Belgrade; Iskra Krstić, a researcher in critical urban studies, eco-activist and journalist at Mašina living in Belgrade; and András Juhász, a member of Mašina‘s editorial board. This conversation first appeared in our latest edited volume “Utopia and Radical Imaginations“.

Ivan Bakalov: I hope you will allow me to begin with a long-winded question. I was in Mitrovica (Kosovo) a few weeks ago where I visited an anti-fascist monument from the 1970s, it’s on top of a hill right above the town and it’s an avant-garde socialist art that represents two massive concrete blocks supporting a third block on top of them. Arguably it symbolises the unity of the Serbian and Albanian people in the anti-fascist struggle and I found that there is a great tension between the symbolism of this monument and the nationalistic symbolism that is dominating the urban environment on both sides of the river Ibar in Mitrovica. Interestingly, in Novi Pazar – just 50 kilometers and a border crossing away from Mitrovica – the protest movement has recently crossed ethnic lines to unite Serbs, Bosniaks, Roma, Slovaks and others. At the same time there are Serbian-nationalist symbols at some of the rallies and gatherings. So I wonder if the ongoing protests are reproducing the same tension that we see in Mitrovica or are they absolving it? Are they moving beyond it in a new form and in new ways?

Anastazija Antanasijević: Our society has been long fragmented along various lines based on ideology, ethnic background, generation, class and so on. I believe the government has been using this to actually reinforce these divisions, to prevent large scale mobilisation. I think this has been a very important thing until now and I believe that the current protests have managed to bring together people who were previously not in the same political or social spaces and that’s something that I think nobody expected. These protests have basically overcome societal divisions and in a way they have already rebuilt collective solidarity. So that’s something I’d like to point out.

Iskra Krstić: I would add that the fact that people labeled as “different” joined forces in current protests has not been just a populist strategy. It actually does more for this divided and atomised society, in which anomie* has been present for a long time, along with high levels of distrust, than the numerous conferences on tolerance and mutual understanding have done in the last two or three decades because it brings people together around the same problems and it actually allows them to meet.

Many people of different ideological or ethnic backgrounds have for the first time seen each other in person and have found out about their mutual sense of humanity.

We have long lived in a society mediated by the mainstream media and we have long “lived” online. At least for the past 15 years our social interactions, especially after the COVID pandemic, have been mediated by algorithms which basically promote violence, as does the Progressive Party [i.e. the ruling party of Vučić]. For the first time these protests are bringing together people who have been taught to fear each other. This has been accentuated in numerous ways not only through mass rallies, which brought together people from different parts of the country, but also through smaller actions that the students are doing throughout the country, by visiting places that have been completely forgotten by the authorities and by the media. So there’s this running phrase: “They are trying to divide us again, but they will not succeed, because we made peace with each other”. And so for the first time in decades, I see the Hungarians from Vojvodina feel as part of Serbia; and even more importantly, for the first time in decades we witness how the people from Sandžak, the part of the country that is mostly populated by Muslims, say that they recognise themselves as a part of this nation state, disregarding the fact that national symbols (such as the state flag) and even some nationalistic and orthodox symbolism is present at the protest. Maybe on the one hand flags and banners remain in the realm of superficial symbolism, something like a fandom; and on the other hand, and more importantly, students are openly stating that they are reclaiming these symbols through protests. They are giving national symbols a more ethical, egalitarian meaning, “cleaning” them from all the war-mongering that these symbols have been used to represent in the 1990s and also with the Progressives during the last 12 years.

As an illustration of that, the next big student protest will be in Novi Pazar in Sandžak.  It’s a neglected (and repressed) part of the country populated mostly by Muslims, and now everybody wants to go there to express unity and inclusiveness. I witnessed a lot of small testimonies to this overall egalitarian, but also perhaps republican vibe. For example, when we were in Niš in South Serbia I saw some guys who were trying to bring their own issue into the protest by going around with two nationalistic posters and yelling “Kosovo is Serbia! Kosovo is Serbia!”. It was lovely to see that nobody paid any attention to them; the crowd just ignored them and went on with what they were doing. The students also initiated an action called “A student in every village” and they’re going all around Serbia visiting villages, basically doing a door to door campaign to explain their demands to the people, but also learn about local issues. I think we could go on forever with such examples of the most surprising moments which function like some kind of a collective therapy.

András Juhász: Iskra, I think that you made a very good point today when we spoke earlier, saying this is the first time in a very long time that the Serbian flag is bringing people together and not dividing them. And I think it’s a very simple sentence that captures at least a good part of the atmosphere as you could hear from what Anastazija said. I would maybe just add some looming questions. Anastazija maybe has an answer to this, but I don’t know exactly what is the political sentiment towards the national question in today’s student population. I have an understanding of that for my generation and I’m quite sure that it’s different for the younger generation. And I have no idea what the mild to extreme nationalist symbols – what we perceived as extreme nationalist symbols –  mean to students today. Like when you see Chetnik* symbols or religious symbols at the protests, I have no idea what today’s students associate with them, how they relate to them. And I think it’s still an open question what will be the role of nationalism in this political process in the future. To get back to what Iskra said, the current students’ and peoples’ movement is creating the conditions now to redefine Serbian nationalism and to move away from ethnicism. 

AA: I want to just add something to your first question. So I was thinking a little bit about how did we actually come together right now and how did we actually forget about all the labels and all the differences. I think it’s because the students themselves who started the protest actually gave up their own label of students. At first people were kind of surprised why students are protesting for this – or against this if you wish. What was different from the previous student protests is that the demands of the students are now not particularistic, they are not addressing individual problems of students as in the past. Before when students protested, they would protest for themselves, e.g. for lower fees, for higher scholarships, for different models of studying etc. But now the students embrace these totally universal demands that have something to do with every citizen of Serbia and I think after the brief period of surprise, people also recognised this and decided to give up their own labels or so to say their identity. Maybe I’m wrong but it just seems to me that it’s like this.

