seip8 introduction

7/30/2019 SEIP8 Introduction

1/29


2/29

Southeast European Integration Perspectives

Edited by

Wolfgang Petritsch,former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina

and Special Envoy of the EU for Kosovo

Christophe Solioz,Secretary-General of the Center for

European Integration Strategies


3/29

Bojan Bili

We Were Gasping for Air

[Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy

Nomos


4/29

1. Auflage 2012 Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2012. Printed in Germany. Alle Rechte,

auch die des Nachdrucks von Auszgen, der fotomechanischen Wiedergabe und derbersetzung, vorbehalten. Gedruckt auf alterungsbestndigem Papier.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or partof the material is concerned, specifically those of translation, reprinting, re-use ofillustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying machine or similar means,and storage in data banks. Under 54 of the German Copyright Law where copies aremade for other than private use a fee is payable to Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort,Munich.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation inder Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografischeDaten sind im Internet ber http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the DeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is availablein the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de .

ISBN 978-3-8329-7806-8

This book is published in the framework of a CEIS project sponsored by the LoterieRomande (Geneva), the Karl Popper Stiftung (Zug) and the City of Geneva.


5/29

5

Contents

Figures and Tables 7

Acknowledgements 9

Abbreviations and Acronyms 13

Introduction 17

1. (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Activisms:

Marginal(ised) Phenomena 37

2. Putting (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War

Activisms in Motion 59

3. Crossing the Lines:

Feminist Anti-War Activism 83

4. Recruitment to High Risk Anti-War Activism:

Anti-War Campaign of Croatia 109

5. Between Fragmenting and Multiplying:

Scale Shift of Anti-War Initiatives 137

6. Sustaining Activism beyond Armed Conflicts:

Belgrade Women in Black 159

7. Power in Activism:

Impacts and Meanings of Anti-War Engagement 179

Afterword: Bending the Gaze 199

Selected Bibliography

Appendices205

213


6/29

9

Acknowledgements

Witnessing the disintegration of the country into which he and many of hisfriends invested energy and ideals, Vane Ivanovi, one of the founders of the

European Movement, said that Yugoslavia was created by the best and de-

stroyed by the worst.1

I enjoyed the research which I present in this book

because it provided me with an opportunity to meet many of the former. I

crossed borders smoothly, changed dialects, and talked to some of the great-

est Yugoslav writers, lawyers, architects, philosophers, human rights defend-

ers... I was astonished by their interest in my topic and the willingness to

share their knowledge, books, experiences and emotions with me. Over the

three-year-long fieldwork, I conducted more than a hundred interviews across

the former Yugoslavia and in other European countries. I am grateful to all of

my respondents for such an unambiguous expression of intellectual solidarity

and support. Although I do not reveal their names when giving excerpts from

my lengthy interviews with them (unless they specifically allowed or askedme to do so), I do list all of them at the end of this work as a small acknowl-

edgement of my appreciation (Appendix 1).

This book is a result of my intention to point to Yugoslav anti-war en-

terprises as an alternative history and a knowledge gap in the studies de-

voted to the wars of the Yugoslav succession. I envisioned the pages that

follow as a rostrum, however inconsequential it may be, that has been too

frequently denied to many protagonists of this book socially, politically and

academically. Irritated by an overabundance of (un)intentionally distorted

interpretations with which they cannot identify, some of my interviewees

believed that my research could make a difference. I very much hope that I

have at least to a certain extent risen to their expectations, although I

know that I could not have possibly satisfied all of them.

Since each of us, like anyone else, is already various people, it gets

rather crowded, says Gilles Deleuze in his Letter to a Harsh Critic .2 This

multiplicity of being and the necessity of sharing and co-constructing are

probably nowhere as pronounced as in academic work in spite (or because) of

the solitariness and seclusion which it necessarily entails. At the very early

stages of this research as I was still sharpening my focus I received

valuable comments from: Ana Devi, Chip Gagnon, Stef Jansen, Donatella

1 As cited in (Accessed 12 August2012).

2 Gilles Deleuze,Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 7.


7/29

10

della Porta, Sabrina Ramet, John Keane, Lepa Mlaenovi, Orli Fridman and

Nick Crossley. At later points, I benefited a lot from my encounters and cor-

respondence with: Dragomir Oluji, Boris Buden, Ildiko Erdei, Milo

Uroevi, Marko Vasiljevi, Ljiljana Gakovi, Zlatoje Martinov, Jasna Dra-

govi-Soso and Maja Kora-Sanderson. Eric Gordy was there throughout,

supervising my work with wisdom and assuring that he made my life easier

whenever he could. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the whole

book reviewed by Paul Stubbs whose sociological imagination and thoroughknowledge of the region pushed me towards rethinking and strengthening my

arguments. Vesna Jankovi, my friend and colleague from the University of

Zagreb, was a constant source of inspiration. It is only due to our long con-

versations and email exchanges if my study manages to capture how funda-

mental activist agency is for its protagonists. Christophe Solioz patiently

coached me through the publishing process. This book would not have ap-

peared had it not been for his trust and support from the earliest stages of our

cooperation. Goranka Mati, Biljana Rakoevi and Dejan Dragosavac Ruta

generously shared with me their photographs/figures which have enriched my

work. Ruth Sutton proofread the whole manuscript with a lot of delicacy,

rescuing the essence of many of my rough formulations with minimal inter-

ventions.

This book derives from a series of articles and chapters which haveappeared over the last two years and I am grateful to the respective editors for

allowing me to use my previous publications.3

I would also like to thank the

University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies as

well as the Open Society Fund and its kind London staff, without whose

3 These include: Bojan Bili, Recovering (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War and Pacifist Activism:

A Research Agenda, The South Slav Journal, 30 (2011) 12, pp. 2456; Bojan Bili,

(Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Engagement: A Topic Awaiting Attention, Filozofija i

drutvo,22 (2011) 4, pp. 83107; Bojan Bili, In a Crevice between Gender and Nation:

Croatian and Serbian Women in the 1990s Anti-War Activism, Slovo,23(2011) 2, pp.

95113; Bojan Bili, Staying Sane(And Even Growing) in Times of Chaos: Serbian An-

ti-War Activism as Therapy, Antropologija, 11 (2011) 1, pp. 4565; Bojan Bili, A

Concept that is Everything and Nothing: Why Not to Study (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War

and Peace Activism From a Civil Society Perspective? Sociologija,53 (2011) 4, pp. 297

322; Bojan Bili, Hod po tankoj ici: artikuliranje antiratnog angamana u Hrvatskoj

ranih 1990-ih godina, in Vesna Jankovi and Nikola Mokrovi (eds.),Antiratna kampan-

ja 19912011: Neispriana povijest(Zagreb: Documenta, 2011), pp. 21228; Bojan Bili,

Contentious Socialists: Precursors of Anti-War Engagement, in Paul Stubbs and Chris-

tophe Solioz (eds.), Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe (Baden-Baden:

Nomos, 2012), pp. 4970, Serbian version:Bojan Bili, Opiranje zlu: jedno socioloko

promiljanje postjugoslovenskog antiratnog angamana, Republika,(2012) 520-521, pp.

