Mobilisation of Love: A New Culture of Resistance in Serbia

 The Novi Pazar students are not being escorted by the police. Due to logistical problems along the route, they will walk sixty kilometres more than planned, but they say this will help them share the message of the student protests with as many people in Serbia as possible. They spent their first night at the Studenica Monastery lodging, where they were offered breakfast prepared in the Muslim tradition. The monastery belongs to the Žiča Eparchy, headed by Metropolitan Justin, who has long supported the students – unlike most leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church, including the Patriarch himself, who have been referring to the Novi Pazar students walking to Novi Sad as “fundamentalists” and “Islamic fanatics”. Only a few days after the Studenica monks welcomed the students, the Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church formed a commission to investigate Metropolitan Justin’s management of the diocese, commenting that he should step down.

At the same time, and perhaps at the last possible moment, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on Serbia, addressing lethal corruption, the absence of the rule of law and media freedoms, as well as other forms of democratic backsliding to which Serbia’s citizens are exposed. The resolution mentions not only Aleksandar Vučić, but also other individuals responsible for the erosion of democratic values in the country, including the notorious Marko Kričak, the commander of the police protection unit, who is currently under criminal investigation for allegedly hauling students into a government underground garage and beating them and threatening to rape one of the victims of his torture, Nikolina Sinđelić

In light of these developments – and the forthcoming anniversary, which will be marked by the large commemoration in Novi Sad – what do the student protests in Serbia, now in their twelfth consecutive month, look like? What kind of culture of resistance do they embody?

To recall, the protests broke out spontaneously on 22 November 2024, when the students of the Belgrade University Faculty of Dramatic Arts were assaulted during a silent vigil commemorating the canopy victims in the street in front of their college. Their assailants were not only members of the ruling party but also its officials. Three days after the attack, the students blocked the faculty building, suspending classes and exams. Despite security camera footage, it took the authorities nearly a month to identify the attackers, while it remained unclear how many assailants there actually were and where exactly the incident took place. Two of the assailants have not been identified to this day, while the three attackers, who have confessed to the crime, have been to the minimum penalties prescribed by law.

Within this social and political context, the question of the birth and death (or smothering) of student and civic resistance in Serbia in 2024/25, along with the politics of language problematising the right to speak and/or the right to remain silent within that resistance, forms part of the broader issues of the culture of resistance in necropolitics, in societies living in a state of emergency or siege, marked by the prolonged and unacknowledged suspension of the rule of law and the erosion of rights as the foundation of justice for all. Achille Mbembe, the creator of the concept of necropolitics, has also argued that acts of resistance against regimes of necropolitics often become impossible and are, in such societies, frequently tied to strategically inadequate or self-destructive attempts at social change that revive necropolitics.  Hence the questions: To what extent is student resistance possible and effective? How do student protests transform existing practices of resistance and open up a different imagination – not of the future, but of the presence and the reality we are living, the one we have grown estranged from, guided by the logic of mere survival? Who and what have stood up against the politics of death within these student protests, which reflect (and sustain) the enigmatic dialectic of speech and silence, both within the academic community and society at large? Which voices are missing in the struggle against necropolitics and how can they be summoned?

There are no simple answers to these questions. The student movement has been clearly and consistently conspiratorial from the very beginning. Although public, it operates in a kind of guerilla mode. We do not know exactly what is happening within the movement itself: the protesting students’ allies and comrades possess little knowledge of the planned actions. For many outside the movement, this is a difficult -sometimes even unacceptable - position to be in. The apparent aporia between the national iconography of the protests and the guerrilla nature of the students’ discursive, informational, and organisational “warfare” creates constant static, generating bewilderment in facing the novel political momentum of the student protests in Serbia. All the more so because this momentum is Partisan-avant-garde: it re-evaluates - in a novel way, in keeping with the 21^st century experience - the Partisan-like figure of territorial people’s-liberation defence— first conceptualised by Carl Schmitt and later historically and theoretically transformed by the thinkers of communist revolutions.