IB: You anticipated my next question very well because I wanted to draw a line to previous rounds of protest mobilisation that you’ve had in Serbia, e.g. against lithium mining, against gun violence, against corruption. I think all of you in different ways sketched how this new wave of protests is different. But are there also things that have been taken from previous rounds of mobilisation, something that has been learned from them?

AA: Maybe I can give you the view of the students so to say, even though I must say I’m not here on the behalf of the students because I haven’t been authorised by them to act as a representative. We are really strict about talking to the media, so now I’m just speaking in my name.

I’m not sure if we really took something from the past. Okay, we have definitely [taken something], but we thought more about the mistakes of the past, so especially for example when it comes to the protest leadership. That’s something that’s been really important to us since the beginning and that has been very effective for us. There are no leaders of the student protests. So that’s something that we more or less learned from the past. These protests don’t have a person or more people representing them, so in the student protests everyone is equal and there is nobody who is more in the media than others or who is representing himself or herself. So it’s like a collective body which I think is the main difference.

IK: I’ve been active in the protests that have taken place over the last 10 years. Before that I was active in the protests in the 1990s but that’s another story. What I believe I’ve witnessed in the current rising politicisation and mobilisation is the formation of networks of people who are ready to take to the streets and express their political demands. This is particularly obvious if you compare current happenings to the period between the year 2000 and 2010 or 2012 when the larger part of the population became passive due to their disappointment in their own role in the regime change, i.e. from Milošević’s regime to that of the new Liberal Democratic government in the early 2000s. And it’s not because they didn’t want Milošević to step down, but because they didn’t participate in massive rallies throughout the 1990s with the intention of facilitating neoliberal privatisations and their livelihoods taken away from them – which is exactly what happened in the early 2000s. But since 2012-14, roughly, we first noticed several waves of mobilisations around questions of ill-conceived urban development and then since 2016 around environmental issues.  Serbia is plagued with high rates of diseases due to the pollution of air, water, and soil (coupled with neoliberal disinvestment in healthcare). This is something that the people recognised strongly, and which brought them back to the streets.

In larger urban environments such as Belgrade it’s the more “abstract” issues like air pollution that drive mobilisation. In local communities people react to straightforward environmental issues, but also against the developments which harm agriculture and the ability of rural populations to sustain themselves, such as the cases of land-grabbing or water-grabbing. So, what I find most striking is the fact that the very idea of having a right to protest in public space and the idea that you should organise politically (whether you call it “political” or not) became commonsensical in the last decade, after being considered meaningless in the decade before. This renaissance of collective organising is, for me, the biggest takeaway from the previous waves of protest.

And also there’s the technical, operative aspect to it – the fact that people are getting to know each other and are forming alliances, forming relations and socio-political networks through which they share the know-how on how to contest and reclaim the institutions. This is the infrastructure that holds the protests together.

AJ: I will just shortly add that in terms of the ways in which this current movement is tied to the ones before it I think we can see in this movement some strong references to certain moments of [resistance to] Serbian neoliberalism. So although this movement started out with demands, which could be perceived as narrow and not overtly political, as time went by the students started supporting workers and communicating with organised labour. The teachers joined the struggle at great cost to their salaries and maybe even risking their jobs. 

Vučić’s neoliberalism started with the introduction of a new labour code that slashed workers’ rights, and austerity measures that slashed the salaries of employees in most parts of the public sector as well as pensions. The anti-worker and anti-public-sector narrative was already set in motion by the government of Zoran Đinđić in the early 2000s but it was the Progressives [i.e. Vučić’s party] who perfected it. The left in Serbia fought these narratives. We cannot be sure how much of the shift in public perception of labour and the public sector can be credited to the left, but something did change during the past decade and it’s encouraging to see the student movements’ support of workers’ rights and public sector employees.

Furthermore the student movement takes a strong stance against lithium mining. Their position on lithium also doesn’t come out of the blue. As Iskra already mentioned, that is, at least in part, the fruit of a strong ecological  movement. 

Some terms that you can see now being used among ordinary people also demonstrate that there is a continuity between struggles of the last decade. An example of this is “investor urbanism”, a concept developed by the left to describe the type of destructive development such as the Belgrade Waterfront project. In today’s discussions in people’s assemblies this term is being used as part of common sense. I think that there are these continuities that are worth observing and noting down for a better future understanding of what exactly is going on at the moment in Serbia.

AA: I would add something to what Iskra said. What makes these protests different is definitely the rejection of the traditional political elite and their monopoly over decision-making. So the protesters are now practicing different ways of doing politics based on direct participation, collective decision-making, all wrapped up in solidarity.

So basically the movement since the beginning tries to resist being co-opted by political parties or any kind of political pressures from the outside. And the movement in a way defined its own autonomous political vision.

I think that is something that is definitely different. This emphasis on participation, the idea that each citizen can participate and the students demand that the citizens self-organise.

IB: If we abstract from the previous context and just look at the current moment and this autonomous political vision as you called it: what exactly is it? How does it look like and how does it work?

AA: Now I’m thinking of where to begin.

IB: The assemblies maybe?

AA: Well definitely. The student assemblies, we call them plenums or plenary sessions. It’s different from an assembly – and we really like the word plenum or plenary session – because everyone can participate and everyone’s vote and voice is equal. That’s the most important thing. So direct democracy is basically what’s been driving these protests for months.

We have these plenary sessions every day in the faculties and this is the place where we make decisions. However we have teams or work groups that are responsible if there is some more work to do and we actually cannot do it during the plenary session, so they work on an issue themselves. At the plenary session we all collectively decide if [a decision is] good or bad or if we want to do something different and so on. The highest authority here is the plenary session, so that everyone is the highest authority in a way and there are no individual decisions made. And this I think is the key for the success of this for four months. Which is a really long period of time and actually the longest period of student blockades of the faculties ever in our history.