1322; Bojan Bili, Movementising the Marginal: Recruitment to the Anti-War Cam-

paign of Croatia, Narodna umjetnost, 49 (2012) 1, pp. 4159; Bojan Bili, Not in Our

Name: Collective Identity of the Belgrade Women in Black, Nationalities Papers, 40

(2012) 4, pp. 60723, Serbian version: Bojan Bili, Kolektivni identitet kao strategija

preivljavanja beogradske aktivistike grupe ene u crnom, Antropologija, 12 (2012) 2,

pp. 187207; Bojan Bili, Between Fragmenting and Multiplying: Scale Shift Processes

in Serbian and Croatian Anti-War Activisms,Nationalities Papers, in press.


8/29

11

three-year-long financial support I would not have been able to complete my

doctoral thesis which has now been transformed into this book.

Moreover, my sister Jelena untiringly printed out and arranged my arti-

cles and helped me with the final version of the bibliography. My other sister,

Bojana, also assisted rarely, though, but she told me that her name must

find its way into these acknowledgements. Our Aunt Dragica Bili has been a

model of moral temerity and human dignity and she has supported me for

years discreetly, but unwaveringly. My friend Georgia Mavrodi taught methe value of patience and perseverance, these precious skills which are so

difficult to master.

Finally, this book is more than anything else, a work which I owe to the

cherished Yugoslav experience and the leftist orientation of my parents and

to the fact that, in spite of their more than 75 working years, our family be-

came appreciably poorer when many of our friends and neighbours did. It

could not have been otherwise.

I thank my Dad, Jozo, for encouraging me to know that, while having ti-

tles is not a bad idea, one must always rely much more on the potency of

ones own mind and the clarity of ones opinions the audacity and free-

dom to express them and defend them and on the flexibility to change them

while concurrently respecting those of others. His belief that this work

was a purposeful enterprise stimulated me throughout.When my Mom, Desanka, was twelve, she was brought for the first

time, by her parents, to see the centre of our small Vojvodina town. When I

was twelve, she sent me to live with an English family in Colchester, Eng-

land. Whereas her father would not let her attend the medical high-school to

which she was accepted because female children need no education, she

enabled me to study across Europe and she listened with patience and under-

standing to all of that incessant prattle about activists, movements, protest

cycles, papers, conferences... Sometimes I think that this is an amplitude

worth more than one generation. I dedicate this book to my Mom the

invisible foundation block of my joyful eagerness to get to know the world.


9/29

The old world is dying away and the new world struggles to come

forth: Now is the time of monsters.1

Antonio Gramsci

Let us try to do something ourselves for our own lives, so that wedo not surrender our destiny to someones uncontrollable hands. If

we do not even try to become citizens with full civil rights, how

can we know what our real prospects for freedom and democracy

are; for peace and not for war; for honest and not for falsified

elections; for a dignified life and not for brutality; for tolerance

and not for military competition; for enterprising and success

instead of inertia and apathy? We have a choice.2

Neboja Popov

1 Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publi-shers, 1971), p. 276.

2 Neboja Popov, Imamo li izbora?Republika,(1990) 7, p. 1.

If not otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.


10/29


11/29

17

Introduction

On 6 April 2012, Sarajevo that city which dies and is at the same timeborn and transformed marked the twentieth anniversary of one of the

longest sieges in the history of warfare.1

A large installation, which com-

prised 11,541 red chairs, stretched along Maral Tito Street all the way up to

Ali-Pashas Mosque, commemorating the same number of victims of the

crime with few parallels on the European continent.2

While the images of this

event spread across the globe, hardly anyone remembered that, in June 1992,

thousands of Belgrade citizens poured into the streets to protest against the

siege and express solidarity with Sarajevans.3 They carried pieces of black

paper which once united formed a kilometre long ribbon, a symbol of

their condolence and compassion (Figure 1). A couple of years later, some of

those who took part in this undertaking also travelled via Croatia and Hunga-

ry, crossed the Igman Mountain and walked through the Sarajevo Tunnel4

to

enter the besieged city and bring to its people a message that many on theother side were against the senseless destruction.

More than a decade after the end of the Yugoslav wars (19911999), there is

little that we know about the processes through which the imminence of an

armed conflict awakened dormant social networks and strengthened existing

activist circles or created new ones. Even less is known about the plethora of

ideological positions driving civic engagement, its tensions and fragmenta-

tions. There are no social scientific accounts that are sufficiently appreciative

of the relevance of anti-war organising for the intricate geometry of the pre-

sent day civic linkages and resistances in the post-Yugoslav space. All of this

constitutes a serious although not entirely surprising lacuna in the bur-

geoning amount of research on Yugoslavias dissolution.

1 Ivo Andri, Jedan pogled na Sarajevo, Jugoslavija, (1953) 7, pp. 203. Available at:

(Accessed 11 April 2012).

2 For more information of the practices of resistance in the besieged Sarajevo itself, see La-

risa Kurtovi, The Paradoxes of Wartime Freedom: Alternative Culture during the

Siege of Sarajevo, in Bojan Bili and Vesna Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil:

[Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), pp. 197224.3 See Gordana Logar, Sramno utanje Beograda, Danas, 8 April 2012. Available at:

(Accessed 15 July 2012).

4 The Sarajevo Tunnel was dug by the citizens of Sarajevo in 1993 to connect the neigh-bourhoods of Butmir and Dobrinja which were controlled by the Army of the Republic ofBosnia and Herzegovina. Through it, food, humanitarian aid and weapons could enter thebesieged city.


12/29

18

This book is based on extensive fieldwork in the region and it draws

upon the conceptual apparatus of social movement studies to start recovering

anti-war activisms in Serbia and Croatia.5

They constitute a complex phe-

nomenon both in relation to the value orientations of their protagonists as

well as in terms of their effects and strategic options. By taking a social

movement/civic contention approach, I offer a framework for collecting and

evaluating empirical information and generating knowledge on the collective-

ly organised and sometimes institutionalised ways in which many Cro-atian and Serbian citizens resisted the 1990s armed conflicts.

Figure1:Demonstrations against the siege of Sarajevo (Black Ribbon),

Belgrade, 7 June 1992

Goranka Mati

5 I use the word activisms to underline the geographical, ideological and strategic diversity

of the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement.


13/29

19

My central argument is that these civic enterprises did not appear in a

political vacuum. Rather, various (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activisms appro-

priated and developed dormant social networks created through student, fem-

inist and environmentalist engagement in socialist Yugoslavia. Anti-war ac-

tivisms, in turn, served as platforms for generating social and material capital

which enabled the establishment of present-day organisations devoted to hu-

man rights protection across the ex-Yugoslav space.