The new language of the student protests is therefore often incomprehensible to those accustomed to the old matrixes of social struggle. This language, incomplete as it is, causes apprehension and doubts in the face of the eternal monstrosity of the new, which at first emerges only in broken, fragmentary form - entirely different from anything we are used to in the field of conventional political and social communication. Yet, this evolving language, which we do not know yet and still have to learn, is remarkably effective, by dint of its emotional force. It is metaphorically precise in conveying the ideas and feelings it seeks to revive, reclaim or re-establish. It is precisely this language, as a distinctive instrument of the students’ struggle, that transforms the very nature of the culture of resistance in Serbia.

7 October 2025 

#LoveIsResistance 

“In this act of resistance, love has become our strongest shield. Love for those who are no longer with us. Love for those who stand beside us. Love for the land we want to heal.

That is why we say: love is resistance.
Resistance to hatred, resistance to fear, resistance to apathy. Love is what drives us not to give up, to believe, to do good.

For only love can endure everything that hatred seeks to destroy.
Because it unites what violence tries to tear apart.
From it springs courage, from it grows hope, from it a new world is born.

They cannot break us when we love one another.
Because there are always more of us.”     (Facebook profile Students in the Blockade)

Mobilisation of love is the dominant metaphor of the new language of the student protests and of the inner logic of their fight. Emotional unity lies at the heart of their “combat readiness”, while falling in love - with the students themselves and their struggle, with the possibility of social change and action, with justice, with the future and, finally, with Serbia itself – is the core of the social mobilisation sparked by the student protests. The strength of the student struggle has lain in its emotional cohesion from the very start, despite the ideological and strategic heterogeneity of the protests. 

It is therefore crucial to understand the emotional nature of the emerging culture of resistance born with the student protest in Serbia, within which love is affirmed as a tool of social struggle. The slogan #LoveIsResistance partly corresponds to the Millennials’ anti-capitalist and anti-globalist #RestIsResistance slogan. Both assert the right to a repressed emotional life and reclaim that right - the right to tears, depression, dysfunction, anxiety, doubt and fear, as well as to rebellion and rejection of the system. This right constitutes an essential and fundamental threat to the contemporary neoliberal world of transnational corporations. To forget this right is to deny happiness, empathy, solidarity and the building of the community as the indispensable foundation of social and political life, which must be restored if the struggle against the politics of death is to be won.

This is why this mobilisation of love has been so successful. It has demonstrated both the strength of solidarity and the richness of the resources on which the student movement can rely. The concept of walking - whereby students travelled on foot from town to town, forming a decentralised network of interconnectedness and highlighting the shared emotional demands of students and citizens across Serbia - was established at the very beginning of the struggle, through a series of small actions. The students embarked on their first major walk when they headed towards Novi Sad to attend the protest on 1 February 2025. The Cycling Tour to Strasbourg and the Marathon to Brussels were organised as extensions of this idea, serving as a special form of dialogue with the Serbian diaspora in the EU, but also with the EU itself. Through walking, the students’ bodies became the stake of the struggle – the symbol and, at the same time, the arena of resistance, the site of its conceptualisation. On the other hand, the walking has opened a dialogue with the f religious pilgrimages and military marches in Serbia’s history. It has rekindled the connection with suppressed memories and forms of resistance, reviving a tradition of defiance in unexpected, seemingly archaic ways that have elicited widespread public support, particularly in rural parts of the country. The student walks have contributed to the creation of what Ildikó Erdélyi calls “infrastructures of care”, through which people in Serbia have shown their willingness to offer students - like any people’s-liberation army - their economic, emotional, cognitive and psychological resources, however modest their own lives might be. These infrastructures of care have revealed that the resources mobilised through love are far greater than anyone had expected or could have considered economically feasible. Thanks to them, the student and civic struggle endured, proving to be more lasting and (self-)sustainable than anyone had anticipated.

In this way, the students metaphorically defined, from the outset, the people’s-liberation character of their protests, in which anti-colonial and anti-globalist tendencies intersect, along with critiques of neoliberalism with the features of a national struggle for sovereignty and self-awakening. The protesting students reclaimed the right to love one’s own country, which the older generations had denied themselves, out of neglect or out of guilt for the wars and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. In doing so, they invoked both the history of Serbian liberation wars and the global tradition of anti-colonial struggles defending the right to love one’s land and its heritage. The Serbian flag became the only legitimate visual emblem of the student protests (alongside the flags of their colleges and universities), chosen to express this newly rediscovered sense of patriotism. 

