Bojan Bilić

Positioned at the interface between historical sociology, anthropology and social movement studies, We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy follows the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war protest cycle which unfolded throughout the 1990s. This book — based on extensive fieldwork in the region — illuminates the broader trajectories of activist group constitution, protest expansion and demise. The author argues that the Yugoslav anti-war activism cannot be recovered without appreciating the inter- and intra-republic cooperations and contestations, occurring in the context of Yugoslavia's socialist experience. The (post-)Yugoslav anti-war undertakings appropriated and developed the already existing social networks created through student, feminist and environmentalist engagement. In turn, different forms of anti-war dissent were instrumental for the establishment of present-day organisations devoted to human rights protection across the ex-Yugoslav space.

Hailed as the event that "removed the last brick ofthe Wall" (J. Fischer), Serbia's democratic revolution marked the end of an era in the country's recent history. This book is devoted to the student movement Otpor (Resistance) that was instrumental in ousting Slobodan Milošević's regime. It is an interview-based study representing one of the first attempts to explore how the movement activists think about their participation in these memorable changes as well as how they account for the difficulties Serbia has been facing in its transition towards democracy. The interviews reflected a plethora of positions that the interviewees assumed towards the issues that are symbolically charged, suggesting that both the student movement and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia were ideologically heterogeneous organizations with constant internal tensions. They thus could not possess a clear-cut political strategy that would go beyond immediate Milošević's removal, leaving their members and supporters rather unsatisfied with the revolution's final outcome. This study could be of interest to those working on the processes of socio-political transition in the region.

Smeštena na raskršću istorijske sociologije, antropologije i studija društvenih pokreta, knjiga Borile smo se za vazduh napušta široko rasprostranjene paradigme nacionalizma i civilnog društva i analizira (post)jugoslovenski antiratni aktivizam u poslednjoj deceniji 20. veka. Pozivajući se na empirijski korpus prikupljen u toku višegodišnjeg terenskog rada, autor tvrdi da se (post)jugoslovensko antiratno organizovanje ne može razumeti ukoliko se u obzir ne uzme kompleksna geometrija (među)republičkih saradnji i otpora u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji. (Post)jugoslovenski antiratni poduhvati su prisvojili i osnažili društvene mreže nastale kroz studentski, feministički i ekološki angažman. Tako artikulisane antiratne akcije su na celom prostoru bivše države kasnije poslužile za stvaranje simboličkog, društvenog i materijalnog kapitala koji je omogućio osnivanje današnjih nevladinih organizacija posvećenih zaštiti ljudskih prava, tranzicionoj pravdi i mirovnom obrazovanju.



Ovo je prva sociološka studija koja prati razvoj antiratnog pokreta u bivšoj Jugoslaviji, od njegovih početaka u alternativnom angažmanu socijalističkog perioda sve do pojave profesionalizovanog NGO sektora. Bilićeva knjiga je ključna za razumevanje politike i intelektualnog života u zemljama bivše Jugoslavije u 1990-im i kasnije.


Eric Gordy, Škola slovenskih i istočnoevropskih studija,
Univerzitetski koledž London


Knjiga Borile smo se za vazduh – tour de force istorijske sociologije – ispituje dinamiku antiratnog aktivizma na postjugoslovenskom prostoru problematizujući postojeća objašnjenja formulisana u okviru metodološkog nacionalizma i/ili idealističke koncepcije civilnog društva. Ova studija je obavezna literatura za svakog ko je zainteresovan za postjugoslovensku regiju, ali i za one koji se bave pitanjima aktivizma i društvenih pokreta uopšte.

Paul Stubbs, Ekonomski institut, Zagreb

Europe and the European Union are unavoidable,  if ambiguous, political references in the post-Yugoslav space. This volume interrogates the forms and implications of the increasingly potent symbolic nexus that has developed between non-heterosexual sexualities, LGBT activism(s) and Europeanisation(s) in all of the Yugoslav successor states.

Contributors to this book show how the long EU accession process disseminates discursive tools employed in LGBT activist struggles for human rights and equality. This creates a linkage between “Europeanness” and “gay emancipation” which elevates certain forms of gay activist engagement and perhaps also non-heterosexuality, more generally, to a measure of democracy, progress and modernity. At the same time, it relegates practices of intolerance to the LGBT community to the status of non-European primitivist Other who is inevitably positioned in the patriarchal past that should be left behind.