Throughout this book, I argue that Yugoslav anti-war activisms cannotbe understood without appreciating both the inter- and intra-republicancoop-

erations and contestations, occurring in the context of Yugoslavias socialist

experience. I employ a trans-national approach which treats Croatia and Ser-

bia as a nexus that comprises an abundance of antagonistic war perceptions

and ideological vantage points which condition divergent activist strategic

options. In this regard, the compound (post-)Yugoslav is used to indicate that

the civic engagement to which I am referring was initiated during Yugosla-

vias existence and continued after the countrys dissolution. (Post-)Yugoslav

is most frequently employed as a geographical term pertaining to the above-

mentioned spatial core of my interest, in the context of its relays with other

Yugoslav republics.6

I am, however, explicit about those instances in which

the term Yugoslav signifies a set of internally dynamic ideological orienta-

tions towards the ethnic, cultural and linguistic affinities of the South Slavpeople, both independent from and in relation to a possible federal organisa-

tion of their territories.7

The title of this work could suggest that within its pages the reader

would find the entirety of (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activisms dissected

and explained. Its broad formulation could welcome an array of research foci

and take students of conflict and contestation down many exciting interpre-

tive paths: trans- and intra-national networking, social memory, the economy

of collective enterprises, the construction of responsible citizenship, democ-

ratisation, transitional justice, to name but a few. Nevertheless, the neat syn-

tax of(post-)Yugoslav anti-war activism is not a manifestation of my ethno-

graphic authority. The social scientist as a knowing subject that Lacani-

ansujet suppos savoir is constituted through acts of drawing personal re-

search experiences through the prism of theoretical abstractions. By doing so,

6 For an outline of anti-war activities in Montenegro, see Sra Pavlovi and Milica Drago-

jevi, Peaceniks and Warmongers: Anti-War Activism in Montenegro, 19891995, in

Bili and Jankovi (eds.),Resisting the Evil, pp. 13758.

7 For Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Yugoslavism is the vision of the South Slavic community

as an essential unity despite differences in language, religion and historical experience.

Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural

Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 1.See also Dejan

oki, Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 19181992 (Madison: University of Wis-

consin Press, 2003). For a brief account of the relationship between Yugoslavism and an-

ti-nationalism, see Ljubia Raji, Jugoslovenstvo kao antinacionalizam, Republika, 3

(1991) 17, p. 12.


14/29

20

(s)he supposedly generates exhaustive knowledge on the phenomena of

his/her interest.8

Given that this work cannot be all-encompassing, I seek to

identify the broader socio-political trajectories of anti-war organising in Ser-

bia and Croatia.

This book, in principle, leaves numerically smaller or geographically

narrower but undoubtedly important instances of anti-war engagement

outside of its empirical grasp. It cannot consider many local officials and (in-

dividual) citizens who showed enormous civic courage when trying to pro-mote peace and tolerance in their communities.9

For example, Josip Reihl-Kir

(19551991) was the head of the police department in Osijek, Croatia, who

was killed, along with Goran Zobundija and Milan Kneevi, in a political

murder in 1991 by (a Croat) Antun Gudelj, when returning from a negotia-

tion with the Serb community in Croatia.10

Sran Aleksi (19661993) was a

Serb beaten to death by a group of his co-nationals in Trebinje, Bosnia and

Herzegovina, because he tried to defend his Muslim fellow-citizen, Alen

Glavovi. Sran was posthumously awarded the Charter of the Helsinki

Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina and streets and passages were named

after him in Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Panevo.11

In a poorly known episode of

individual resistance to war, Vladimir ivkovi, a forcefully mobilised re-

servist from Valjevo, Serbia, drove a Yugoslav Peoples Army [Jugoslov-

enska narodna armija, (JNA)] armoured personnel carrier all the way fromthe Vukovar frontline and parked it in front of the Yugoslav Parliament in

8 Richard Handler, On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nation-

alism and Ethnicity,Journal of Anthropological Research,41 (1985) 2, pp. 17182.

9 How shocking war must have appeared as a solution for the Yugoslav crisis, is testified by

the results of research done by the sociologist Vladimir Goati in all of the Yugoslav re-

publics and provinces in 1991. He found that only 6.7 per cent of the population thought

that Yugoslavia would disintegrate and that numerous independent states would be

formed on its territory. Public opinion polls carried out in Serbia in September 1991

showed that 80 per cent of the population favoured peace (75 per cent of men and 86.4 per

cent of women). See Anelka Mili, Women and Nationalism in the Former Yugosla-

via, in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (eds.), Gender Politics and Post-Communism:

Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London: Routledge,

1993), pp. 10922. A violent dissolution of the country could not have been envisioned bysocial scientists either: in a survey organised by Slaven Letica during a political science

conference in Zagreb in October 1989, none of the 30 leading Yugoslav sociologists, po-

litical scientists and economists thought that civil war, terrorism or violence were possi-

ble; 18 responded that the status quo would prevail, 6 that there would be a strengthening

of democratic tendencies, four that a sort of administrative arbiter (and a possible Yugo-

slav Peoples Army intervention) would appear and only two said that the country would

disintegrate. See Silvano Boli, Sociologija i unutranji rat u Jugoslaviji, Socioloki

pregled,26 (1992) 14, pp. 925.10 An exhibition about Josip Reihl-Kir, entitled Who is Reihl-Kir for You? [Tko je tebi

Reihl-Kir?] and prepared by Tanja Simi-Berclaz, was opened in Belgrade in July 2010before touring other cities of the former Yugoslavia.

11 In February 2012, Sran Aleksi was decorated for bravery by the president of Serbia Bo-

ris Tadi. See the documentary Sro (2007). See also Svetlana Broz, Dobri ljudi u vre-

menu zla (Banja Luka: Media centar Prelom, 1999).


15/29

21

Belgrade, symbolically pointing to what he thought was the source of irra-

tional violence (Figure 2).

While I hope that all of these and many other similar cases will find a

more prominent place in our memory, this research deals with the ways in

which activists in their capacity ofcollective actors conceptualised the

possibilities of resistance in the environments characterised by fundamentally

different power positions within the armed conflicts. Whereas I examine the

local, regional and republican organisational peculiarities as a function ofpower distribution within the conflicts, the resources which I had at my dis-

posal prevented me from giving them equal treatment.12

My analytical chap-

ters follow the protest cycle and discuss the anti-war collective organising in

Serbia and Croatia, starting with the processes of recruitment and actor con-

stitution and tracking their development during and after the Yugoslav wars.

Figure 2:Vladimirivkovi parked a JNA armoured personnel carrier

in front of the Yugoslav Parliament, Belgrade, September 1991

Art klinika13

However, this book cannot offer an analysis of all the cycle stages across

cities and republics. It is limited to a series of case analyses, such as recruit-

ment to the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia [Antiratna kampanja Hrvatske

(ARK)] or the collective identity of the Belgrade Women in Black [ene u

12 Along with both local and foreign anti-war actors, there were groups of civic activists

across Europe who were of Yugoslav origin, but living abroad. One such group Mi za

Mir [We for peace] operated in Amsterdam and consisted of young Yugoslavs who

wanted to evade military mobilisation. Nives Rebernak was one of the founders of the

group which was also supported by the Dalai Lama.13 This photo, taken by Zoran Ra, was used in a dealing with the past campaign organised

by the artist groups Art klinika, Led art and the Belgrade-based Centre for Cultural De-contamination. Available at: (Accessed 16 July 2012).


16/29

22

crnom (UC)], also in instances where a cross-case comparison might be

plausibly expected. My reasoning has been that given the lack of literature

on the topic a more deductive approach, outlining and illustrating domi-

nant trends, should be preferred to a meticulous exploration of more specific

issues. I hope to offer one possible framework which future research could

supplement and revise.

