The Postsocialist Transformation of Youth Voluntarism in Serbia

Introduction

This study combines an analysis on two levels of the functional and organizational transformation and the historical continuities of youth voluntarism in Serbia. The study of the institutional transition and structural changes in the organization of international voluntary services in the last two decades of the twentieth century is combined with research on personal experiences of participants in voluntary actions during the 1990s. The research follows two thematic streams. First, it explains the dynamics of accommodation of the international normative structures in youth voluntary work as these are found in existing state and/or national system(s). Second, it analyses the impact of the transition from a socialist to a multiparty system in Serbia on incoming and outgoing international voluntary service projects. The 1980 to 2000 timeframe represents a period in which top-down—that is, international to national—practices were set up and defined. Similarly, this temporal dimension represents a tool for the analysis of horizontal changes and challenges due to systemic regime and governance changes.

My hypothesis is that the international voluntary service was translatable to both socialist and then partially democratic societies because of its content, i. e. volunteering, specifically. In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), volunteering was associated with the tradition of Youth Labour Actions, while the subsequent societies in transition to free-market economy recognized the latter’s project-based, community-oriented, grassroots activities. I conclude that the transition was successful also due to this continuity of the organizational programmes of voluntary actions.

Defining Volunteering

Volunteering has been promoted as the achievement of democracy and democratic regimes in the countries that once belonged to Yugoslavia. There are two principal sources for such a trend in the public spheres of these countries. The first has its origins in the debate over whether the mass attendance and participation in Youth Labour Actions during state socialism were actually voluntary or not.^[1] The second is an understanding of volunteering as a ‘fundamental democratic feature’, as it is defined by the European Youth Portal.^[2] Forms of unpaid work such as those in the framework of Youth Labour Actions were widespread during state socialism in Yugoslavia, reaching a peak in the context of post-World War Two reconstruction efforts. For example, Youth Labour Actions or humanitarian aid responses related to the Red Cross organization, as well as to firefighter organizations in local communities, to name only a few, were present on the territory of the SFRY long before the transition to a multiparty political system and the major quantitative expansion of non-governmental organizations as the main form taken by civil society stakeholders, which are today the pillars of voluntary actions and organizations.

This study assesses how an international normative approach to volunteering was adopted and accommodated within the historical, economic, and political circumstances in Serbia between 1980 and 2000. The starting point is thus the definition of ‘international voluntary service’. According to the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service (CCIVS), a global coordinating body for international voluntary service founded by UNESCO in 1948, international voluntary service is categorized and regulated as ‘a vehicle for non-formal and informal education [which] seeks to encourage the belief of the volunteers and their hosts in their personal potential as tools of positive change’,^[3] while volunteers are understood as ‘people who offer to devote their knowledge, time and energy, within the framework of a collective social effort, working actively for the general interest of the community without replacing paid labour’.^[4] Hence, the voluntary service in focus in this article has the following characteristics: 1) it deals with youth work; 2) it is institutionalized; and 3) it is coordinated within an international regulating body. The voluntary projects on which this study focuses are short-term voluntary workcamps organized in Serbia, as well as international ones that include participants from Serbia. Workcamps are a form of (international) volunteer work typically lasting two to three weeks, the topics of which range from the ecological, archaeological, social, artistic, constructional, and agricultural, to those that deal with cultural heritage, history, language, and work with children and people with disabilities.

The article first tackles the institutional framework within which voluntary exchanges were operated both in the SFRY and in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with a focus on the (Socialist) Republic of Serbia.^[5] The Young Researchers of Serbia and its voluntary service are chosen as a case study in order to track institutional changes and the way voluntary programmes were implemented from the 1980s onwards, i. e. the period when programmes were financially controlled by the state, until the 2000s, instead characterized by the exponential growth of the non-governmental (NGO) sector. The rationale behind the selection stems from the membership of the organization in international volunteer networks coordinated by the CCIVS, its continuous existence, and active engagement from the 1970s to the present day. In the second part of the article, personal experiences in voluntary workcamps are presented and discussed, in order to grasp the social, cultural, and often political dimensions and motivations to participate in international voluntary actions. Special attention is given to the context of the causes and consequences of the wars in the 1990s, as well as to the international isolation triggered by the politics of Slobodan Milošević’s regime.