And this experience has been disseminated to the citizens. After so to say perfecting this way for making decisions and participating, the students asked the citizens to do the same and self-organise in their neighborhoods, in their village and their town and try to practice this plenary session in a way that’s good for them and in a way that’s feasible. And the citizens have actually responded after four months of this cross-cutting solidarity, they have done exactly this and the people have been making decisions, they have been talking to each other and that’s something that we wanted from the very beginning. For everyone to participate and for everyone to be able to make decisions about their own lives because apparently the system that we currently live in doesn’t actually work too well. So the students are very hyped up about direct democracy and I believe the citizens are becoming hyped too.

IB: I wonder how things actually look and work like in practice. For example, when you’re voting, are you present in the same space, do you use any technologies, who advances proposals, who determines the agenda? Maybe a few details about the day-to-day running of the plenums?

AA: We’re of course all present in the room and one person gets one vote, you can’t vote for someone else and so on. There are some variations between faculties, for example the Faculty of Philosophy and the other faculties in the humanities have planned recessions every day because they like to talk more. Some other faculties don’t have plenary sessions every day, so it’s just what works best for them. That has been working for four months so I think it’s really fine. We don’t have much technology because we don’t need it I think. We have a team of moderators, there are two people who are talking and actually moderating the sessions and there is one person who is writing down everything that has been said and this person is also writing down all of the decisions. So after every planning session they give us the notes of what’s been talked about in the plenary session. We do have some rules at the plenary session, for example we can’t discuss one topic for more than half an hour and if we do want to discuss it for more than half an hour then everyone has to vote on it. Even though you have the right to talk about every topic, you can’t raise your hand to talk for more than for example five times on a specific topic in order to prevent some people from maybe taking over the plenary session and to make sure everyone has an equal right to participate.

Regarding the items on the agenda, everyone can propose a topic they think would be good to discuss and there is a team of people responsible for writing this down. We have a lot of teams responsible for things. So we write it in the group chat – all of us have group chats on Telegram or WhatsApp but mostly Telegram because you can hide your phone number – you either write it down in Telegram and they write it on paper or you go up to them in your faculty and you say: “I want this to be talked about today”, and they just have to write it and before the beginning of a plenary session we again vote for the topics for the day, so if anyone has anything against the topic they have to say why and then we vote again. There’s a lot of voting.

As for the votes we raise our hands, so no technology, and if it’s obvious the moderators just say if there’s something passed or if it’s denied, then if the vote is a bit close they count hands. However there is this university plenary session, so when it comes to decisions that have something to do with the entire university, for example actions or protests, there is this university plenary session. I believe the Faculty of Electronics have written some Python code that is used for voting which sometimes works sometimes doesn’t, but I guess it’s easier this way. So this is called “VSD” [Veliki Sastanak Delegata, the Great Meeting of Delegates] so this is the only representative body of students, but it’s not representative in a way that these delegates can actually make decisions on this plenary session. We vote in the faculties and they’re just delegating our decisions. Basically they have all the votes for the day and they go to this VSD and they just present the votes of their faculty and then the votes are counted and that’s mostly it. So that’s how we make decisions on a university level.

And we are also in communication with all the universities around Serbia. We are communicating with each other when it comes to protests and actions.

IB: I was going to ask you precisely about this coordination between different plenums. It’s one thing operating within a university, but when the network expands and you have plenums from different universities in the country, perhaps even plenums from different kinds of organizations, how does that coordination work?

AA: Well, most of the organisation is based in a city, so not everything is a question of multiple cities, most things are local. We don’t have any sessions with other universities across Serbia but when something needs to be decided on a country level they have their meetings. So people have meetings and then they go back to the university and the local plenums to say what other students have to say or what they think and then we decide [what to do]. It’s maybe not the best way of communicating but it’s been efficient so far I think. So there is no country plenary session, it’s mostly the university plenary sessions communicating with each other.

IK: I wanted to ask something that I haven’t thought about before. So, the big protests that were hosted by students and in which tens of thousands of people took part in Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac, Belgrade, and now Novi Pazar –  they were hosted by individual universities in these cities?

AA: The local university organises everything and they ask for help. Basically they have a plan for the protest, their faculties made it, they discussed it so we don’t exactly discuss it with them. We can just agree or disagree to participate. And if we agree to participate they tell us what they need, so if they need more people to be protest marshalls they ask other universities. If they need logistical help – people help them with logistics, if they need donations then we help them with donations. For example, a lot of students need to sleep at a faculty when there is a big protest. There was this huge protest in Belgrade on March 15 and we had a bunch of donations of beds and pillows and other things. Now the protest is going to Novi Pazar and the faculty and the University of Belgrade is now donating these beds and pillows, the things for sleeping to Novi Pazar. So this is like a circle of solidarity between the universities even though we don’t make a lot of decisions together.

IK: I wanted to add that students have been organizing plenary sessions since late November, since they began student blockades, but the citizens have only picked this up recently. The students called the citizens to join local assemblies some two and a half weeks ago or so. We’ve only now so far had local assemblies and one so-called assembly dedicated to a particular topic of the so-called “public” (but actually private) bailiffs. But so far to my knowledge – and maybe someone can correct me – no organisations have picked up and tried to implement direct democracy apart from some small political organisations. That said, I need to add that, of course, most of these organizations – so political organisations, NGOs and labour organisations – are still organised in the way they had been organised prior to the protests. And some environmental organisations, such as those in eastern Serbia, meanwhile realised that they had been organised in assemblies all along because they found it to be the most operative way intuitively.