The issue of flags the protesters have been flying has, in fact, been one of the key points in attempts to establish control over the narrative of the student protests within the authoritarian political field in which they have been taking place. The students have often been criticised precisely because of the contradictory visual identity of the protests: alongside the Serbian flag, one could also see flags depicting the “Curly-Haired Jesus” (which some associate with Russia and others see as a hybrid symbol merging Orthodox imagery, patriotic sentiment and internet irony), flags with Serbian saints and (WWII Nazi collaborators) Chetnik symbols, and even the flags of the Russian pro-Kremlin mercenary organisation Wagner. The absence of EU flags has been conspicuous and consistent. Interpretations of the student protests have tended toward shortcuts and simplistic explanations aimed at ensuring control and supervision of public discourse. The students have been accused of being Russophile and anti-European, of nationalism, denial of war crimes and ignorance of the true nature of the wars fought across the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. A proliferation of sceptical and defeatist “oppositional” narratives has also emerged, portraying the protests as doomed to fail, while reproaching the students for the secrecy of their activities and, in particular, for their refusal to engage politically with the existing opposition or articulate a public political programme. This shows that the efforts of various social actors to seize — now politically very lucrative — control over the narrative of the student protests have become part of a habit of reading the social change unfolding in Serbia through the lens of past, lost political struggles. Interpretations of the student protests often reveal a tendency toward shortcuts and quick solutions aimed at asserting control and surveillance over public discourse. All of this has seriously undermined the mobilisation of love and the “infrastructures of care” that have emerged from it.

The mobilisation of love, as well as patriotism, is, however, the outcome of a carefully crafted student strategy of emotional communication — one that is not easily neutralised. A meticulously curated soundtrack plays an extremely important role in this process. In addition to the Serbian anthem, the student choirs have always performed “Vostani Serbije” (“Arise, Serbia”) and “Tamo daleko” (“There, Far Away”) at the protests, emphasising the Enlightenment-patriotic Serbian tradition that must be revived, seized from the hands of conquerors and colonisers and returned to the hearts and lips of Serbia’s citizens. The soundtrack highlights the establishment of Serbia as a modern state (“Vostani Serbije”) which was a worthy ally of the great powers in WWI, contributing to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a major European imperial-colonial power (“Tamo daleko”). The students have recognised the ruling regime as part of neo-colonial and imperialist mechanisms, perceiving the fight against corruption also as a struggle against the colonial status into which Serbia has fallen during Aleksandar Vučić’s rule. 

When selecting the dates for major protests, the students have paid special attention to historical events that defined Serbia as the site of modern and emancipatory politics - ideals aligned with the students’ demands and with the affirmation of love as a form of social struggle. The protest in Kragujevac took place on 15 February 2025, the anniversary of the 1835 Constitution, celebrated for establishing the separation of powers - a principle the students argue is now being violated, most notably by the President - as well as for its proclamation of civil liberties. Although annulled only a month after its adoption, this so-called Sretenje (Candlemas) Constitution remains one of the key milestones in Serbia’s emergence as a modern European state. The reading of the “Edict of Niš” clearly evoked the Edict of Milan, a legal act issued in 313 AD by Constantine the Great (one of two Roman emperors born in Niš), which proclaimed religious equality and the end of Christian persecution. And it was precisely during the protest in Niš, held during Ramadan, that students from Novi Pazar were offered iftar, while, later on, participants in the Novi Pazar protest held during Lent were served a traditional pastry (mantije) prepared in accordance with the rules of the Serbian Orthodox fast. This symbolic exchange of food echoed the message of love and religious tolerance embodied in the “Edict of Niš.” The ideological and iconographic polyglossia and heteroglossia of the student protests, together with the power of solidarity and empathy, culminated on 12 April in Novi Pazar. Under the slogan “Freedom Rules the Bazaar,” the students united in a struggle to defend their common homeland, restoring the bonds between members of different faiths and nationalities that the Serbian regime had systematically eroded by deliberately cultivating an atmosphere of latent conflict and inter-ethnic intolerance. In an atmosphere of mutual respect for religious and cultural differences, the Novi Pazar students commented that this was the first time they felt like equal citizens of Serbia. The moment at the Novi Pazar protest when a Muslim male student and a Serbian Orthodox female student together released a white dove – the universal symbol of peace – was the climax of the first phase of the student protests, confirming that the students’ path is the path of love. 