Resisting the Evil: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Contention systematically illuminates (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement as an important and up to now neglected aspect of the complex process of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. More than a decade after the end of the wars of Yugoslav succession, there is very little that we know about the processes through which the imminence of an armed conflict awakened dormant social networks and strengthened the existing activist circles or created new ones. With its distinctly trans-national approach, this volume recovers the relevance of various forms of civic organising in former Yugoslavia for the anti-war contention which unfolded before, during and after the wars of Yugoslav succession. This book is a collective endeavour of a group of authors coming from all the republics of former Yugoslavia. It, thus, offers a look from within which has been conspicuously missing from the regional sociology. Almost all of the contributors combine rigorous theoretical reflection with empirically rich accounts stemming from their own activist experience in the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and peace initiatives."

Opiranje zlu osvjetljava nedovoljno istraženu temu (post)jugoslavenskog antiratnog angažmana kroz niz priloga autora i autorica (Ljubica Spaskovska, Marko Hren, Gëzim Krasniqi, Bojan Aleksov, Ana Miškovska Kajevska, Lepa Mlađenović, Srđa Pavlović, Milica Dragojević, Zala Volčič, Mojca Planšak, Bojan Bilić, Larisa Kurtović, Vesna Janković, Nebojša Šavija-Valha, Biljana Kašić, Paul Stubbs) koji ovoj problematici pristupaju iz transnacionalne i interdisciplinarne (historiografsko-sociološko-politološko-antropološke) perspektive, kombinirajući analitičnost znanstvenog sa strašću aktivističkog djelovanja. Zbornik kontekstualizira bolne biografske narative i pozicionira otpor ratovima koji su obilježili raspad Jugoslavije u centar sukobljenih ideoloških stanovišta i isprepletenih odnosa vojne i političke moći. Umjesto jednodimenzionalne interpretacije kompleksnih fenomena društvenog organiziranja, Opiranje zlu pokazuje da polifona rekonstrukcija marginaliziranih glasova otvara prostor za nove metodološke obrasce koji nadilaze uobičajeno insistiranje na “objektivnoj” analizi.



Čini se da su antiratne inicijative marginalizirane u dosad objavljenim historijama jugoslavenskih ratova, u sociološkim studijama društvenih pokreta u centralnoj i istočnoj Europi, kao i u globalnim naporima da se razumiju kompleksne epizode političkog sukobljavanja. Imajući to u vidu, Opiranje zlu se pojavljuje kao važan korektiv i nudi izvanrednu, višeslojnu analizu povezanih oblika aktivističkog organiziranja i njihovih odnosa s politikom, kulturom i društvom u (post)jugoslavenskom kontekstu.

Paul Stubbs, Refleksije o značenjima antiratnog aktivizma

The Belgrade-based activist group Women in Black
has been for twenty years now articulating a feminist anti-war stance in an inimical socio-political climate. The operation of this anti-patriarchal and anti-militarist organization, which has resisted numerous instances of repression, has not been until now systematically approached from a social movement perspective. This paper draws upon a range of empirical methods, comprising life-story interviews, documentary analysis and participant observation, to address the question as to how it was possible for this small circle of activists to remain on the Serbian/post-Yugoslav civic scene for the last two decades.My central argument is that a consistent collective identity, which informs the group’s resource mobilization and strategic options, holds the key to the surprising survival of this activist organization. I apply recent theoretical advances on collective identity to the case of the Belgrade Women in Black
with the view of promoting a potentially fruitful cross-fertilization between non-Western activism and the Western conceptual apparatus for studying civic engagement.

Keywords:
Women in Black; Serbia; collective identity; anti-war activism

This paper follows the almost contemporaneous emergence of the two primary antiwar initiatives in Belgrade and Zagreb to explore how they acted as hotbeds from which permanent human rights organizations appeared in the newly created nation-states. Drawing mostly upon in-depth interviews with antiwar activists from Serbia and Croatia, I argue that the dominant patterns of protest expansion were different in the two countries. While cooperation and tensions existed within both antiwar groups, the Antiwar Campaign of Croatia acted as a broker, leading toward the multiplication of civic initiatives; on the other hand, the Belgrade Center for Antiwar Action was characterized by ideological, professional, and personal divisions, which caused a rapid fragmentation of antiwar undertakings. This paper outlines the main reasons for such expansion patterns (scale-shift processes) and discusses them in the light of recent theoretical advances in political contention studies.
Keywords: Antiwar Campaign of Croatia; Center for Antiwar Action; Croatia; Serbia; scale shift