Students are in fact in contact with some of those organisations. I know for a fact that they have some contact with those organisations from eastern Serbia, the Faculty of Philosophy had talks with them, but it’s not like the plenary sessions and the assemblies are now a complete network in which everybody’s participating in. We can only hope that it develops. If you are in favour of direct democracy that would be an optimistic view.

AA: If I may add, technology actually has been a huge factor to this. So even in the beginning for students it was the easiest way to connect through group chats and they’re still connected like that. This is also an important thing for other universities and other cities because even though we can’t see each other every day and hold the sessions and meetings, we can text or have calls and we can actually talk about what our universities have been deciding, thinking etc. So this is a really fast and efficient way of communicating and also I want to add that these citizen assemblies even though the students have only recently asked the citizens to hold assemblies, there has already been between 90 and 100 assemblies. Which is huge.

IK: I participated in a few assemblies in my local municipality, and went to another municipality as a “tourist”. What was really striking for me is the fact that at least those people who were there – and it’s about 1000 people in both places, which is not a small number – were completely in touch with what was going on. They know how they should act: they keep discipline, take turns in talking, use technical things like raising their hands… In [the neighbourhood] Zvezdara in Belgrade they even booed somebody who stated that assemblies are “not a political issue!”; another guy yelled like, “No, no, no, everything is a political issue!”, and I was like: “Yeah, nice, we’re getting somewhere after all…”. From what I’ve seen so far, citizens are eager to adopt the students’ advice on how to move forward, and it was really interesting to see that regular people are willing to do that. Well, at least those who spare their time to be in assemblies now.

AA: Do the people in these assemblies – because I haven’t been to one yet – do they have the hand gestures too? Because that’s another thing I missed about the assemblies, I mean the plenary sessions. We’ve come up with a bunch of rules that make the plenary session more efficient, so instead of clapping when you like something you do like this with your hand [does quick rotations of both hands in upright position] and if you don’t like it you do the same just downwards.

IK: Those are actually hand signs used by the Green Youth, but that’s how things from the civil society get adopted as commonsensical like part of [political] culture.

IB: Yes, I would really like to pick up on that with the gestures as an example of radical imagination for how you can communicate efficiently within the plenary. And there are so many instances of what would seem like radical ideas in a normal political situation that are now actually being practiced. And I can suppose that a lot of this imagination comes from the practice of actually facing specific problems, but I also wonder where else radical imagination comes from? Where does the idea for a plenum come from? You have historical examples like the Occupy movements in 2011, they had attempts at direct democracy, you have Rojava, you have the Paris Commune, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils from 1917. What are the sources of radical imagination, where does it come from?

AA: All the students are aware of the history, very aware, because we didn’t make most of the things up. So the students of humanities and arts, they were in touch with people from previous episodes of student blockades – there were student blockades of faculties in Serbia, Croatia, and in the region before. Even though we could have this word of mouth, so the people could share their experience with the students who are currently studying, but there’s also this book “Blokadna kuharica” [Blockade cookbook] – even though it’s been made fun of in the media and being misused by Ana Brnabić* – I mean it’s a useful book. It’s basically a set of rules on how to make a plenary session from scratch, so this has been very useful and people are very aware of what it is and who made it and they are aware of what direct democracy is and where it stems from.

However the blockades and the protests and the entire movement is not ideologically defined. Even though we use these strategies, we use these ways of organising, people are kind of ignoring this. People are kind of ignoring the history in a way. So we do recognise it – most of the people, because I couldn’t say much about faculties of mathematics and so on, I’m not sure – but most of the students are aware. But the rest of the ideology is just not there so to say. So I mean in the plenary sessions among the students there are people of different political affiliations: some people are left-wing, some people are right-wing, some people are nothing at all, they don’t care for politics but they’re in this. I’m not sure if that answers the question.

IB: This certainly raises a lot of questions, but if we focus on the part which is about how do you learn to imagine political things that are not around you, I think we certainly get a sense. So it’s a patchwork of word of mouth, solutions to practical problems, and reading books.

AA: Yeah there I mean there’s a lot of theory so. I think none of this organizing is really made-up. But one thing that is definitely true is that the students don’t make the same mistake twice. So if something hasn’t worked before or they made a mistake, something didn’t work well, they don’t make the mistake twice. So if something is not working it is changed immediately, so maybe that’s I’m not sure if that’s really imagined, but it’s practical. So it’s not just theory that’s what I’m trying to say. So even though this started based on the theory in these books and other people who had this experience in the past, the students are designing the blockade and they’re organising to their needs.

AJ: I just wanted to ask Anastazija: so this book, this manual for organising which was written I don’t know how many years ago.

AA: In 2006.

AJ: So this, like, really had an impact, it’s something which is widely read among the students?

AA: Well… Widely read, no. However it doesn’t have to be widely read, some people did read it, most people didn’t read it, because it does have like 70-100 pages, something like this. So most people I think didn’t read it. However these principles are not really metaphysical, I mean it’s just a manual, so you can hear about all of the rules in the plenary session, if you didn’t read it. So let’s say somebody has a different idea of how something can work. They present it and say [what they have in mind]. They just raise their hand during the plenary session and ask for something to be different and that’s something that happens every day. So the students keep changing it every day to their needs. And I believe some things from the “Blokadna kuharica” are not the same.

Yeah, they did change a lot of things and in the beginning they did use a lot of things from it, so it’s a mix of being practical and maybe imaginative and just reading a manual.

IB: So it’s like a collective learning process where the efficiencies of communication and participation are exploited by the students?

AA: Exactly.

IB: So students are very good at learning. This is something that you would expect, but I also wonder about the teaching part. This is the part of disseminating these radical imaginations to other parts of society, to these new plenaries that are sprouting up. How do you teach radical imagination to other groups of people?