The last major student protest was held in Belgrade on 28 June – Vidovdan (St. Vitus Day). That was the day when the medieval Serbian state lost its statehood and sovereignty in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to the Ottoman Empire. The speeches delivered during the rally suggest that the student movement made a political compromise that day, leaning populistically toward the toxic matrix of Serbian politics –the concept of Serbian hegemony, which was re-established in the 1990s precisely through references to the Kosovo myth, most notoriously in the speech former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević delivered in Gazimestan (Kosovo), also on St. Vitus Day. 

The invocation of the Kosovo Covenant (in which one choses the heavenly over the earthly kingdom) and the Kosovo sacrifice, however, is not always or necessarily a nationalist war cry. It serves primarily as a reminder of the necessity of sacrifice in struggle – as a historical, religious and spiritual principle of resistance. It should also be noted that the Vidovdan protest ended with a call to citizens to take the initiative, with a communal, not a nationalist appeal; with recalling national sacrifices for freedom, as well as Europe’s revolutionary traditions of rebellion. With a call to the barricades by which the student protest entered a new phase of the struggle.

12 October 2025

@PriceofFreedom 

“Every change has its witnesses, but also its bearers.
While some merely watch, others pay the price.
That price is not a number; it is sleepless nights, fear and uncertainty, threats and blackmail.
It is the people who have traded comfort for hope, safety for truth, peace for justice.
It is all those who believe that Serbia can be better — even if it costs them everything they have (…).

The price of freedom cannot be measured in material terms.

 It is paid in patience, in trust, in renunciation. It is paid in courage and in love, in fearful glances and in hands that refuse to let go. It is paid with every “I can’t go on” that nevertheless turns into “I can make it a little farther.”

This is why freedom will have its guardians as long as there are those who give of themselves for others, as long as there are those who carry the burden so that others may walk more lightly.

(Facebook profile Students in the Blockade)

Ever since they first launched the now-famous phrase “This is outside your jurisdiction”, the students have been successfully unmasking the unsustainability of Aleksandar Vučić’s rule, driving Serbia toward the destruction of all its resources, including its human ones. The students’ retort encapsulates the autocratic nature of Vučić’s government: most of the social issues that he addresses unilaterally, bypassing democratic procedure, do not fall within his legal powers and are a flagrant example of the suspension of the rule of law. By creating an illusion of omnipresence and omnipotence, Vučić has been shifting attention away from the unlawfulness of his actions, which exceed his constitutional powers. The students have been rejecting authoritarian presidential decrees and insisting that the captured institutions respond to their demands. Thus, this now-famous student phrase — often used in a humorous or ironic context — effectively exposes the true nature of Vučić’s regime: sheer force.

It became clear that political and state violence in Serbia was taking new forms - both institutional and extra-institutional - after the authorities used an unidentified sonic weapon during the silent vigil at the 15 March protest in Belgrade. Has the war returned home, as writer Tomislav Marković and others analysing the student protests through the lens of Yugoslavia’s disintegration and Serbia’s wartime role have suggested? Or are we witnessing the preparation of a new kind of reckoning, the reach and consequences of which we are unable to fathom?

During July and August 2025, Serbia’s streets saw arrests and detentions of students and citizens, accompanied by abuse and beatings; even minors and the elderly, some of whom did not even take part in the protests, were not spared. The arrests were unlawful and excessive use of police force was indisputable. This form of violence is unprecedented among EU member states or candidate countries. (Despite comparisons with the brutal arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in West Europe, the conduct of the Serbian police, apparently aided and abetted by paramilitary groups and private security personnel, indicates that the situation in Serbia has overstepped the bounds of the rule of law and is incomparable to that in EU member states.) The European Parliament’s resolution condemning Vučić’s regime was long in coming, merely confirming the ineffectiveness of Western democracies and their own global crisis, as Boris Buden has already noted in his analyses of the political unknown toward which the non-representational, plenum-based democracy of the student movement in Serbia is leading us.