The operation of the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia has remained under-theorised in spite of its importance for the present-day human rights oriented civic scene in this post-Yugoslav country. This paper draws upon in-depth interviews and documentary sources to examine both structural and motivational factors that propelled individuals towards participation in the Anti-War Campaign. Given that the war in the 1990s was perceived by the Croatian authorities and the general public as an act of aggression,the anti-war undertakings of its citizens were precarious and dangerous activities.In accordance with the McAdam model of recruitment to high-risk activism, this paper shows that the participants in the
Anti-War Campaign were already involved in an extensive network of activist ties. The anti-war engagement was closely related to prior civil rights activity as well as to biographical availability. The Croatian anti-war activists in the early 1990s were predominantly urban university students or recent graduates occupying the narrow niche between freedom from parental supervision and the absence of adult responsibilities.

This paper draws upon a variety of empirical sources to start critically examining the concept of civil society in the context of both (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist activisms and the civic engagement stemming from them in the nationally fragmented post-Yugoslav space. I argue that civil society can no longer be meaningfully used for understanding the complex geometry of social, political and personal interactions, cooperations and resistances within the regional civic spheres characterised by appreciable power asymmetries. Its definitional volatility and logical incoherence allow civil society to incorporate ideologically and historically extremely divergent phenomena. Due to its conceptual elasticity, civil society is a cognitively easily available device and a de-politicised theoretical paradigm convenient for masking power networks frequently conditioned by foreign political agendas. This paper points to possible alternative perspectives that might prove more productive for analysing (post-)Yugoslav bottom-up civic engagement.

This paper begins to illuminate the therapeutic function of Serbian anti-war activism during the armed conflicts of Yugoslav succession. Such a specific aspect of civic engagement in the 1990s Serbia has been insufficiently explored in the existing accounts of the Yugoslav/Serbian pacifist efforts. Serbian anti-war activists perceived “sanity” maintenance as an important aim of what is normally considered to be exclusively political involvement. I draw upon in-depth semi-structured interviews and documentary sources to examine how collective enterprises, such as candle lighting, petitions, street protests and demonstrations were conceptualized as spaces of personal freedom without necessarily having specifically articulated political objectives. An inductive thematic analysis of the collected material revealed the following themes under the overarching category of therapy: staying “sane”, recovering agency/empowerment, personal growth and maturation, and resistance to “psychologization”. These themes are discussed in the light of complex interactions between the personal and the political through which social movements, groups and organizations, which generally tend to be perceived as disturbing elements of unrest and change, become islands of civility and creativity in a political environment marked by destruction and violence.

This paper argues that the widespread insistence on various Yugoslav nationalisms across the social sciences has obscured a rich dynamics of anti-war and pacifist engagement which was taking place immediately prior to and throughout the wars of Yugoslav succession. I analyse some of the main reasons for which (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist activism has not by now assumed a more prominent place on the regional research agenda. Given that politically focused collective enterprises never appear in political and social vacuum, I position this kind of civic involvement in its socio-historical context. The 1968 student protests as well as Yugoslav environmentalist and feminist activisms are perceived as three extra-institutional spaces from which a vast majority of anti-war and peace activists would be subsequently recruited. The paper critically reviews the existing studies on (post-)Yugoslav anti-war and peace activism and proposes a promising theoretical approach for further exploration of this complex phenomenon.

This paper puts forth and calls for further unpacking of a potentially fruitfulconceptual cross-fertilization between various social movements theories and Bourdieu’ssociology of practice. Following some of my most important predecessors, I argue that thistheoretical hybridization could accommodate many threads of social movements researchthat otherwise would not cohere into a rounded theory. Bourdieu’s powerful conceptualarmoury is both parsimonious and flexible and seems particularly well-suited to address theproblematic issues pertaining to agency and structure in the field of social movements. In thesecond section of the paper, I call for an exploration of Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist activism immediately before and during the wars of Yugoslav succession. I perceive anumber of politically and organizationally heterogeneous initiatives, taking place throughout the demised country, as a case that can be used to empirically test the proposed theoreticalconsiderations. Yugoslav anti-war and pacifist activism has yet to receive the sociologicalattention that it deserves. It is a complex social phenomenon calling for a sophisticated and systematic examination which should position it between its antecedents – the embryonicforms of extra-institutional engagement during Yugoslav communism – and its divergent posterity, mostly circumscribed within the national fields of non-governmental organizations.

