Grammar,context and power: securitization of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade

In the wake of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, right-wing extremists portrayed the event as a threat to public morals, while liberals framed homophobia as a threat to democracy. While these moves managed to polarize and mobilize the public, the government didn’t heed their calls to adopt extraordinary measures. The Parade took place on 10 October and the extremists organized unchecked violent counter-demonstrations. By drawing on Securitization Theory, we triangulate content and discourse analysis to understand why these securitizing moves had a low success. Our analysis shows that although both moves followed the grammar of security, they were only partially embedded into the wider discursive context and were not enunciated by securitizing actors with strong positional power.     

Big dreams and small steps: comparative perspectives on the social movement struggle for democracy in Serbia and North Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a comparative analysis of social movements’ characteristics and capacities to struggle against illiberal tendencies and incite political change in Serbia and North Macedonia. First, we discuss the illiberal elements of political regimes in the countries in question, Serbia and North Macedonia. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview of progressive social movements in the two countries, formed and organized as a response to different authoritarian and non-democratic tendencies. Finally, we point to some differences in their organizing, coalition-forging and issue-defining principles, which, we believe, may help to explain the relative success of social movements in North Macedonia in producing relevant political outcomes, compared to the weak political impact of social movements in Serbia. Empirical data were collected during the summer of 2018 through in-depth interviews with members of social movements in North Macedonia and Serbia.     

The Serbian Opposition and Civil Society: Roots of the Delayed Transition in Serbia

The article discusses the reasons for the ten-year delay in the democratic transition in Serbia, focusing in particular on opposition parties and civil society. It argues that the policy of opposition parties was partly responsible for the failure of an earlier fall of the Miloevic regime. While civil society has been similarly weak and divided, the article details how a number of NGOs proved to be crucial in the coordinated campaign which lead to the overthrow of the Miloevic regime in October 2000.     

Kosovo: Where It All Began

Kosovo, a largely ethnically Albanian province of the Serbian republic, played an important role in Yugoslavia's troubles in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Shortly after Tito's death in 1980, disturbances in Kosovo set the Albanians and the Serbs on a collision course and also polarized the country politically. Ironically, when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in 1991, and as it fell into four years of warfare, Kosovo remained relatively calm. Only after the Dayton peace, in late 1995, did Kosovo's Albanians opt for a militant policy toward the Serbs. Meanwhile Serbs escalated their oppression of the local population. International diplomatic intervention failed to defuse tensions, and ultimately, NATO initiated military action to stop Serbia. NATO prevailed in the seventy-eight day engagement in 1999, while Kosovo acquired greater autonomy and was put under UN protection.     

Modernist nationalism: statism and national identity in Turkey

The year 1989 marked a turning point for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). But unlike other places in the region, that year saw a turn towards growing political conflict which soon led to violent warfare. This paper identifies and discusses three processes that led to this outcome. The first process was the impetus towards reform of the Yugoslav federal state, its political and economic system. The second was the conflict over the future of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije – SKJ). The third was the shifting meanings of ethnic and nonethnic labels and the ways in which putative “national” and “ethnic” interests came to be aligned with specific political options. By the end of 1989 these three processes had come together to spell the end of the SKJ, of the SFRY, and of “Yugoslavism” as a political identity. In their places, ruling parties threatened by changes within their own societies, as well as by pressures created by the 1989 revolutions in the region, resorted to strategies of conflict and violence in an attempt to forestall the kinds of changes and elite turnovers seen in other socialist countries.     

Ending the impasse in Kosovo: partition,decentralization, or consociationalism?

This paper argues that current Western-backed approaches to conflict resolution in Kosovo have failed to alter Serbia's policy toward the region and have contributed to the exacerbation of political tensions between Belgrade and Brussels, while deepening ethnic cleavages between Serb and Albanian communities. While there is no possibility of Kosovo returning to Serbia's control, there is an equal unlikelihood that Serbian-populated regions of Kosovo, especially the north, will submit to Pristina's authority. Most importantly, there is little hope that Kosovo can gain full international recognition and membership in international organizations without a compromise settlement with Serbia. While territorial partition has long been a suggested option, I conclude that the best possible solution for Kosovo, given the positions of all parties involved, is a process of significant decentralization beyond the internationally supported measures in the Ahtisaari Plan. A model of consociational power sharing is one in which Serbian and Albanian municipalities are granted high levels of autonomy similar to arrangements made for Bosnia. While this solution may not be ideal and further weakens central authority, I argue that consociationalism reduces the problems of ethnic conflict, encourages local self-government, and preserves the overall territorial integrity of Kosovo.     

National and ethnic identifications among the Slovak diaspora in Serbia: stranded between state(s) and ethnicity?

Identity has been treated in relevant literature predominantly as a dynamic, fluid, multidimensional, and ongoing process. Currently, identity is viewed as a process, as something achieved, and as a product of social relations. Scholars have acknowledged that members of minorities and diasporas can have very complex multiple identities, which are both dependent on social context and changeable over time. This article explores the national and ethnic identifications of Slovaks living in Serbia. Its main objective is to examine how the members of the Slovak diaspora identify themselves and what kind of national and ethnic awareness and pride they hold. As well, this paper explores their opinions and attitudes on language and cultural identity. This study used a web-based survey and basic statistics. The results of the explorative study indicate that members of the Slovak diaspora living in Serbia have multiple identities that coexist, do not conflict, and vary in their importance for respondents. Distinct national and ethnic identifications are perceived in different ways and have divergent emotional intensities. This study proposes further research on the importance of civic and ethnic values and on different perceptions of identity, citizenship, length of residency, and minority rights for collective identifications of minorities and/or diasporas.     

Memory claims and memory constraints. (Re)negotiating statehood and identities in Serbia

Rather than focusing on often-explored mnemonic practices (memorials, national celebrations, commemorations etc.) the article addresses the role that remembering, as a part of a wider political culture, plays in situations where images of the past are not visible per se, but are implied or even openly invoked to explain and (de)legitimize choices political actors make. By analyzing the interactions of memories and new institutional arrangements related to minority rights in the case of the Bosniak minority in Serbia, the article shows how recollections in political claims and policy-making were used as a medium for negotiations and the contestation of both political interests and competing “group-making projects”.     

'[S]he was Convicted and Condemned'

This paper traces an archaeology of single motherhood, using the disparate examples of the prosecution of infanticide in early seventeenth-century London and the vilification of welfare-dependent single mothers in contemporary western societies, as presented in Slavoj?i?ek's analysis of the cultural logic of late Capitalism. The paper addresses the issues of media representations, the medicalisation of birth, and the defining and containing of the single procreative female before the law. These demonised representations are set against the problematic conservative notions of legitimate maternity and 'the family'. It is argued that contemporary stereotypical assumptions around single motherhood in examples from countries that have inherited their codes of justice from the Westminster system have their bases in early modern English culture and law.