AA: Well for one thing, most of the students agreed that it’s not efficient or effective in any way to fight with people. So even if somebody is against students or against the student blockades and the protests, the students have come up to, let’s say, an agreement not to fight with anyone, but to try to explain as much as they can. It’s also mentioned in the campaign “Student in every village”, so we like these manuals, we have made several now on how to make an assembly in your neighborhood and so on. But we are also aware that just like the students, some people won’t read it but then comes the face-to-face introduction and there’s a lot of interactions between students and people. So during the protests or coming to somebody’s village during a walk to another city, talking with people – that’s something that’s been most effective. So basically face-to-face conversations with citizens and let’s say setting an example for them. They see how we, the students, are organised and they see how impenetrable the movement is, so that’s another reason why they would organise in a similar way. I don’t know if this makes sense but…

IB: It absolutely makes sense, bring the manual to the people.

AA: Just one more thing, during the walks to other cities the students made little pamphlets with their demands or how to organise and so on. It was easy to read, it was short and they would hand it out to people while walking. So there are different ways, also like the social media campaigns and the students have huge profiles on Instagram and Twitter where they constantly talk about what they do and how they do it, so yeah it’s all over the place.

IK: On the outside it’s been very exciting to see (what I assume is) an exchange of knowledge between students, who are otherwise compartmentalised in their faculties and only learn anything about others’ expertise later in life, if ever. Through Instagram profiles of the faculties in blockades, and through direct exchange, people have now gotten an idea about what somebody from civic construction engineering, architecture, philosophy or political sciences knows and does. The plenums are producing elaborated strategies and manuals on so many issues. For example, they issued analyses and strategic plans for each particular huge protest, with maps and everything. It’s fabulous to witness this in action, all this knowledge from different fields coming together. It might seem time-consuming, but in the end it actually allows a huge movement to act flexibly and react fastly, thanks to having discussed possible scenarios prior to the events. 

This, in my opinion, probably saved lives on the so far biggest protest in Serbian history, on March 15 in Belgrade – because they really organised so quickly against something that seemed like an inevitable catastrophe. To so many of us it seemed like Vučić had firmly decided to provoke and stage violence, and had done all in his power to assure it would happen. 

AJ: The President announced great violence on TV before the protest.

IB: And this is fascinating because the conventional wisdom is that democratic planning is very slow and inefficient, so we shouldn’t use it. But here we have an example of operational democratic decision-making on the ground. According to conventional wisdom it’s utopian to think about democratic self-governance as an efficient way of doing politics.

AJ: I would like to add two no-brainers. Since we have an instance which proves that this direct democracy can work, I think what’s specific about this movement is that the energy of the moment in Serbia inspires people to sacrifice time to do this and probably time is an essential factor for direct democracy.

In a society which would be organised around these [democratic] principles everybody would need to be able to delegate a few hours a day or week to do something like this. And now because the atmosphere is – to use the terms of the protests – “pumped up”* it comes natural to many people that it’s worthwhile to spend 2 or 3 hours of your day meeting with your fellow citizens or students to plan actions.

This is one no-brainer and the other area which I find really important is a very simple one. Anastazija was talking about this face-to-face moment in the collective learning and teaching processes. It’s something that just always proves to be such a powerful aspect. When you look at labour and political organising proper which produces results, it’s again the face-to-face contact as one of the pillars which cannot be substituted by technology and media. And I found it really fascinating and joyful to watch the students who were organising these walks from city to city, passing through small towns and villages. It really seems that this action of meetings face to face en masse between the student movement and the local communities, that this is powerful enough to cut through the ideological crap that is spread all the time through government controlled media.

IK: I also have to add some no-brainers. In hindsight historical events always seem logical and we can establish correlations and causations. But it is in fact a very complicated constellation of elements that allowed this movement to evolve. What I assume as “very logical in hindsight” is to regard faculties and universities as places of labour, and realise that this might have allowed them to become places of organising and politicization. Throughout the 20th century places of labour were the main places of organising and politicization. We have lost this in the meantime, partly because a lot of us don’t even go to our offices anymore, but primarily because labour is fragmented so much and the labour workforce is disenfranchised to the extent that it cannot organise in its workplace. Some theoretised that home overtook the role of primary space of socialisation and politicization, but this didn’t contribute to organising. And, lo and behold, there come the students who organised more or less in their workplace. Because what do they do? Their “job” is to study if you look at it that way. Seems very logical now, but it was completely unexpected just five months ago.

Another thing that we need to keep in mind is the multiplier effect, i.e, the non-students who are invested in the movement, which is a contributing factor, but also as a risk. There are many more people involved in on a daily basis than “just” the hundreds of thousands of students* in the six blocked state universities in Serbia. In order to have so many people involved in daily discussions for five months straight you need to have a mass of people who are providing for them economically (parents, but also all those who donate money and stuff). We can take them into account as a passive part of the movement, a kind of a much needed virtual “liberated territory”, people who are “marked safe from the Progressive party mental influence”. The risk I mentioned comes from the fact that they might be kind of stuck in this position. We might actually have a mass of people who are prevented by their role in the reproduction of the movement to, let’s say – enter a strike (if it’s not a general strike). So, apart from not having good trade unions and good workers’ organising, we also have average earning citizens who literally don’t have any savings, who need to work to invest in all those blankets and equipment and food and stuff needed at the universities. And this is where we find ourselves now, unable to replicate the organising from the students’ “place of labour” to the actual places of labour. And the movement would really need that kind of organising to become strong enough to bring Vučić down, especially under current circumstances, with all the support he has from all foreign political actors.