The paper critically analyses the capacity of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to predict health behaviours. However, rather than focusing on specific health behaviours, the paper employs them as a framework for exploring the underlying methodological and theoretical issues that can interfere with both the reliability and the validity of the findings based on the TPB. It is argued that although the TPB can be regarded as an effective and parsimonious model for predicting health behaviours, there are serious conceptual problems that call for further research. Also, the final section of the paper outlines general difficulties in explaining human behaviour that will probably cause the TPB to be incorporated into a larger integrative model of human action.

Otvarajući polje nenasilja u našim duboko heteronormativnim i patrijarhalnim društvima, koja se i dalje pozivaju na svoju epsku ratničku tradiciju, antiratne inicijative su destabilizirale mit ratnika na 'braniku otadžbine', na čemu se često zasnivaju državotvorni projekti koji isključuju i dehumanizuju svakog ko se ne uklapa u uski i nasilni nacionalni kanon Bojan Bilić (Vrbas, 1982.) doktorirao je političku sociologiju na Školi za slavenske i istočnoevropske studije Univerzitetskog koledža u Londonu, a radi na Institutu za društvena istraživanja u Amsterdamu. Autor je knjige 'Borile smo se za vazduh' u kojoj, uz zbornik 'Opiranje zlu: (post)jugoslavenski antiratni angažman' koji je uredio s Vesnom Janković a objavili su ga Documenta, Kuća ljudskih prava Zagreb i Naklada Jesenski i Turk, istražuje dinamiku antiratnog aktivizma u zemljama bivše SFRJ.

Tematizirajući više od tri desetljeća lezbijskog aktivizma na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije, knjiga okuplja glasove autorica koje u svojim tekstovima isprepliću osobne/aktivističke i akademske/znanstvene perspektive. Kroz njihova razmatranja mapiraju se lezbijske inicijative i savezništva u navedenom periodu, kao i feminističke reakcije na jačanje nacionalizma, nasilje nad ženama i lezbo/homofobiju.

This talk discusses the LGBTIQ activism in Montenegro, focusing on how it has been shaped by complex relationships between the NGOs, the state, international donors, the EU, and everyday forms of oppression. Montenegrin LGBTIQ activists have invested a lot of effort to teach the state institutions, such as the police, healthcare, or justice system, how to 'do their job' in order to ensure the basic conditions for providing physical safety of the LGBTIQ people. In doing so, the activists were faced with a particular set of everyday, personal problems, which affected their wellbeing and intimate relationships with other people in their lives. While highly successful according to a specific set of parameters, such efforts could not disturb the historically forged conceptual link between 'Europe' and 'homosexuality', which places non-heterosexual practices and people outside of the Montenegrin polity. The chapter discusses possible directions of the LGBTIQ activism which could reposition minority sexual practices as constitutive of the political and social life in Montenegro. ČARNA BRKOVIĆ is a social anthropologist exploring politics of survival and wellbeing, public spheres, and clientelism in former Yugoslav countries. After obtaining a PhD (University of

This lecture will consist of two parts: first I will try to explicate the term queer in opposition to hetero/homonormativity and offer a brief introduction to queer theory and its critique of identity politics and the present mainstream gay movement. An attempt will be made to (re)connect queer theory with Marxism and make it a tool for a wider, class struggle, "intersecting" gay oppression and workers' oppression, going back to the revolutionary 70's of the XX century when homosexual struggle was considered a part of universal human emancipation. Secondly, I will use the aforementioned theoretical tools to deconstruct the Belgrade Gay Pride as a completely non-queer manifestation, formally indifferent to class problematic while being deeply integrated into neoliberal politics, homonationalism and pinkwashing. Dušan Maljković is a Belgrade-based journalist, publicist, translator and long-term LGBT activist. He studied Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, and worked for a variety of both radio and print media outlets. He edited the homoerotic series Kontrabunt at the Belgrade publishing house Rende and was the editor of the site gay-serbia.com. Since 2010 he has been the editor of the journal for queer theory and culture QT and the coordinator of the Belgrade Centre for Queer Studies. In 2002 he received the Heimdahl Award for his radio programme

