engleski

Unsettling ‘the urban’ in post-Yugoslav activisms: ‘Right to the City’ and pride parades in Serbia and Croatia

In the post-Yugoslav space, activist initiatives have developed at the intersection between ‘transition’, war, authoritarian nationalisms, pronounced urban-rural tensions and contested sovereignties in the form of both state fragmentation and new state building. An overwhelming focus on the ‘transition period’ both distorts and obscures the rich and varied dynamics of activist engagement in some of the main urban centres of socialist Yugoslavia. Even in the context of massive international agency presence and an insistence on the rather unproductive concept of ‘civil society’, itself narrowly reduced to the ‘modern’ NGO, Yugoslav anti-war engagement appropriated and expanded the already existing activist networks created as a result of trans-republican (pan-Yugoslav) political co- operation. However, these emergent movements often changed under the pressure to conform to a particular kind of NGO structure in order to survive in a crowded, donor-driven, environment. In this paper, we explore those initiatives, protests, and, indeed, organisations which attempt to both widen the discursive critique of the current condition and escape from the narrow confines of the NGO shape and form. In doing so, we consider the meanings, narratives, and strategies of three broad movements: for public space and the right to the city ; for a transformation and de- commodification of higher education ; and for LGBT rights. We examine the complex local, regional and global configurations and contestations of these movements, asking about the extent to which they both break free from existing frames of movement activism as ‘anti-political’ and resist the ‘NGO - civil society’ frame as the only meaningful reference point for their self-identity.

Croatia ; Serbia ; urban ; activism ; LGBT

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