While analysing voluntary work transformation in times of major regime change, I have taken into account the broader context of democratic transition, expressed in several points, the first of which is the transition from a single-party to a multiparty political system.^[6] Here, I am mostly interested in the general operational context of civil society actors and how voluntary actions have been organized, presented, and widely disseminated. The second point is the transition from war and violence to peace.^[7] Despite the fact that the wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia were not fought on the territory of Serbia, the historical moment marked by economic and political sanctions affected every form of international cooperation. The third point regards the transition from what the historian Hrvoje Klasić calls ‘Yugoslav laissez-faire socialism’^[8] to a capitalist or rather market-based economy.^[9] This feature mainly influenced the financial aspect of the organization of voluntary work and the subsequent project-based funding of the activities.

The Institutional Transformation of Voluntary Work in Serbia

In this section, I approach the transformation of youth voluntarism on an institutional level, by tracing the changes in the organizing structures of the Young Researchers of Serbia (Mladi istraživači Srbije, YRS). Between 1980 and 2000, this organization transitioned from a coordinated network of organizations to a postsocialist civil society organization, and thus represents a valuable example of a fully functional voluntary association in both periods.

The SFRY had acquired important experience of organized voluntary activities. Their social and economic contribution was an important form of agency in the post-World War Two reconstruction efforts. State-organized activities, the so-called Youth Labour Actions (omladinske radne akcije), standing out in terms of their size and societal reach, were especially frequent in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. The number of participants in such actions and the potential of large-scale mobilization of young people made the Youth Labour Actions ‘one of the most Yugoslav phenomena of all’.^[10] Their main goal was to restore and rebuild the country after 1945, but also to contribute to the new development plans linked to infrastructure, construction of new settlements, as well as educational, sporting, and cultural facilities. Although volunteering activities were politically led, they were predominantly voluntary in nature and would fit into the current legal definition of voluntary work.

In addition to volunteer programmes organized by the state, the SFRY also included some non-state organizations and voluntary movements that had already been founded in the nineteenth century, such as the Society for the Support and Education of Poor and Abandoned Children (Društvo za potpomaganje i vaspitanje sirotne i napuštene dece), now named Friends of Children (Prijatelji dece), the Red Cross (Crveni krst), and the Scouts’ organization (Izviđači).^[11]

In SFRY, the international voluntary service, for both incoming and outgoing volunteers, was made possible with the establishment of the Commission for International Voluntary Activities (Koordinacija za međunarodnu razmenu dobrovoljaca i organizovanje međunarodnih radnih kampova u SSOJ), based in the Socialist Republic (SR) of Slovenia. This Commission was part of, and operated through regional sections of, the Alliance of Socialist Youth (Savez socijalističke omladine, SSO). It coordinated voluntary exchanges between local and international youth organizations.^[12] At the beginning of the 1980s, the SSO started to lose importance, and in 1990, after the 14^th (and last) Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, SKJ), the Yugoslav SSO de facto ceased to exist, as it dissolved together with the SKJ. Therefore, on the eve of the breakup of the SFRY, the coordination of international voluntary exchanges was transferred to the Slovenian organization Most (Bridge) and to the Voluntary Service of Serbia (Volonterski servis Srbije, VSS), which was a part of the Young Researchers of Serbia. In the late phase of the SFRY, this move was justified by the idea that the structure of the voluntary service had to change because of the possibly ongoing process of politicization of the Alliance of Socialist Youth. In its 1990 report, the Yugoslav Coordination of the International Exchange of Volunteers indeed warned that the organization of international workcamps implied the transformation of the Alliance of Socialist Youth into political parties, which was particularly inconvenient for the functioning of the Commission for International Voluntary Activities.^[13]