IB: That’s a great point, thanks for drawing our attention to it. I’ll use this opportunity to transition into the last block of the interview: we’ve talked about the sources of the radical political imagination, we’ve talked about the expressions of this radical political imagination and now we can turn to the implications and the consequences of it. What you raise as a point is how the protest gets reproduced in other sectors of society beyond the university and there have been several instances of solidarities cutting across sectors of society. For example, the teachers’ strike where IT workers collected money to support the ongoing strikes, implying they feel connected to their struggle. I’d be curious to hear if you think this protest is an expression of an unfolding class struggle in Serbia? So is class confrontation the driving force here or is it something that could itself be driven by the protest?

IK: It all depends on whom you ask.

AJ: I think none of us has a ready-made answer for a number of reasons that maybe we can get into. I can start off with a simple situation and then maybe we can think aloud. Very recently, I don’t know if you saw this event, the student movement extended an invitation to trade unions and trade unions replied positively and the five major trade union organisations have so far had two meetings with the students. They came to an agreement to heed the call of the student movement to participate in this political process with their worker-focused demands and these demands so far concerned the law on strikes and the labor law. Both are hostile to the workers’ interest. And so now we have yet to see whether these trade unions are capable of producing some kind of labor organising which we haven’t seen in quite a long time. If this were to happen this would certainly bring in an easily observable class character to the struggle.

But so far we are not there yet. What we did have and still do have is the participation and the consequential sacrifice the teachers are making as they participate with their strike in the current struggle. Their salaries were cut and as you mentioned in your question we can see large-scale solidarity in the form of creating a fund to subsidise the workers salaries that are being cut because of the strike.

IK: There’s a document called “Students’ edict” which was read at the protest in Niš a month ago. I think Anastazija might know more but I assume that the students sat together and voted for the set of points that represent their values or act as a kind of a students’ constitution. This document loosely resembles The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and, although I might not remember correctly, doesn’t touch much on social or economic rights. This disbalance was harshly criticised as an alleged sign that this protest, much like a lot of previous protests, is merely an expression of the interests of the middle class who don’t care about the economic rights because their economic rights have  (again – allegedly) already been established. “It’s only about the rule of law, and the same applies to some of the students’ demands which also are in the realm of the rule of law”, the critics would say.

But I think that in order to understand where this came from we need to take into account two things. One is that the problems the Serbian population faces go beyond the middle class’ demands of the rule of law or the working class’ fight for economic rights. We live in a kind of a non-declared civil war. People are getting killed by semi-legal construction works, run over by drunken military officers, drugged state officials and corrupted media workers; stabbed by knives, decimated by pollution, and no one is ever brought to the face of justice for those crimes. This has been going on for years. So the students said – Okay, let’s draw a line and first establish that we have a right to live; that we have a right to have a life and our right to live it not only as subjects of material exchange. Because for 25 years we’ve only been fed vulgar materialism. That’s why, in my opinion, when they express their demands, they are assuming that we already live in a world where material interests are acknowledged, and it’s assumed that every individual has a material interest. It is in such circumstances that they’re saying: “No, but we also need to be alive and also have a right to think, emancipate and to organise”.

Also, I don’t think that they can do everything all at once. Now when they have contacted the trade unions and the people from different movements, maybe the idea that you need to fight for economic rights will become a more prominent part of the struggle and maybe the plenary sessions will also acknowledge that you can fight for material rights – and avoid being accused that somebody is paying you to do what you’re doing. Because the regime has successfully defamed many organizations and movements by claiming that their actions were paid by foreign actors. Like Anastazija pointed out, students are choosing deliberate tactics to avoid the well-known traps. Obviously a lot of people will say that the students themselves are middle class just because they’re educated, but that kind of thinking is outdated.

Just to add, Serbia is such a polarised society. I like a take of a colleague who said yesterday that there are only two classes in Serbia: one is the ruling class of those who stole everything and everybody else is the subordinate class. Socio-economic inequalities in Serbia are among the highest on the continent.

IB: I find this remarkable because it’s kind of by implication that there is a class character to this protest. It’s by implication of democracy not being compatible with this level of social inequalities in society: if you have all of the resources concentrated in a small group of people how would it be possible to have a parliamentary democracy at all? So by questioning the capacity of this existing political model of producing democracy, by implication you’re also inferring that there is a problem with the class structure of society.

AA: Just like Iskra said, most of the student demands and the movement itself and why all of this came to life is the question of having a right to live and everything else comes second. But there are traces of class consciousness I think in the movement, they are not even below the surface. The fourth demand of the students is to raise the budget for universities by 20%, so this is the only demand that has a class connotation to it. But we have also been in contact and in touch with workers a lot and they are a big part of the movement, so I believe there is a – I would say – an underlying tone of class consciousness but I think it especially shows in the fourth demand.

But I would say currently the focus is more on the power. So once the power is distributed differently I think we can talk about class a bit more. This is why the students keep saying they don’t want the fall of Vučić or anything like this because to the students it really doesn’t matter who is in power, but how the power operates. So this vision actually goes beyond reform; it actually imagines a fundamentally different political reality. If we actually succeed in something like this we can talk about class as much as you want, but that’s maybe the first step at least from the students perspective.

IB: Thanks! Perhaps it makes sense to take a step back and pick up on something that you said Anastazija: it doesn’t matter who is in power and with this you’re highlighting how the political imaginaries of the protest movement are disrupting the conventional political common sense – and I’m borrowing here from Saša Savanović’s article from today who talks about this established image of the two Serbias. Politically speaking you can either be a nationalist or a liberal, you’re either in power or in opposition. But the protest seems to be disrupting this worldview, so if neither of these images apply, what is it actually? Is it possible to put a name to it?