This lecture addresses the convergence of European Union expansion and queer politics in the production of Islamophobia in Muslim majority countries in the Balkans. It looks at how EU enlargement assemblages of civil society, conditionality mechanisms and media reporting establish a representational praxis of queer communities in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania under threat by Muslim extremists. The discursive framing of Muslims as homophobic rests on the emergence of a new Islamophobic discourse in the Balkans that identifies Muslim extremists in the registry of foreign, fundamentalist intruders into the otherwise peaceful and secular local Balkan Islam. I argue that the LGBT rights projects that become part of the European expansion processes not only aim to create acceptable queer subjects along Euro-American homo and heteronormative norms but to also divide 'good' secular Muslims against the deviant religious extremist and un-European Muslims. The engagement of LGBT political formations in the processes of Europeanization then serves as a tool to both discipline and exposes those Muslims in the Balkans who reject Eurocentric sexual liberatory frames as foreign Muslim extremists. In this context, European financed 'coming out' projects gain a new meaning in the Balkans, one where the promotion of visibility for certain queer subjects works simultaneously to expose Muslim extremists. Queer acceptance in Islamophobic times, then, becomes the ultimate test of who can and cannot become European citizen. Piro Rexhepi is a scholar of East European Studies currently teaching at the Center for Global Affairs, New York University. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde, UK (2013). His research is located in the Queer and Feminist Theories in International Relations with special interest in Islam and Southeastern Europe. He is fluent in Albanian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian. He is a founding member of the Balkan Queer Initiative and a member of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, a group of volunteers committed to the Islamic traditions of equality and brotherhood/sisterhood in Islam.

Almost seven years after the October 5th revolution, which overthrew the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia is a divided state, characterized by a severe conflict between the old marxist-nationalist elites and the new civic elites. The old elites have proved surprisingly resilient and still powerful enough to actively obstruct moral reflection and critical examination of the recent past. Therefore they make it difficult to form a qualitatively new perception of collective identity based on the ideas of democracy and the rule of law. It is argued that Serbia is an ‘unfinished state’ whose transitional process, due to a range of long-term historical cleavages, has its own path-dependent dynamics and does not exactly follow the pattern of post-communist transitions in other Central and Eastern European countries. The persistence of ‘disunified elites’ enabled by the post-October unimpeded perpetuation of ‘old elites’ produces a series of unstable regimes marked by the tension between democratic legitimacy and the façade of legality. In that sense, the October 5th revolution is perceived as an ‘unfinished revolution’ and a missed opportunity for an authentic decommunization and democratization that would considerably facilitate the process of Serbia’s accession to the European Union.

The potential or necessity of history to be narrativised (in order to become accessible) can serve as a very powerful political tool. This is particularly so if we bear in mind the fact that, as Sean Homer argued, narratives of history are by no means objective but they contain specific ideological assumptions which automatically imply how that history should be understood.

This actually represents the notion of ‘emplotment’ that was propounded by Hayden White and that refers to the selectivity with which a historian chooses to organize and recount historical events. It is at the discretion of historians to focus on specific events and decide what is and what is not to be included in their historical account. By doing this, historians inevitably shape the ‘meaning’ of history. However, historical evidence do set limits to emplotment - historical events are intrinsically constrained in their capacity to be narrativised. 

Moreover, there is another concept related to the narrativisations of history that seems to be particularly relevant to the topic of this conference. It is Ricoeur’s idea of a narrative’s intelligibility, that is, its capacity to encompass and at the same time simplify a large amount of historical data. The potential of history to be manipulated resides exactly in the oversimplified and readily understandable recounts of historical narratives which thus become potent historical/cultural myths that tend to be employed in everyday political discourse as well as to stimulate a creative response that only perpetuates them further.

More specifically, I would like to focus on two events (from Serbian history) that have been, according to my opinion, the ones most frequently put under the process of mythologization and therefore most politically manipulated. The first among these is the famous battle of Kosovo (that took place in 1389 when the Serbs were defeated by the Turks), and the other is the Second World War (National Liberation Struggle [NOB]). These two events, although very different in their ideological content (the second actually repressed the first only to encourage its subsequent tragic outburst), were both for a long period of time the focal points around which people conceptualised their (supra)national identity.