Both successor organizations operated within the Commission for International Voluntary Activities, thus inheriting the existing infrastructure and the network of youth organizations throughout the SFRY. The initial idea proposed in February 1990 during the advisory meeting of the Commission as a ‘possible way of development’ for Yugoslav voluntary service featured the establishment of an independent association. A suggestion of this kind was judged to be ‘not a dream, but more like a reality of the future’. The main argument was the recognition of the difficult financial situation of the regional centres of voluntary exchange, together with their lack of experience. Moreover, the Commission advocated a ‘rational coordination’ of the network of existing centres, as a ‘minimum’ requirement necessary for the implementation of common activities. In addition, the Commission stated that the regional sections of the Alliance of Socialist Youth (SSO) transformed into ‘political parties of determinate colours’^[14] [emphasis added, A. L.] and consequently used voluntary and youth work for political purposes. For example, the report considered some voluntary activities to be a façade, while their real purpose would result in the presence of political parties among the electorate. Even though the breakup of Yugoslavia would escalate into armed conflict only one year later, this example clearly outlines how the politically motivated tensions in social and institutional structures were conspicuous. The choice of wording, however, albeit comprehensible, seems to illustrate how euphemisms were employed to refer to a delicate political and historical moment of the SFRY.

The previously mentioned Voluntary Service of Serbia was founded in 1990 as a member of the Young Researchers of Serbia umbrella association in order to take over the voluntary exchange from the regional SSO. Before the YRS became a ‘non-profit, non-political NGO’ in the 1990s, it had already been ‘officially established in 1976 as a network of organizations, societies, clubs and sections with research programmes, gathered around the coordinative office on the national level in Belgrade’.^[15] The aims and objectives adopted by the YRS in the socialist period carried distinctive political determinants. At the beginning of the 1980s, the YRS listed among its objectives the ‘self-managed organization of research activities […] aiming to widen knowledge on nature and society’, the ‘preservation of the People’s Liberation Struggle (narodnooslobodilačka borba), and tradition of the socialist revolution’, ‘cooperation with the youth from the entire country in order to strengthen the brotherhood and unity (bratstvo i jedinstvo) of our nations and nationalities (naroda i narodnosti)’, and the ‘development of […] the struggle for world peace, of the love for all nations of the world and of our non-aligned politics (nesvrstane politike)’.^[16] Here, not only were the references to the official ideological environment outlined, but the discursive strategy and wording also easily revealed the historical era in which the organization was founded. Voluntary work, as inherently socially responsible and directed towards a common good, was promoted in the local communities (mesne zajednice) by in situ clubs, sections, and associations within the Young Researchers of Serbia.^[17] The financial aspect of social engagement and the creation of subsections within the Republic’s conference of the YRS was relatively straightforward: the YRS was financed in the framework of annual state budget grants dedicated to youth organizations. Consequently, the local and regional units under this larger umbrella association were receiving support directly from the local branches of the Alliance of Socialist Youth, namely through a specific Municipal Conference of the SSO (opštinska konferencija saveza socijalističke omladine). The local subsections were also connected to, and often logistically sponsored by, local schools, local organizations of associated labour (organizacije udruženog rada), or other local communities.

Due to the complex bureaucratic registration procedure, the editorial staff of the YRS’s youth magazine advised potential local activists to ‘start immediately with their work, as if the organization had already been created—[since] without action there is no organization’.^[18] This message in fact echoes the motto of the Youth Labour Actions: ‘There is no rest while we’re rebuilding!’ (Nema odmora dok traje obnova!), which evoked a strong sense of social duty towards the state, and towards the common good. The sociologist Mladen Lazić underlines this, in a certain sense, utopian element, in his definition of civil society, applicable to two fundamentally different systems of social regulation, the command and planned system and the market-driven system: ‘firstly, as a type of social action; secondly, as an area or sphere connected to the economy, state and private sphere, but standing on its own, separately; and thirdly, as the anchor of a design or project that has some utopian features’.^[19] Even though presently the public perception of civil society sees it as completely detached from the previous one-party system—since back then there was indeed a clear lack of independence from the state’s political and financial control—the latter had many elements that were continued in the organizational programmes, values, and objectives after the end of state socialism. This is particularly true for the organizations dealing with culture, science, the environment, or the rights of women, which had started to develop in the 1970s, ‘through dissident action and the development of movements that were modelled in line with the new social movements from the West’.^[20] In this study, I indeed argue that the fact that there was a potential to continue in the spirit of the YRS’s activities and values made the transition period less difficult and less painful. In other words, the thematic focus of the organization on international voluntary service and exchanges mainly in the domain of environmental and life sciences eased the ideological adjustments of the transition years.