Whereas the body text represents an analysis of the broader trajectories

of post-Yugoslav anti-war organising, the footnotes bring a more personalaccount, highlighting the main actors and giving their elementary biograph-

ical information. As is often the case when exploring fluid social phenom-

ena, like civic enterprises, the list of names mentioned here is not exhaustive.

While it is not my intention to personalise the movements and initiatives I

study, I do believe that

[...] individuals are extremely important because activist work is a struggle

against defeatism and passivity. Not a single programme, activity or organisa-

tion could have been created without the initiative and the efforts of the individ-

ual activists who are sometimes also calledsocial entrepreneurs. People are the

carriers of both war and anti-war initiatives and it is for this reason that the nam-

ing of civic participants is crucial for the acknowledgement of the value of civic

engagement and resistance to evil. [...] The naming of the persons who took part

in anti-war activities throughout the 1990s is all the more important given thefact that it was a small number of people who had the courage, craziness or both

to struggle for these unpopular topics in hard times.14

This study has a distinctly ethnographic character because it deals with what

Povrzanovi Frykman calls the lived experience of war.15

Grassroots per-

spectives, be it in relation to the war victims, soldiers and conscientious ob-

jectors, have often been eclipsed by the grand narratives of nationalism and

the geo-strategic transformations after the fall of East European socialism.16

Dragovi-Soso claims that the academic literature on Yugoslavias break-up

has been overly interested in elites at the expense of local, social and family

histories and grassroots forms of mobilisation.17

I recover the agency of indi-

vidual and collective actors who did not have the powerful political and mili-

14 Vesna Jankovi and Nikola Mokrovi (eds.), Antiratna kampanja 1991.2011.:Neis-

priana povijest(Zagreb: Documenta, 2011), p. 17.

Available at: (Accessed

9 August 2012).

15 Maja Povrzanovi Frykman, The War and After: On War-Related Anthropological Re-

search in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Etnoloka tribina,33 (2003) 26, pp. 5575,

here p. 58.

16 For an exception, see, e.g., Paula Pickering,Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from

the Ground Floor(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 190.

17 Jasna Dragovi-Soso, Why Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? An Overview of Contending

Explanations, in Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragovi-Soso (eds.), State Collapse in

South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavias Disintegration (West Lafayette:

Purdue University Press), pp. 139, here p. 28.


17/29

23

tary apparatus at their disposal. In this regard, my study departs from the

premise that political violence works on lives and interconnections to break

communities... and yet in the midst of the worst horrors, people continue to

survive and to cope.18

Products of ethnographic encounters and social scien-

tific accounts stemming from them, may have a transformative potential

which should not be underestimated. Sociological imagination and analysis

should constitute a platform for a critical intersection of a multitude of voices

whispers, screams, silences

19

that may have been marginalised bothpolitically and academically.

This book focuses on Serbia and Croatia because they are widely re-

garded as the central Yugoslav republics constituting the axis of Yugo-

slavism [jugoslovenstvo].20

On the other hand, Gagnon claims that these two

countries/(ex-)republics represent cases of what Western observers charac-

terise as extremist nationalism leading to violence, and they are often held up

as the paradigmatic examples of ethnic conflict.21

It is, thus, all the more

important to show that, throughout the 1990s, both Serbia and Croatia and, in

particular, their capitals, were places of intense civic engagement that went

counter to the elites efforts to impose congruence between ethnic identity

and political position.

While examining civic activisms in their various forms and strategic op-

tions, this book does not test a single social movement theory as a set ofpremises accounting for numerous aspects of movement emergence, opera-

18 Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Introduction, in Veena Das et al. (eds.), Remaking a

World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Los Angeles: University of California

Press, 2001), pp. 130, here p. 1.

19 Paul Stubbs, Nationalisms, Globalisation and Civil Society in Croatia and Slovenia, in

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, (1996) 19, pp. 126. Available at:

(Accessed 13 July 2012).

20 The centrality of the Serbo-Croat political axis for the Yugoslav wars is also evident from

the operation of a small Bosnian and Herzegovinian peace initiative called Peoples Peace

Movement [Narodni mirovni pokret], organised by Vasvija Oraanin in August 1991 in

Bosanska Dubica. On 4 August 1991, there was a peace gathering of around 15,000 Mus-

lims, Serbs and Croats who crossed the bridge on the Una River which is a link between

Bosanska [Bosnian] and Hrvatska [Croatian] Dubica. The movement had its own Peace

Charter [Povelja mira] which was supposed to be signed by the presidents Franjo Tuman

and Slobodan Miloevi. Franjo Tuman received a movement delegation led by Vasvija

Oraanin at his official Zagreb residence Banski dvori on 17 August 1991. At that occa-

sion Tuman agreed to sign the Charter. At the same time, another movement delegation

left Bosanska Dubica for Belgrade where president Miloevi refused to sign the Charter.

Soon after, Oraanin was forced to leave Bosanska Dubica after her husband was shot at.

They moved to Ljubljana where she was helped by the Slovenian activist group Move-

ment for the Culture of Peace and Non-Violence [Gibanje za kulturo mira in nenasilja].

Oraanin continued her pacifist engagement and worked on the preparations for a meet-

ing of the Yugoslav peace activists from all of the republics and provinces with Lord Car-

rington as well as a peace protest in Strasbourg. See Vasvija Oraanin, Kako je pretuen

mirovni pokret,ARKzin, (1991) 1, p. 8. See also Jankovi and Mokrovi (eds.),Antiratna

kampanja,p. 59.

21 Valre P. (Chip) Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Itha-

ca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. xix.


18/29

24

tion and decay. Rather, the extant field of political contention studies is here

approached as a Foucauldian toolbox which supplies the means for under-

standing collective engagement around the protest cycle.22

I select from this

repository those concepts whose explanatory charge and abstracting potential

I consider relevant to the issues in question. My research offers certain theo-

retical advances because it applies the conceptual armoury of social move-

ment studies to a context in which it has not been extensively used. Neverthe-

less, the objective of my work is primarily empirical in nature. The pages thatfollow are a contribution to a corpus of historical data which should enable

(post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement to assume its proper place in the inter-

pretations of the countrys disintegration. By drawing upon Western socio-

logical scholarship, this book promotes a potentially fruitful cross-fertilisa-

tion between the non-Western episodes of political contention and the West-

ern conceptual means for studying collective undertakings.

While it focuses on anti-war contention, this study does not intend to

relativise the nationalism argument or negate its primacy in accounting for

Yugoslavias break-up. The turbulent history of the Yugoslav peoples points

to the unwavering significance of their national questions. No other para-

digm could substitute the relevance of the destructive Yugoslav nationalisms

which reached their climax in the early 1990s. Attempts to dilute the im-

portance of the nationalism argument could absolve the Yugoslav republicanleaderships from their responsibility for the countrys painful demise.23

How-

ever, an exploration of anti-war initiatives diversifies the Yugoslav political

scene and cuts across strictly national affiliations. It supplements the authori-

tative, but sometimes mono-focal, nationalism studies by pointing to political

alternatives as important pieces in the intricate mosaic of Yugoslavias disso-

lution.

