Description
Over the past decade, a wave of grassroots activism has emerged across South-East Europe. Such protest movements typically occur as a response to contentious infrastructure developments or proposals, are usually detached from formal civil society and the NGO communities that have developed over the past two decades, and tend to employ anti-globalist and green discursive frames. These mobilisations ‘formulate a profoundly anti-capitalist and radically democratic vision of their societies’, bringing radical politics back to the so-called ‘rebel peninsula’ (Horvat & Štiks 2015). The case of Serbia is particularly interesting: the country saw a significant mobilisation against the Belgrade waterfront development in 2015 but the activists initially made no mention of the environmental impact of the proposed scheme, nor did they seek to engage the city’s quite developed community of green NGOs (Fagan and Ejdus 2020). However, more recent protest, including the high-profile mobilisation against Rio Tinto lithium mines, now focus squarely on the environmental impact and newly emerging movement-parties have adopted the environmental issues into their programs. Therefore, the paper focuses on the explaining and conceptualising the ‘green’ shift – how should we understand emergence of ‘green-speaking’ movement-parties in Serbia? Drawing on the concept of ‘activist citizenship’ (Isin 2009) we argue that the shift is part of a move from ‘performative practices’ to ‘pre-figurative politics’ (Leach 2013), occurring as a consequence of social learning through a cycle of contention. It is also emblematic of both ‘strategic learning’ and ‘cognitive liberation’ (Kralj 2022). However, such analysis underplays the salience of the ‘green’ discursive. The use of the environmental frame to protest against government-backed schemes at a time when formal opposition and civil society spaces are increasingly constrained is reminiscent of the end of communist rule across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. We contend, therefore, that this new wave of environmental activism to register more fundamental dissent as part of eclectic grassroots mobilisations represents a particular democratic moment for Serbia.