Once the ideological component of the youth organizations gradually lost its significance, the Young Researchers of Serbia assumed with relative ease the role of a ‘non-political’ organization detached from the regime, as it consisted of youth scientific clubs dealing with (mainly) environmental matters.^[21] Even before the beginning of the structural changes of the entire political system, youth organizations such as the YRS in fact promoted, at least discursively, the ‘democratization of science’. Not only did they claim and try to offer a content that went beyond the restrictive and inflexible system by supporting ‘every form of youth action that enables the creative expression of each individual’, but they also motivated youth to actively participate, as ‘the YRS would not have been a youth organization if it had first needed to transform into one’.^[22] Here, the definition of the term ‘youth’ is quite interesting. According to the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia, youth (omladina) referred to all young girls and boys from the age of 14 to 25, more specifically from the seventh grade of primary school.^[23] However, this age range did not comply with the CCIVS’s definition or with the profile of the participants in the international voluntary service. Even though the YRS had regularly provided information about its actions to all secondary schools in the Socialist Republic of Serbia, and even included some final-year primary school students in its activities, participation in the international voluntary service was not possible for minors. In addition, the maximum age limit was never really defined, since besides outgoing volunteers participating in workcamps abroad, local experts and mentors of all age groups were involved in the work of the YRS in organizing incoming activities and workcamps. Similarly, the later statute of the YRS, dating from the mid-1990s, also refers to youth as the main beneficiary of the projects but omits a precise definition of the term.^[24]

Until 1990, the YRS was a participant in international youth exchanges through the Alliance of Socialist Youth, and such exchanges mostly covered scientific topics, so that YRS members ‘continued their usual scientific work abroad’.^[25] However, with the establishment of the Voluntary Service of Serbia, a switch in the nature of the science camps occurred:

‘First volunteer helpers started to appear at the end of our scientific mission and gradually started to help on our fieldwork site. Then the groups started to overlap, and later on, some scientific camps [i. e. fieldwork activities] were even transformed into voluntary camps.’^[26]

In Serbia, the wars that took place from 1991 to 1995 in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were strongly felt in every aspect of political, social, and economic life. Indeed, throughout the 1990s, society in Serbia massively supported the Yugoslav wars on the one hand, while on the other hand there was a simultaneous ‘equally massive and long-lasting public resistance to those wars’.^[27] The YRS and the VSS were not publicly dealing with the causes of the wars, but more with their consequences, with specific programme activities directed towards civilians and refugees, or with the isolation of Serbian youth from the rest of the world. During the wars of the 1990s, scientific or youth exchanges of any kind were rendered difficult, and due to the political and economic sanctions on Serbia, international projects became very uncommon.

One initiative that stood out during the first half of the 1990s was a so-called peace camp with the title ‘Views on others and views on ourselves’, which was organized in Valjevo in 1993. This action, fondly remembered by everyone who either worked with or had relations with the YRS during the war years, aimed to

‘provide a possibility for the volunteers to discuss some of the aspects of the Yugoslav conflict […], by attempting to break down political and social barriers and close distances in the views of all sides in the conflict. It was intended to be an opportunity for the participants to learn something about life under sanctions.’^[28]

Although the work tasks listed for this peace camp continued to be strictly environmental— cleaning the banks and bed of the River Gradac—the workcamp also tried to give a broader picture of daily life during the time of crisis and organized meetings with different members of civil society in order to challenge prejudices and war propaganda and learn about ‘xenophobia, racist and fascist tendencies and how to oppose them in different countries and societies’.^[29] Work activities at the river were combined with lectures given by university professors, experts, NGO members, and members of political parties, predominantly from Serbia itself. This hybrid conception became a trademark of YRS workcamps organized in the last decade of the twentieth century. The fact that the majority of the YRS–VSS programmes were oriented more towards research than to manual work attracted a ‘large number of partner organizations to start collaboration with the YRS’.^[30] Such partner organizations were usually local institutions or associations such as schools or ecological clubs, bridging the YRS’s contacts with the local community and its needs. Such practice was and continues to be far from unusual, not only in Serbia but also in other member states of the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service.