The student protest has begun to define itself as a slow-burn political process - one in which authoritarianism, the personality cult and other pillars of social and patriarchal hierarchy are rejected, and where there is insistence on taking responsibility for one’s own participation in society. Yet, in this slow-burning process, the stakes are constantly — and almost imperceptibly — being raised. Despite the torture they endured following their arrest, students Nikolina Sinđelić and Teodora Gardović have vowed that they are ready to give their lives for their country and have refused to be intimidated. Dijana Hrka, the mother of the young man killed by the collapsed canopy, has said the same, bravely resisting brutal assaults by police officers. Over the past month, the bar — the stake of the struggle — has been raised still higher for those willing to understand the moment in which the history of the student movement is naming its own heroes and heroines: Luka Mihajlović, Lazar Dinić, Andrej Tanko... Many others, too, have proved — and some have openly declared — that they are ready to defend their struggle with their lives, if that is what it comes to, as student Bojan Jovičić wrote in his letter from prison to the Serbian public. On behalf of the Novi Pazar students, Džejlan Habibović has demanded that the State University of Novi Pazar be placed under emergency administration and that its Rector be dismissed: “We’ll be ready to return to class when the rector resigns.” At the same time, a number of girls and women — such as Sonja Ponjavić, Kristina Vasiljević and Ana Vučak — have demonstrated an incredible combination of fragility and strength at the student protests. There is something unbreakable in that combination. No arguments can prevail over that indestructability. Even the most loyal supporters of the regime know this. 

During their October preparations for the anniversary of the canopy collapse, students shared photographs of earlier marches and walks — images that evoke historical photographs of military campaigns — on the Instagram profiles of their university and college plenums (their only official channels of communication) and on their joint account Students in the Blockade. The slogans and visual materials reveal that this movement already has its own history and is aware of that history. This provides the foundation for a new communication strategy grounded in a strong ethical component, one that permits no concessions and has not previously been articulated: the students’ struggle comes at a price. And that price is high. By choosing struggle over commodification and comfort, the students are opting for the spiritual rather than the material, for immaterial values and a high degree of risk — transforming themselves into figures of both heroes and martyrs. In doing so, they articulate a new cycle of mobilisation that demands a radicalisation of love — its unconditionality and readiness for personal sacrifice. In this radicalisation, the Partisan, the revolutionary, and, at the same time, the martyr-like religious dimensions of the student protests once again reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, remaining faithful to their heterogeneity in love. 

The students have also been posting on their official Instagram profiles a series entitled “Turning Point” sum up the experience and phases of the student struggle: “With steps of remembrance, we return to commemorate the crime and tragedy that changed everything.” The summing-up highlights the most important events that have shaped and transformed the student protest. For instance, in the episode “Political Articulation”, they set out their position on the necessity of their final demand - the calling of early parliamentary elections. The students have said that they are drawing up a Student List that will articulate their political programme at those elections, whilst emphasising their commitment to democratic values: “We believe that democracy is the only right way to resolve a crisis of this magnitude and we call on the people to support the list in which the students in the blockade of all higher education institutions in Serbia will place their trust so that truth may prevail on the scales of justice”. 

We have, therefore, entered a new phase of the student and civic struggle on the eve of the anniversary of the Novi Sad tragedy, a stage that does not acknowledge the political tactics of the “neutral ones”, who think they can strike a deal with history, or of the “smart ones”, who think they know how it will all end. However, how should we understand the commitment to traditional democratic values in the midst of a non-parliamentary, direct-democratic struggle? As a concession or as a pause? Or have we still not mastered the new language of the student protest and don’t understand the clear messages of the social struggle it is articulating ? 

The students have obviously continued consistently refusing to take part in forms of social resistance that revive and perpetuate the politics of death.  Love is undoubtedly their most effective — if not their only possible — weapon in countering the culture of fear and violence. This is why we should remind ourselves of its true meaning and of the fact that it implies dedication and patience. And unconditional support sometimes. The readiness to stake everything on one card — or cast the die. In this demand for the unconditional, the ethical Rubicon has been crossed. We are challenged to a duel of love, while the young Spartans are sending a Partisan-like message: You are not entitled. We do not recognise the judgments of your political option. You have no excuse for defending your positions and privileges. You are not prepared to pay the price. But we are here to protect you, to bear the sacrifice, to forgive and understand you, to love in your stead, to look after Serbia instead of you, and, if necessary, to declare in our own name: With our shield or upon it.  

A message with a postscript imbued with love: 

See you in Novi Sad on 1 November!

Belgrade, 28 October 2025