Moreover, before proceeding, there is a need to conceptually differenti-

ate between anti-war and peace activisms because these two terms are relat-

ed, overlapping and sometimes interchangeably used. Anti-war activism can

be an ambiguous concept because it refers both to a general resistance to an

armed conflict and to civic engagement with a pronounced personal/local di-

mension. Anti-war activists in the latter sense experience private war-related

grievances which stimulate resistance to a particular war happening here andnow. They need not be against war as such, but may reject a particular war

out of ideological convictions (e.g. that war being aggressive or unjust).

22 Foucault said: I would like my books to be a kind of toolbox which others can rummagethrough to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I wouldlike the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educa-tor, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I do not write for an audience, I writefor users, not readers. Michel Foucault, Prisons et asiles dans le mcanisme du pou-voir. Available at: (Accessed 6 June2012).

23 See Olivera Milosavljevi, Fatalistiko tumaenje razaranja Jugoslavije, Republika,

(2003) 31617. Available at: (Accessed 12 No-

vember 2011).


19/29

25

Anti-war attitudes are, then, plausibly articulated also from a nationalist per-

spective.

Peace activism, on the other hand, is informed by a set of broader values

according to which war or any other kind of military means must not be used

for conflict resolution. Peace activism stems from a clear, mostly left-leaning,

political stance. Simply put, an anti-war activist is not necessarily pacifist,

whereas a pacifist is by definition anti-war oriented. For the lack of a more

precise concept, anti-war (orientation) as a generic term suggesting re-sistance to armed conflicts is regarded as incorporating pacifism through-

out this book, except in those instances in which I insist on a conceptual dif-

ferentiation.

In one of the very first attempts to engage with Serbian anti-war activ-

ism in a more theoretical manner, Paunovi differentiates between anti-war

and pacifist movements and argues that an anti-war movement could only

appear in a country which had not experienced any military activity on its ter-

ritory.24

The overt support of the Serbian general public for the anti-war

cause was relatively weak due to a lack of civic culture in which an anti-war

stance is a matter of spontaneous citizen reactions (such as draft-dodging).25

According to him, anti-war activities in Serbia mushroomed between autumn

1991 and summer 1992, coinciding with the period of the most intense draft

into JNA. It is only at this stage that one could talk about an anti-war move-ment.26

24 arko Paunovi, Mirovne aktivnosti u Srbiji: izmeu inicijativa i pokreta, Filozofija i

drutvo, 20 (1995) 7, pp. 10725.

25 It is, in this regard, also pertinent to differentiate between, on the one hand, draft-dodging

as a spontaneous reaction which prompted people to hide from the authorities or leave the

country and conscientious objection as a political stance, on the other. Although the Yu-

goslav regime insisted on peace (which was also one of the central principles of the Non-

Aligned Movement[Pokret nesvrstanih]), serving in JNA was a legal duty of all mentally

and physically able men. Refusing military service on the basis of conscientious objection

was considered law infringement. One of the most well-known cases of conscientious ob-

jection in socialist Yugoslavia was Ivan eko, a Jehovahs Witness from Maribor, Slo-

venia. The Belgrade Military Court sentenced him to four years of imprisonment in 1979,

five years in 1983 (three of which he actually served) and five more years in 1986. The

case ofeko was important in stimulating a public debate about the role of the Army in

Yugoslav social life as well as about conscientious objection and civic service; see Slav-

enka Drakuli, The case of Ivan Cecko: Yugoslav Youth Stir It Up, The Nation, (1987);

Available at: (Accessed 8 September

2011). For the relevance of conscientious objection for the Slovenian Peace Movement,

see Marko Hren, The Slovenian Peace Movement: An Insiders Account, in Bili and

Jankovi (eds.),Resisting the Evil, pp. 6382.

26 In his memoires, General Veljko Kadijevi argued that the operation of JNA was consid-

erably affected by the failure of the Serbian authorities to mobilise reservists. See Veljko

Kadijevi,Moje vienje raspada: vojska bez drave (Belgrade: Politika, 1993), pp. 767.

According to CAA, turnout rates were around 5 percent in Belgrade and around 20 per-

cent in provincial areas. Other reports give a figure of about 50 percent in Serbia and 15

percent in Belgrade. See Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War, pp. 1089. On the issue of

conscientious objection in the Yugoslav wars, see Bojan Aleksov, Resisting the Wars in

the Former Yugoslavia: Towards an Autoethnography, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Re-


20/29

26

Also, among a vast majority of regional civic activists, Serbias in-

volvement in the Yugoslav conflicts is regarded as aggressive in character.

Political actions undertaken by the Miloevi regime throughout the 1990s

stimulated many civic protagonists to contest the state from within. Some-

what paradoxically maybe, such a constellation tends to afford the Serbian

(and almost exclusively Belgrade-based) activists the highest amount of dis-

cretionary leverage in the regional extra-institutional sphere. This, yet again,

results in resistances and contestations that I discuss in the chapter devoted tothe effects of anti-war engagement. Such a state of affairs is also related to

the problem of unequal representation of the former republics in contempo-

rary Yugoslav scholarship which has been noted by Dragovi-Soso and to a

certain extent perpetuated in this book.27

Moreover, a lot of tensions among Yugoslav activists stemmed from the

cleavage which separates anti-war from pacifist efforts. Spontaneously gath-

ered activists do not cluster in one or the other group at the beginning of their

public engagement. At that point they are motivated by opposition to vio-

lence and destruction which only later obtains relevant theoretical substantia-

tions. The subtle difference between anti-war and pacifist stances becomes

more prominent as a result of specific developments, such as, for example,

foreign military interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995) or Serbia

(1999). The Serbian civic scene became severely polarised when 27 of itsprotagonists appealed to foreign governments and NATO commanders ask-

ing for an immediate termination of the NATO bombing. A few activists, on

the other hand, perceived this campaign as a legitimate means to oppose the

Miloevi regime (see Appendix 2).28

Such sharpening of intra/inter-state at-

titude is a critical element in the existence of any collective enterprise and it

is at the heart of a lot of segmentation processes within (post-)Yugoslav anti-

war activisms.29

This book cannot fully appreciate the theoretical significance of the

conceptual differentiation between anti-war and pacifist engagement, which

sisting the Evil, pp. 10526; Bojan Aleksov, Deserters from the War in Former Yugosla-

via (Belgrade: ene u crnom, 1994); Aleksandra Milievi,Joining Serbias Wars: Volun-

teers and Draft Dodgers, 19911995 (Los Angeles: University of California, 2004 PhD Dissertation).

27 Dragovi-Soso, Why Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? pp. 139. See Bojan Bili and Ves-

na Jankovi, Recovering (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention: A Zagreb Walk through

Stories, Analyses and Activisms, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.),Resisting the Evil, pp. 25

36.

28 See, e.g., Nadeda Radovi, Pismo pod bombama, Vreme,12 September 2002. Availa-

ble at: (Accessed 26 July 2012).29 For an analysis of the relevance of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign for the tensions

among the Belgrade liberal intelligentsia, see Jasna Dragovi-Soso, The Partying ofWays: Public Reckoning with the Recent Past in Post-Miloevi Serbia, in Timothy Wa-ters (ed.), The Miloevi Trial: An Autopsy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcom-ing). See also Olivera Milosavljevi, Taka razlaza: povodom polemike voene na stran-icama lista Vreme od 1. avgusta do 21. novembra 2002, Helsinke sveske, (2003) 16, pp.618.