Although during the 1990s the YRS was not a prominent political actor or member of Serbia’s antiwar movement, the organization did express its political opinion, when, for example, it adhered to the following proposition of the Youth Council of Serbia (omladinski savet Srbije), with which it was affiliated:

‘We are witnessing war and the pain and suffering of innocent people, caused by a lack of tolerance and political compromise. The executive board of the Youth Council of Serbia, as a non-governmental organization, advocates for: 1. The peaceful solution of all the problems [related to the war] […]; 2. The democratization of relations in Serbia (freedom of information) […]; 3. The abolishment of UN sanctions which harm innocent people and especially Serbian youth […]; 4. Help in solving the refugee problem in the areas affected by the war […]; 5. Help in exerting pressure on the factors responsible for banning the shipment of humanitarian aid [… as] the truth about our nation cannot be based solely on the relationship to Serbia’s current regime.’^[31] [emphasis added]

This quote illustrates the change in language. From the early transitional period, terms such as NGO, democratization, pluralist democracy, and human rights began to replace the previous socialist discourse and to accommodate the expectations of new international donors including (mainly) the embassies of West European countries and the United States. Moreover, the core semantics related to the YRS–VSS activities were adjusted: ‘Youth actions (omladinske akcije) first became programmes and then workcamps’^[32] [emphasis added], and ‘suddenly people arrived as youth workers and left as volunteers’.^[33] When it comes to the financial aspect of the YRS’s work, the funding of the voluntary programmes switched from state sponsored to project based with the support of foreign donors:

‘Even though it was quite a change for us not to be able to count on state sponsors such as the SFRY Fund for Youth Organisations anymore, which had regularly secured funds for organizations such as the Youth Hostels Association (Ferijalni savez) or the Scouts, we were used to project proposal writing and survived the transition with relative ease.’^[34]

The Young Researchers of Serbia and the Voluntary Service of Serbia, however, also obtained public funding from the government of the Republic of Serbia, while at the same time managing independent fundraising projects together with other similar organizations, or receiving donations.^[35]

Between 1996 and 2000, after the end of the armed conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the YRS organized between five and ten international workcamps per year, sending over a hundred local volunteers and attracting twenty to fifty foreign volunteers each season. The organization struggled with the implementation of their annual plans, mostly because of ‘the organizational and technical conditions and the lack of financial means’, for example because ‘accommodation facilities reserved for the YRS had to be given to refugees from the war torn areas’. On the other hand, however, there were also strong initiatives to ‘strengthen ties with organizations from the neighbouring and Balkan countries and to prepare and implement common projects’.^[36] The VSS’s motto, ‘Think big, do little!’, was coined in line with the ‘Think globally, act locally’ slogan, connecting the international and the local dimension of volunteering.^[37]

Besides ‘inherited’ international partners such as the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service, based in Paris, France, the Alliance of European Voluntary Service Organisations or Service Civil International, the YRS, and the VSS took part in the programme ‘Next stop Serbia’ implemented by the Danish government, which aimed to provide long-term project support for the independent media, refugee programmes, and also for humanitarian and youth organizations. Such collaboration was fostered further through the establishment of the Southeast European Youth Network (SEEYN), which was founded through the FRESTA programme of the Danish ministry of foreign affairs.^[38] Although the SEEYN was established with the main idea of peace and reconciliation activities,

‘together with the colleagues from Green Action (Zelena akcija) [from Zagreb, Croatia, A. L.], we thought that the idea of gathering people to explicitly speak about human rights, peace, and reconciliation would be counterproductive. Instead, we offered environmental workcamps in order to achieve more spontaneous dialogue among participants.’^[39]

In addition, at the end of the year 2000, the YRS became the national NGO secretariat for the Regional Environmental Reconstruction Program (REReP) in the framework of the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe.

Besides the previously explained structural changes at the organizational level, the legal status of volunteers and voluntary organizations in Serbia and the other post-Yugoslav countries was not fully regulated until recently. Although the notion of volunteer or voluntary work existed previously in legal sources both in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the law dedicated solely to the phenomenon of volunteering was adopted only in 2010. According to this 2010 Law on Volunteering, voluntary work is defined as ‘the organized voluntary provision of a service or activity of general interest, for the common good or benefit of another individual, without financial remuneration or the request for any material benefit’.^[40]