AJ: At least from the outside what seems clear to me is that this movement, the student part of this movement, thus far is adamantly opposing the political system and is at least with its own practice offering another kind of political practice. And I like the phrasing you used that there is a class question by implication, I think that pretty much captures the current state of things. And so far to me it doesn’t seem that there is a label that can be put on what is being imagined as something that should replace this political system or replace more than just the political system. And the whole process from the beginning to me seems very open. When it started, I think somebody already mentioned this, a lot of things weren’t really foreseeable, nobody would suggest that it would grow so strong, that it would last so long as it has already lasted, that it will expand from those very first demands in its political narrative to this moment where it is now. Because, you know, in the beginning we had statements like: “We don’t have anything to do with politics”, not even so long ago a student from the Faculty of Political Science (Belgrade) said: “We don’t care about politics”, and then three weeks go by and you have the student movement offering manuals to and calling on citizens to organise into plenary sessions.

So I think there is a lot of life in it and openness towards new moments. But I don’t see any defined ideas emerging, like we are striving for socialism or something like that.

IK: I think I agree with what András said and I think that this will remain true even if the movement faces failure in terms of its demands or the implied change of political power or political system. Even if this seed doesn’t grow into a fully developed plant, it still is what it is. It is still a completely new form and really for us a time not only of collective catharsis but of political liberty. Exactly because we don’t know what the next step is.

As a side note, sometimes it’s really hard to say if the regime is scared of this citizen-student movement, or completely untouched by it. Two hours ago the police apprehended a professor who organised one of the aforementioned IT platforms for solidarity contributions for the workers in education who had lost their pay. He tried to enter Serbia regularly, he lives here, and now he’s in custody. And we don’t know does it show that the regime is really frightened and defensive and now it’s using its power recklessly or just that we are basically Belarus now? Right now nobody knows, because it also depends a lot on the external context. 

I don’t think that this amount of repression would have been tolerated by the European Union in a candidate country five years ago, before Ukraine and Gaza. Now anything goes, the threshold for tolerable repression and violence has changed. It’s as if the EU goes: “So what, some guy was arrested or some innocent professors have been in jail for four months –  who cares? I mean, what, no mass murders? It’s okay”.

IB: I would like to pick up on the external implications of the protests but before that I’m also curious to hear what Anastazija thinks about this point.

AA: Well the student movement from the beginning wasn’t defined in any ideological or political way. Okay, maybe as political, but not ideological. And this is the main reason why they gain the trust of so many people and why and how they got so many people from different parts of the political spectrum or ethnicity or age or whatever to come together. So another thing now at this point after four months of protests and an apparent need to politically articulate what we are doing, the students don’t want to do it because the students feel like it’s not solely their responsibility to make decisions for an entire country. What the students have been doing and are still doing is making a platform for other people to organise themselves. One part of it is asking the citizens to gather into assemblies in their neighborhoods. Basically the students feel like they shouldn’t present an idea of how this crisis should be solved, because this is a question for all of the citizens. And this is the foundation of the movement: bringing the politics from the elites to the ordinary people. This is why the students don’t want to act as another leader. The people have been asking the students to make the next move, to tell them what to do and so on, but the students keep refusing and keep telling the people they should do it, that we should all do it, right?

IB: This is just me trying to make sense of the situation so please correct me where I’m getting things wrong. So disrupting this conventional wisdom that you are either with the liberals or with the nationalists either with the ruling regime or with the opposition, it’s not about this horizontal political institutional image, it’s no longer horizontal confrontation, it’s vertical. And the students are disrupting this worldview by showing an alternative political image, they’re inviting other people to sit down and think about what it means and how the situation is to be solved. And this is a very powerful dynamic and it seems that it’s not only applicable to the domestic political compass. It also applies to the new geopolitical configurations, because – especially countries in Eastern Europe – we are always told we are faced with this civilisational choice and we have to choose this or that; or it’s a geopolitical story where we have to pick a side in this geopolitical clash. And the student protest seems to be disrupting that image as well, because it’s neither here nor there. It’s again not about this horizontal clash between the centers of power, but it’s about this vertical contestation that runs across borders. It again does not have a defined articulation, but it’s a very powerful image that disrupts the established political imagination. And I realise I may be forcing certain ideas on you, but I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on the external political implications of the protests.

AA: Well for one thing, since the beginning I can say that the students have been avoiding them like hell, they’ve been trying to remain as independent as possible, literally ignoring geopolitics as a thing. I think that was really important in the beginning to gain the trust of people. And actually I’m not sure if the students were aware of what they were doing, but by rejecting all of this the political parties, the geopolitical situation, and the divisions between the West and the East and so on, they have done exactly what you said they changed the entire view. So by this the students together now with the citizens have sort of created or imagined different and maybe autonomous political reality. So they’ve been trying to create something that doesn’t depend on anyone else, something entirely local so to say.

IB: Thanks for the insight. Maybe I can rephrase the question in terms of this contradiction: globally speaking we seem to be receding to imperialism as a stage of capitalist development in global politics with different imperial centers contending for influence. How do you practice another kind of vision of the future in the context of a world that is going back in time?

AJ: In terms of this movement I don’t see any discussion happening on this level. I don’t see discussions happening on questions that are relatable to geopolitics or to imperialism. And in fact the only thing that comes to my mind that has an international dimension that is not locally oriented is this message that is being carried to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. 

AA: But there were a lot of conflicts when it came to this, because this idea came from the University of Novi Sad, not from other universities so I couldn’t say it’s the wish of the entire country, of all of the students. It was just Novi Sad and some other faculties and universities maybe agreed to it or they also thought it was good, but some other faculties didn’t so there’s a bit of a division between faculties when it comes to this question of going to Strasbourg.

However there was a letter to students around the world which was maybe the first communication to other countries from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. I’m not sure if you’re aware of it but it was a call to action to students all around the world and it was a call to self-organise and practice direct democracy across the globe. So it was actually kind of interesting (though it was just the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, some faculties shared this letter, most of them didn’t) because it was the very beginning, just one month into the blockades and the students saw that the Faculty of Dramatic Arts already had this huge idea of like an international revolution or something like that. But yeah after this I think the students kind of went a step back and decided only to focus on the situation in Serbia without any connections to other influences. Although there is a regional solidarity, so if the students are connected with anyone in the region, there is communication with the region and it’s like a shared struggle, yeah.