21/29

27

is also relevant when discussing the involvement of foreign pacifist activists

in the Yugoslav conflicts. The following excerpt shows how a group of non-

Yugoslav members of War Resisters International (WRI) replied to the letter

of Yugoslav anti-war activists in which they asked their international col-

leagues to protect Bosnia and Herzegovina by all means possible:

There is an alarming phrase in your statement, when you suggest defending the

Bosnia-Herzegovinian state by all means possible. This could be taken to mean

warfare without limit: at worst, nuking Belgrade; more probably, the sanitised

language of surgical strikes belying a reality of massacred civilians and chil-

dren, as in Baghdad. We assume that this is not what you meant. Perhaps our

reaction to this phrase shows a difference in sensibility.30

Whereas it certainly constitutes an exciting research topic, I do not expound

on the international dimension of the wars of Yugoslav succession. There are

already a few publications regarding the engagement of international anti-war

activists in the Yugoslav region.31

On the other hand, the role played by for-

eign diplomats and various political actors, mostly characterised by insensi-

tivity and partiality, has been extensively although not conclusively or

comprehensively covered elsewhere.32

Andrew Pakula, a long-term peace

activist, argues that:

[...] international mediation in the Yugoslav crisis has been plagued by incon-

sistency, confusion, lack of coherence, disagreements about strategy, tactics and

mandate, poor coordination and planning, inadequate understanding, idle

threats, and the dominant role of self-serving, short-sighted national policies

driven mainly by Realpolitikand nostalgia [...] At best, the engagement of the

worlds political organisations in the former Yugoslavia has been ineffectual. At

worst, it contributed significantly to the escalation and persistence of violence.33There are two other important elements that have remained outside of the

theoretico-empirical grasp of my research design: first, this book does not

discuss the efforts of Kosovo Albanian activists to articulate a strategy of

30 See Appendix 3 for the full letter of the Yugoslav activists and an abridged version of the

WRI response.

31 See, e.g., Vesna Jankovi, International Peace Activists in the Former Yugoslavia, in

Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil, pp. 22542; Barbara Mller, The Balkan

Peace Team 19942001: Non-Violent Intervention in Crisis Areas with the Deployment of

Volunteer Teams (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006); Judith Large, The War Next Door: A

Study of Second-Track Intervention During the War in Ex-Yugoslavia (Stroud: Haw-

thorne Press, 1997); Christine Schweitzer, Strategies of Intervention in Protracted Violent

Conflicts by Civil Society Actors: The Example ofInterventions in the Violent Conflicts in

the Area of Former Yugoslavia, 19902002 (Coventry: Coventry University, 2009 PhD

Dissertation).

32 See, e.g., Brendon OShea, The Modern Yugoslav Conflict, 19911995 (London: Rout-

ledge, 2006).

33 Andrew Pakula, War and Peace: Yugoslavia, the Worlds Failure, Peace Magazine,

(1995) 56, p. 16.


22/29

28

peaceful resistance to the severely nationalising Serbian state. Given that I

am interested in the broad dynamics of civic organising in the Yugoslav

space, I believe that it would be useful to examine the relationship between

the Kosovo-based civic actors and the efforts to maintain peace in Bosnia and

Herzegovina or Croatia. I am aware of the specificities of the Kosovo politi-

cal situation and the widespread disrespect of the Kosovo Albanians human

rights which occurred throughout the second half of the 20th

century.34

In this

regard, I touch upon the issue of Kosovo to the extent to which it served asthe criterion for gauging the democratic potential of any ideological option

articulated within the Yugoslav political space throughout the rule of the

League of Communists of Yugoslavia [Savez komunista Jugoslavije (SKJ)]

and its Serbian successor the Socialist Party of Serbia [Socijalistika parti-

ja Srbije (SPS)].35

Although many protagonists of this work might have never

visited Kosovo, their position on the complex Kosovo question was an im-

portant identification mark in the Yugoslav political arena.36

So much so that,

as one of my interviewees told me, in the 1980s Yugoslavia there was a sim-

ple formula for finding ones place in the political spectrum: Tell me what

you think about the Kosovo Albanians and I will tell you who you are. The

importance of Kosovo for Yugoslav civil organising is evident in the words

of Vesna Tereli, the long-term coordinator of ARK:

[...] I feel this was a mistake that we all made together, citizens of a country that

later disintegrated through a series of wars. In fact, we all have some responsi-

bility for mistakes made before the 1980s, because I believe if we had reacted

more loudly to the violation of human rights in Kosovo, all the events that en-

sued might have never happened.37

Finally, it is not the primary goal of this book to contribute to the field of

peace studies. Peace as a phenomenon and the efficiency of various strategies

for achieving and maintaining it are not in the focus of my attention. I do not

discuss the plausibility of the programmes or actions that my respondents at-

tempted to implement, nor do I offer practical guidelines on where they

34 For more information on various forms of civic resistance in Kosovo, see Gzim Krasniqi,For Democracy Against Violence: A Kosovar Alternative, in Bili and Jankovi(eds.),Resisting the Evil, pp. 83103. See also: Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo(London: Pluto Press, 2000).

35 It was after his first official visit to Kosovo in April 1987, that Slobodan Miloevi con-solidated his authority in Serbias political life. See Neboja Vladisavljevi, Nationalism,Social Movement Theory and the Grass Roots Movement of Kosovo Serbs, EuropeAsiaStudies,54 (2002) 5, pp. 77190.

36 See Sra Popovi, Dejan Jana and Tanja Petovar, Kosovski vor: dreiti ili sei? (Bel-grade: Chronos, 1990).

37 Vesna Tereli, One Should Use These Unexpected Chances, in Helena Rill, Tamara

midling and Ana Bitoljanu (eds.), 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and

Change: Peacebuilding in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia (Belgrade and Sarajevo:

Centar za nenasilnu akciju, 2007), pp. 7594, here p. 81.


23/29

29

might have gone wrong and what should have been done instead.38

I do

not, in principle, engage with peace scholars (or peace scholarship) although

some of them have been quite active in the region.39

This work is interested

in the articulation of political alternatives or in carving political opportunities

for such articulations, in which peace becomes an imposed meta-topic, a fun-

damental precondition for their development and realisation.

Methods

This book is embedded in a qualitative research tradition where social en-

quiry is understood as a process in which questions are revised in the light of

collected empirical material and bibliographical sources. Such a perspective,

appreciative of the uniqueness of personal biography and the historical con-

text surrounding it, acknowledges the researchers co-constructivist role in

knowledge production. The ethnographic encounter is a rich and intricate

tapestry of values, predispositions and behaviours for which shared experi-

ences and shared language are essential. The arguments which I make in this

book do not derive their legitimacy or their truth from the fact that I am a

local. I hope to have destabilised such a possibility by crossing borders and

working in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and across Eu-rope, constantly and either willingly or unwillingly switching between

the position of insider and outsider. However, a flow of sensitive infor-

mation is, of course, facilitated in a meeting of two persons with an overlap-

ping portion of lived reality behind the corpus of mutually understandable

wor(l)ds.

