Activist Citizenship in Southeast Europe

The volume Activist Citizenship in Southeast Europe gathers seven excellent case studies of practices that expand the notion of political action beyond the institutions of liberal democracy. The introduction, written by the editors Adam Fagan and Indraneel Sircar, discusses three important contributions that the volume makes. First, despite the fact that the countries of Southeastern Europe are commonly characterised as having ‘weak’ civil societies, various forms of activism do take place there. Second, by delving into the history of some of the case studies, the authors show that the forms of activism they study did not develop within the core and then disseminated to South-eastern Europe, i.e. the periphery, but that the cases often display innovative and trailblazing characteristics. Finally, some of the contributions point out that small political acts—infra-politics, in James C. Scott’s parlance—that often are dismissed as unimportant, indeed, are indispensable for a civil society that goes beyond the form of non-governmental organizations.

Following the introduction, Chiara Milan’s chapter analyses the differences between two waves of popular mobilisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Milan identifies the domination of performative practices of citizenship in the 2013 Baby Revolution (#JMBG) protests, in which participants brought about ‘moments of rupture that created possibilities for social change’ (11). The 2014 ‘social uprising’, on the other hand, exhibits a prefigurative orientation for Milan, by creating ‘alternative social arrangements that prefigured a new model of citizenship’ (11).

The second chapter, authored by Astrid Reinprecht, investigates how the repertoire that Serbian student protesters relied on changed in relation to the changing circumstances and collective identification of protesters. Appropriation of some innovations from student protests that were taking place in other European countries allowed Serbian students to widen the longstanding framing of student movements in Yugoslavia and other post-Yugoslav countries in order to articulate ‘a comprehensive critique of neoliberalism in the public sphere’ (42).

In the third chapter, Alen Toplišek and Lasse Thomassen focus on Slovenian 2012-2013 popular mobilisation that led to the development of new political parties to examine horizontality and verticality, i.e. the two aspects of social movements and political parties that are evident in organizational decision-making structures and the relationship with the state. Instead of enforcing the binary opposition, the authors claim that ‘there is no horizontality without verticality’ (49) as the two are intertwined in any organisation and an outcome of negotiation by agents that comprise those organisations.

In the fourth chapter, Danijela Dolenec, Karin Doolan, and Tomislav Tomašević analyze the changes that the Right to the City Movement in Croatia has undergone. Instead of focusing on institutional self-preservation, the authors argue that the movement opted for social impact, which translated into organisational shape-shifting—evident in the five phases that the authors identify in less than a decade of organising—and resulted in ‘encouraging citizen engagement and political participation’(87).

The fifth chapter, authored by Bojan Baća, discusses a social movement that emerged in the Montenegrin village of Beranselo in opposition to government policy regarding garbage disposal. Baća argues that, as the mobilisation echoed on the national level, it created a political frame for the struggle against injustice and marginalisation that could not be reduced to any existing ‘ethnic-cum-political identity’ (113), which allowed the political subjectivation of other Montenegrins as unrepresented in the polity.

In the sixth chapter, Piotr Goldstein focuses on forms of activism that aim to create counter-spaces that are different from forms of activism and politics embodied in NGOs and social movements. For some of the people that the author studies, such activism is an alternative to more formal activism, while for others, it is complementary, as it creates an infrastructure for other forms of activism or catalyses them.

The final chapter, authored by Alexandra Ana, analyses the role of feminists in the anti-austerity protests that took place in Romania in the winter of 2012. Ana differentiates between redistribution claims made by feminists, some of which were largely accepted by other protesters, and recognition claims, which feminists thought were not so easily accepted. Despite ideological differences among Romanian feminists, which, Ana argues, prevented their acting as a unified bloc, feminists had a significant influence on the course of the 2012 protests.

The unifying theoretical idea behind the collection is the notion of ‘activist citizen ship’, developed by Engin Isin. This seems like a broad enough concept that can contain all of the phenomena on which the authors in this edited volume focus. Isin’s interest is not in citizens as a category that precedes political belonging, but rather in practices through which citizenship is claimed. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, actors have constructed themselves as citizens—active citizens of modern states, to be precise—through routinised practices such as voting or paying taxes. In contrast to active citizens, Isin points out how people can enact new political subjectivities in a political community through acts of citizenship that involve the contestation of existing political norms and practices and that bring about a rupture.

Whereas the notion of activist citizenship is a thread that binds all chapters together, the authors do not all approach it in the same way. Isin calls on citizenship scholars to examine what makes a citizen. That requires a grounded examination of a specific historical configuration of ‘rights’, ‘sites’, ‘scales’, and ‘actors’ alongside ‘acts’. ^[1] Some of the chapters offer a wider examination of political action in the context that are studied, against the backdrop of which the acts of citizenship they write about take place (most notably, Baća and Reinprecht). However, the majority of chapters remain more narrowly focused on the phenomena they study, which are gathered under the umbrella of ‘activist citizenship’ even though Isin’s approach does not inform them to a great degree (most notably, Toplišek / Thomassen and Ana).

This is a missed opportunity not because Isin’s work should necessarily guide analysis, but because it seems like a framework that is flexible enough to allow a grounded theory of citizenship in the region. This point is related to a wider point about knowledge production. All of the authors should be applauded for engaging with works by scholars from the places they study, as well as sources in the local languages. However, the analytical work they engage in critically depends on theory from the core of academic production. Other than Isin, the authors engage with various theorists to analyse their material: Della Porta, Tilly, Tarrow, Snow, Rancière, Sitrin, Mouffe, Lefebvre, Fraser—to name but a few. Some of the chapters cite the work of Štiks and Horvat, who attempted to situate recent examples of contentious politics in the post-Yugoslav space in the specific predicament of postsocialist neoliberalism and the ‘desert of transition’ that it brought about. ^[2] However, their work, which focused on a series of protests that lead them to call the Balkans ‘the rebel peninsula’, is cited as a bridge to broader interests in a global wave of uprising rather than as an attempt to theorise phenomena in the region themselves. Reading the volume, I was hoping that some of the authors might, in their future work, take up the ambitious question of what a grounded theory of citizenship and contentious politics in Southeastern Europe could be.

Still, the collection is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary conversation on social movements and citizenship. It challenges us to rethink citizenship claims in Southeastern Europe and to consider what political actions can be when they eschew institutions of liberal democracy, such as political parties or nongovern mental organisations. The authors discuss their cases in a subtle manner, which allows them to not predetermine what political success is. Rather, they explore how the understanding of success is tied to broader political contexts in which activist citizens operate and how those contexts could be transformed through various forms of activism.