Protests against the government in Serbia have been going on for months, culminating yesterday in a mass showing in the country’s capital, Belgrade (estimates range between 100,000 and 300,000 people attending). Among worry, hope, fear, pride, and other predictable mix of emotions people like me who have left Serbia experience as we watch them, one sensation became clear: I feel sorry for (and a bit angry, and a bit frustrated with) people who keep looking to the student movement to provide them with a political solution, or act disappointed when the student movement refuses to do so.
The student movement is not there to institute a new government nor to act as a transitional one. It is not there to provide restitution or redistribution, especially as power tends to accumulate to those who grab it. Given Serbia’s external debt, that kind of power is likely to be used to decide how and to whom to sell the lithium mine. Asking for the student movement to appoint or at least point to that sort of power, to me, seems like a refusal of autonomy – or like the people got so used to being ruled over that they cannot recognize autonomy even if it is given.
The student movement showed what taking responsibility for one’s own life and one’s future looks like. Through plenums (a horizontal all-inclusive deliberative form of assembly), it gave an example of how decisions can be made autonomously, in a non-hierarchical and direct manner. Through day-to-day organizing at occupied parts of Serbia’s universities, the student movement also demonstrated how this kind of decision-making can provide food, lodging, education and entertainment in more just and equitable ways than capitalist modes of distribution, be they market- or state-based. By organizing long walks – to the cities of Novi Sad and Niš, North and South – the movement demonstrated how a strong moral compass can align supposedly irreconcilable political and ideological orientations (patriotism and cosmopolitanism, rural and urban), whose fragmentation was the mainstay of Serbia’s institutional politics over the last three decades.
Most importantly, perhaps, the student movement has demonstrated that the feared president is a paper tiger. Vučić may still cling to the illusion of being in charge, much like Serbia’s former president Milošević did during the interregnum after October 5th 2000, when the protestors stormed the Parliament. For at least 100,000 people on March 15th 2025, however, that illusion has been dispelled permanently. The ensuing vacuum is not to be feared: in it reigns a silence of possibility, a silence that the regime is so afraid of it will use dreaded LRADs (sound canons) just to fill it.
That silence is the sound of freedom.
Jana Bacevic is a social theorist at Durham University (UK), and a sister in struggle, temporarily located in the United States.
Peščanik.net, 17.03.2025.