Biases and preconceived ideas, even among those who attempt to shed them, are

almost unavoidable, and this applies to outsiders as well as to insiders. Indeed,

the outsiders view is not necessarily inferior to the insiders, and the insider is

not necessarily anointed with truth because of existential intimacy with the ob-

ject of study. What counts in the last resort is the very process of the conscious

effort to shed biases and look for ways to express the reality of otherness, even

in the face of paralysing epistemological scepticism.40

38 For a more activist approach to the issue of peace-building in the post-Yugoslav space,

see Rill et al. (eds.), 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change; Goran

Boievi (ed.), U dosluhu i neposluhu: Pozitivni primjeri izgradnje mira u Hrvatskoj u

90-ima i kasnije (Gronjan: Miramida centar, 2010); Jankovi and Mokrovi (eds.), Anti-

ratna kampanja.

39 Among the most prominent are Diana Francis, Adam Curle, Johan Galtung, Howard Clark

and Dieter Senghaas.

40 Maria Todorova,Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 9.


24/29

30

Social movements and other collective enterprises have been frequently com-

pared to icebergs, whose substance is mostly hidden below the surface.41

Scholars wishing to reconstruct group initiatives must take a look at the way

in which private grievances step over the threshold of public visibility into

overt protest. While researchers of social movements have diverse theoretical

leanings, they all address the vitally important questions of when, how and

why people resist authority.

Recovering and theorising (post-)Yugoslav anti-war contention is achallenging task, not least because the protest activities are separated from us

by more than a decade. The individuals and organisations that engaged in an-

ti-war activisms were pitted against political regimes and social climates that

were not amenable to their development. The activists often did not have the

time or financial means for documenting their engagement or they were not

aware of the importance of such a practice. I relied on interviews, documen-

tary analysis and participant observation to start recovering these often

ephemeral enterprises which arose as a consequence of tenuous links both

within and between trans-national activist networks.

As a native ethnographer researching highly politicised issues which

one can rarely access in their explicit(ly verbalised) form, I was faced with

numerous epistemological and methodological dilemmas. During my field-

work I met many people who were former colleagues and fellow-activists liv-ing in the same country, and who have, in the meantime, opted for divergent

ideological and professional paths in the partitioned Yugoslav space. For

some of my interviewees, I was an idealist who still believed in what they

had, with wisdom and experience, already abandoned. For the others, I was

something of a conservative expatriate able to afford high foreign university

fees and interested in capitalising upon the activist experience of others while

applying Western social science theory where it did not belong. Because of

this, I was constantly challenged by the need to find a politically neutral

starting point, so that the contact could be established and our conversation

begin. This went rather smoothly once I managed to enter a sphere of friends

and colleagues who would recommend me and willingly share their contact

information within the circle. Challenges (suspicions, trust winning and

questions) arose as I, consciously or not, crossed from one sphere to theother. I was, of course, never in pursuit of the truth, but of small personal

accounts and different forms of reality constructions which I wanted to root

in their social context(s). These narratives are a snapshot of the memories

shaped by the current political, social and personal developments. They testi-

41 Elisabeth S. Clemens and Martin D. Hughes, Recovering Past Protest: Historical Re-

search on Social Movements, in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds.)

Methods of Social Movement Research (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2002),pp. 20130.


25/29

31

fy to the veracity of James Cliffords claim that ethnographic truths are in-

herently partial, committed and incomplete.42

More specifically, throughout my fieldwork, I felt that among the re-

spondents/activists across the Yugoslav space, there was a sense of saturation

with interviews done by young and usually poorly informed and, therefore,

insufficiently sensitive scholars. This irritation resembles the one provoked

by a myriad of foreign experts/consultants who visit the region for a short

period of time, frequently led by self-promotion goals. Among some re-spondents there was a feeling that (young) researchers use both emotion- and

value-laden activist knowledge for personal career advancement in places

that are removed from local political tensions and straitened financial circum-

stances.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of my research encounters were pleasant

and rewarding experiences. The interviews were most productive in those in-

stances in which I shared with my respondents the idea that critical scientific

exploration was an extension of their socially responsible civic efforts. Given

my unique structural situation43

as a sociologist willing to mediate

among conflicting parties, I knew that some of my respondents might per-

ceive the social sciences as an enterprise which legitimises social reality and

the authorities interventions in it. The need to preserve a critical voice even

in the wake of repeated conversations invoking deeply cherished memoriesand values, made me painfully aware of Douglass argument that field re-

search may be a traitorous activity.44

As a local sociologist/ethnographer whose study is primarily based on

personal contacts with civic activists across the Yugoslav space, I was faced

with the danger of romanticising and fetishising resistance.45

That is why

the emphasis is here put on the broader social trajectories, their contexts and

long-term determinants, rather than on the attempts to personalise activist ini-

tiatives. Whereas I mention people who are responsible for the occurrence of

certain phenomena, this work should not idealise marginalised discursive

practices or lament over their failure to exert a stronger societal influence. A

critical approach to social marginality is an expression of respect to those

articulating it because such a perspective by appreciating the features of

42 James Clifford, Introduction: Partial Truths, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus

(eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1986), pp. 126, here p. 7.

43 Hanspeter Kriesi, The Rebellion of the Research Objects, in Mario Diani and Ron

Eyerman, Studying Collective Action (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 194216, here p. 194.

44 Jack D. Douglas, Investigative Social Research: Individual and Team Field Research

(London: Sage, 1976).

45 Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: Etnografija otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu (Belgrade: Bib-

lioteka XX vek, 2005), p. 57.


26/29

32

the social environment in which it unfolds reduces their unconventionali-

ty.46

The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination,

decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and

hermeneutic modes of critical inquiry. The standpoints of the subjugated are not

innocent positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle

they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all

knowledge. They are knowledgeable of modes of denial through repression,forgetting, and disappearing acts ways of being nowhere while claiming to see

comprehensively.47

In this regard, Foucault claims that power, however imposing, is not all-

embracing, but is constituted by an intricately interwoven tapestry of rela-

tions that interact and cut across each other throughout a social world. Power

is a process of ceaseless struggles, confrontations and transformations be-

cause its manifestations are bound up with multiple resistances which contin-

uously disjoin the chain that force relations would otherwise form.48

Caught

in a constant conjunctural fluctuation, the mainstream and the marginal can

alternate or even be combined within volatile social environments character-

ised by poverty and competition. The dissident status in former Yugoslavia

often was not such a painful and precarious position as it might sometimes bepresented by those who identify with it. It was in many cases related to ap-

preciable amounts of social, symbolic and financial capital whose preserva-

tion sometimes made the activists choose strategic options which were not

particularly well suited to the promotion of their cause. As I will argue, civic

engagement after the wars of the Yugoslav succession can sometimes consti-

tute an elitist platform on which middle-class professionals are prepared for

assuming government positions.

46 Communities which do not welcome alternatives can hardly encourage theoretical reflec-

tion upon them. In both the Croatian and Serbian research contexts, there are only few so-

ciologists studying social movements. Even those who do so, are not empirically oriented

or they overly concentrate on certain theoretical paradigms (e.g., Vukain Pavlovi (Ser-

bia) and Gojko Beovan (Croatia) focusing on civil society). Although there are excep-

tions in both countries, academism and elitism of nationally (or even locally) bounded

professional networks stimulates identification with dominant values and obscures mar-

ginality as a legitimate topic for sociological inquiry. Sharing the destiny of their compat-

riots, regional sociologists were sometimes forced to interiorise the dominant and politi-

cally innocuous research agenda due to fears of unemployment. For example, the Zagreb

Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilarwas established in 1991 in opposition to the Institute

for Social Research (IDIZ) which was perceived as leftist. The Ivo PilarInstitute has been,

in general, considered more appropriate by the nationalist authorities and it has been more

generously financed.