This is not a unique or isolated phenomenon compared to other European countries, although the modalities of transition and the subsequent structural changes differ in each context, and Serbia is no exception. Due to the specific circumstances, its legislation was put into practice rather late when compared to the larger European legislative framework. At the European level, interest in the institutionalization of voluntary work was expressed at the beginning of the 1990s in the framework of the expansion of the European Union (EU) and accompanying discourse concerning the EU’s values. Civil society discourses and volunteering in particular first explicitly appeared in Declaration no. 38 of the Treaty of Amsterdam on ‘Voluntary Service Activities’, issued in 1997 and put into effect in 1999, which described the contribution of such activities towards the establishment of social solidarity.^[41] Moreover, the European Voluntary Service, an initiative of the European Commission, was implemented in 1998 with the purpose of promoting the mobility of ‘young volunteers’ (first aged 18–26 years, amended to 18–30 after 2007) among the EU member states and other partnering countries, both those aspiring for EU membership, as is the case with Serbia, and selected overseas countries.^[42]

Volunteers’ Stories. Personal Experiences of Voluntary Work

In the following, I present personal experiences based on my discourse analysis of sixteen semi-structured interviews with volunteers engaged in workcamps in Serbia and abroad, as well as with some of the leading organizing officers and former workcamp leaders. Both the snowball technique and purposive sampling were employed while selecting the informants. At the centre stood the dimensions of workcamp participation and organizational planning of the said international voluntary services. Most of the interviews were conducted in Belgrade and Novi Sad, while four interviews were conducted via Skype. Particular interest was paid to the motivation for and meaning of voluntary service in the immediate aftermath of the Yugoslav wars, the collaboration with the antiwar movements in the region, and the process leading to the foundation of the aforementioned Southeast European Youth Network. The motivation to volunteer is one of the main dividing and changeable factors in societies experiencing a transition from war to peace. The wars of the 1990s profoundly influenced all spheres of public and private life in the countries that were once Yugoslavia. In the framework of international voluntary service, they created new challenges and also solutions, especially in the context of some pioneering cross-border collaborations in the immediate aftermath of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition to these, my study covers the first post-Yugoslav-wars and post-sanctions voluntary exchanges to Serbia, and engages with the issues of representation, inclusion, and cooperation.

Conclusion

This article explores the transformation of youth voluntary work in Serbia in the last two decades of the twentieth century. I have focused on the process of institutional changes and on the personal memories of former volunteers, camp leaders, and organization officials. The research hypothesis that voluntary work transitioned relatively easily from one system to another proved to be correct. The transition process of voluntary service from being coordinated and sponsored by the state to being an instrument of civil society revealed some continuities and overlaps. The process was marked by the continuation of programmes and main activities, and this mostly, I argue, because the organization was recognized as being non-political. In other words, volunteering was considered to be a ‘common good’ under both political systems.

However, there were some important differences in the way voluntary work was performed during socialism and during postsocialism. While Youth Labour Actions were largely state-induced projects of national interest, mostly performed by citizens of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, voluntary workcamps were organized not only as local initiatives addressing specific needs of a local community, but as part of a larger international voluntary movement. Moreover, today the principles and rules of international voluntary exchanges and voluntary work have been turned into legislative form, both by the EU and at the level of single states. In that sense, the normative dimension of international voluntary service is an important pioneering endeavour that has proved to be adaptable to socialist, transitional, and (weak) democratic societies. However, international voluntary service employs much stricter rules of participation, in terms of class, gender, and education, than was the case with the mass reconstruction projects after World War Two in Yugoslavia.

When it comes to personal memories, several topics are identifiable as common to most workcamp participants, independently of their origin, such as a sensibilization to tolerance, solidarity, intercultural learning, peace promotion, and equality. In Serbia, although the linguistic registers used to express such values changed during the transitional years, their semantic content has remained the same. The interviewees in the sample did not refer to several of the layers that a multi-motivational perspective on taking part in voluntary activities has laid out: they did not talk about career options, social pressure, or protective reasons when it came to their motivations. This, I argue, was a consequence of the specific historical moment of the 1990s in Serbia when, for example, participation in a voluntary project rarely contributed to enhancing one’s employability.

Several site-specific reasons for engagement in voluntary activities became obvious in interviewees’ responses. Their emotionally strong memories of understanding workcamps as a means to escape the reality of Serbian society in the 1990s, combined with the desire to recapture the feeling of ‘normal’ prewar life, definitely carried a strong and specific idealistic and utopian significance, which today’s young volunteers would rarely share.