IK: I might add that there was also one conflict at the Faculty of Architecture that is descriptive of what we’re talking about. The technical faculties in the 1990s had a large banner that said “Belgrade is the world”. It was made in opposition to the then isolationist politics of Milošević’s regime. At the beginning of the current protests the students of the same faculty made a replica of this banner that was very popular in 1996-1997, the new one saying that “Belgrade is once more the world”. I remember being part of these demonstrations in the 1990s and I cried my eyes out when I saw this. For a lot of people back then this meant we’re against war, we’re for pacifism, we’re for what we then perceived the West to be – including the welfare state which already didn’t exist at the time. But it turned out that a clash erupted at the Faculty of Architecture around the new banner because some people pointed out that the world isn’t what it used to be, so that Belgrade and Serbia shouldn’t make such references. Their view on the matter was that Belgrade shouldn’t try to take sides and be the “world” – the “world” basically meaning the western world, the western democracy, the European Union – because since the 1990s the European Union has become something very different, something largely influenced by the right-wing groups and something that has an openly colonial stance towards Serbia. To put this in context I need to mention that last year we witnessed EU officials bluntly saying that Europe needs Serbia’s lithium.

Such gestures and such actions towards Serbia have contributed significantly to turning what used to be maybe a quarter or a third of the population who were always Eurosceptic and in favor of BRICS or Russia or whatever, into more than 50% of the nations’ population who now don’t want to be a part of the European Union. 

There’s a lot of debate now around these questions, around the fact that there are no EU flags at the protests. Those actors who are both pro-EU and pro-lithium mining interpret this entirely as a sign that the protesters are completely conservative; assuming on the same breath that if you’re not for the European Union you’re probably pro-Putin. I beg to differ. I’m certain that for the majority of those involved this is not the case, for historical and contemporary reasons. 

In the past several years the European Union has taken its gloves off and says “we need to militarise, we need to act as a military power”; Macron for three years now keeps saying that France needs a wartime budget, etc. This isn’t a promotion of human rights, and it certainly isn’t something that’s fallen on deaf ears here in Serbia. And then there’s mining. Serbia already gave mining rights in Vojvodina to the Russians and Eastern Serbia is more or less bought by the Chinese; they are not perceived as friendly, but these deals are done and probably can’t be undone. The people are now trying to fight against the new mines, of which there might be as much as 40 planned across the country. They are mostly in the hands of western corporations. With that in mind I would state that these protests have an implied anti-colonial and anti-globalist character.

We have a large migration outflow, but for the first time in years we heard students saying that they want to stay. To me this implies that a lot of students are aware that the world isn’t what it used to be and that it’s not so easy to move. If they move to Trump’s USA, it’s not the same now as moving there in the 1990s was. Perhaps this motivates them to stand their ground and fight for their future here, for their right to stay put. This is something that is also a very interesting contradiction in terms of culture, because these protests are obviously hyper-modern in the way they try to cut all ties with everything that was before. So, we have this pronounced modern (in the strict cultural sense) approach of cutting ties with all past, and at the same time an anti-modern aspect of it in it being anti-globalist. That’s why it’s so complicated to see what happens next. Except if we’re just colonised and killed, I mean that’s always an option.

IB: This was some transition from “Beograd is the world” to the dark tones of “being colonised and killed is always an option”. Where does this leave us with the future imaginaries opened up by the protest movement?

IK: Milo Rau, the director of the Vienna theatre festival, gave a speech in Belgrade a few months ago and later issued an open letter to the Austrian right-wingers with a Spartan saying “Molṑn labé”: “Come and get it – of you dare”. This is a kind of a pessimistic-optimistic, Stoic stance. This is maybe something that we will be experiencing in the world in the coming years.

AA: I would also say it’s kind of pessimistic-optimistic every day.  This has been going on for four months intensively, but the atmosphere and people being displeased with the situation in Serbia – that has been going on for years and years. So now after these intensive protests and so much energy involved, so much high hopes, so much trust, and ambitions – if this fails you can call anything after this a failure if we don’t change the entire system. So if this fails in any way I think that people will be so discouraged and so hopeless after this that [it would be terrible]. A lot of my colleagues have been saying for the past month or so that if the protests fail and everything goes back to the same, they will go somewhere else, they will move out of Serbia for good. Because these people were those who didn’t want to move, so this is the intellectual elite of Serbia, the people at the faculties who didn’t want to move from Serbia but after this after so much energy involved after dedicating their entire lives to these blockades – some people actually live in the faculties, they sleep there, they eat and take their shower there. After this they might actually move.

So that’s the pessimistic part of it but the optimistic part is that I believe that we have been really laying the ground and a base for a different political reality.

We have destigmatised some ways of organising, so if you would have said self-organising two years ago or five years ago you wouldn’t get a positive reaction of any kind. But now this has become the new normal. So I think we really did make a new normal and that’s a start. We might have another chance after this to actually make something different.

AJ: In a certain sense there is nothing pessimistic about it because it’s after so many years of neoliberalism, of devastation done by the government, of an unpopular parliamentary opposition, and widespread political apathy in the larger part of the population, you have this moment when politics all of a sudden comes alive again. The atmosphere in the streets is often breathtaking. Even if the movement fails, it’s still in a sense purely optimistic because at least over these months there is a really, really strong struggle which is – I completely agree with Anastazija – is setting the stage for something radically different than what we had before. 

IB: Thank you so much for your insights and inputs and for your time. I would propose we end the interview on this positive note.

Cover image: Ivan Bakalov.

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