47 Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges,Feminist Studies,14 (1988) 3, pp. 57599, here

p. 584.

48 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (London:

Penguin, 1976/1998).


27/29

33

Moreover, given that this book heavily relies on interview information,

I need to consider possible disadvantages of this frequently employed re-

search method. Interview shortcomings mostly pertain to the reliability and

validity of retrieved information. How can researchers be sure that their in-

terviewees are providing them with an historically veracious account which is

not either over- or under-stating their involvement in the events in question?

Can a certain critical distance, which such an account would necessitate, be at

all possible when talking about emotionally charged events and probing intohighly sensitive memories that are fundamental for activists self-perception?

The instances in which my respondents cried or had passionate political ti-

rades were not rare. It was obvious to me from very early on that the political

activism about which I was enquiring, stemmed from a deeply rooted set of

values lying at the heart of who these people were. Human memory is not the

most reliable source of information especially when dealing with turbulent

events which took place more than twenty years ago.

While recognising that other empirical techniques are not free from var-

ious forms of bias, researchers take recourse to a discussion of obvious inter-

nal incongruities, compare different biographies and check interview data

with other sources in a form of inter-method and inter-disciplinary research

design. Life story interviews are only one out of several possible information

sources and they are not particularly suitable to research oriented towardspublic events. They can be much more powerful when exploring the cultural

and symbolic dimensions of social movements as well as personal stances

and experiences related to such an engagement.49

When including a set of documentary sources in my empirical corpus

along with numerous interviews, I was aware of Masons claim that different

types of documents are constructed in particular contexts by particular peo-

ple and with consequences intended and unintended.50

None of the doc-

uments that we will encounter throughout this book is straightforwardly evi-

dential or supposedly capturing the events of interest in their objective en-

tirety. Documentary sources, nevertheless, constitute a valuable source of in-

formation which calls for critical evaluation. They may well supply an alter-

native angle and provide an additional dimension to research questions.

Clemens and Hughes warn social movement scholars that documentary mate-rial issued by groups involved in protest can overstate the degree of consen-

sus among them.51

When documents are used in conjunction with other re-

search methods, as is the case here, their function is mostly to contextualise,

verify or clarify personal recollections and other information gathered

through interviewing or observation.

49 Donatella della Porta, Life Histories in the Analysis of Social Movements, in Mario Di-

ani and Ron Eyerman (eds.), Studying Collective Action (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 168

92, here p. 187.

50 Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching(London: Sage, 2002), p. 110.

51 Clemens and Hughes, Recovering Past Protest, pp. 20130.


28/29

34

Finally, the participant observation component of my research design

refers to the two month long stay with the Belgrade-based activist organisa-

tion UC.52

Throughout the summer of 2010, I attended meetings of this

small feminist group which were mostly devoted to the planning of a street

performance called A Pair of Shoes One Life . With this initiative, the ac-

tivists wanted to mark the 15th

anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide in

Knez Mihailova Street in downtown Belgrade. I was actively involved in the

preparation for and carrying out of this event (doing translations, collectingshoes, reading messages in the street). Moreover, I took part in two silent vig-

ils, one which traditionally occurs in mid-July at the Belgrade Republic

Square and the other one at the Memorial Centre Potoari, near Srebrenica,

Bosnia and Herzegovina. I used this time to become familiar with the organi-

sation of this activist group, get to know their members, affiliates and interna-

tional guests and interview them. Throughout my stay in Belgrade, I was sub-

scribed to the organisations mailing list and I was kept informed about the

latest developments in this rather intense period of the year.

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 outlines the most important reasons for the fact that (post-)Yugos-lav anti-war enterprises have not, up to now, assumed a more prominent pla-

ce on the East European social science agenda. It engages with recent schol-

arship on the region to identify trends which normalise the current situation

and privilege the nation-state as the most appropriate research framework.

My literature review shows that (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activisms have not,

up to now, been approached from a clearly articulated theoretical perspective.

This chapter introduces and substantiates the idea that Croatian and Serbian

civic engagement cannot be recovered without appreciating the inter-republic

contestations and cooperations which occurred in the context of Yugoslavias

socialist experience.

Chapter 2 brings an exposition of the theoretical framework in which I

nest my empirical material. Here I account for an important terminological

shift from a narrower, but possibly more elusive, concept of social move-mentsto a conceptually broadercontention which I consider more appropri-

ate for my work. This chapter provides a short overview of the conceptual

apparatus upon which I draw throughout the book and which is to a con-

siderable extent embedded in the political process theory and the research

paradigm known as dynamics of contention .53

Political process-based theoret-

52 Kathleen M. DeWalt and Billie R. DeWalt, Participant Observation: A Guide for Field-

workers (Landham: AltaMira Press, 2002).

53 Doug McAdam, Sidney G. Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).


29/29

35

ical models have rarely been applied outside of the Western context. For this

reason, I consider some of the dilemmas which arise when contention epi-

sodes are compared across countries and cultures. The presentation of the

major theoretical advances, to a considerable extent, parallels the arrange-

ment of my analytical chapters.

My analysis begins with a closer look at feminist anti-war activism

which, I argue, was one of the major strands of anti-war engagement in both

Serbia and Croatia (Chapter 3). While I do not provide a gender/feminist the-ory account, I do track the dynamics of feminist organising before and

throughout the wars of the Yugoslav succession. I posit that feminist anti-war

activism reactivated and developed already existent social networks forged

during Yugoslav socialism. Chapter 4 analyses the specificities of recruit-

ment to high-risk anti-war activism in places in which an armed conflict is

taking place. McAdams theory of high-risk contention serves as the theoreti-

cal basis for explaining recruitment to ARK. This is followed by a detailed

account of the social mechanisms responsible for expanding the scope of an-

ti-war engagement both geographically and strategically (Chapter 5). I com-

pare the scale shift processes in Serbia and Croatia and account for their dif-

ferences by pointing to long-term patterns of political organising in the Yu-

goslav space as well as to the uneven, but continually shifting, distributions

of political and military power within the Yugoslav armed conflicts. Chapter6 draws upon recent collective identity approaches to explain the surprising

resilience ofUC. Specific collective identity articulations can account for

the capacity of this activist organisation to sustain its political engagement in

an inimical social climate for more than two decades. The final analytical

chapter (Chapter 7) discusses the ways in which Serbian and Croatian anti-

war activists negotiate the meanings and outcomes of their undertakings. I

expound on the post-war activist regroupings and tensions to show how anti-

war enterprises have moved away from their empowering functions to the

arena of professional enterprises characterised by significant power asymme-

tries. Here I also revisit the notion ofcivil society in the light of my analysis

before offering a few personal considerations on social scientific engagement

with the wars of the Yugoslav succession.

seip8 introduction

Documents