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Southeast European Integration Perspectives Edited by Wolfgang Petritsch,

former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Special Envoy of the EU for Kosovo

Christophe Solioz,

Secretary-General of the Center for European Integration Strategies

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Bojan Bili

We Were Gasping for Air

[Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy

Nomos

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This book is published in the framework of a CEIS project sponsored by the Loterie Romande (Geneva), the Karl Popper Stiftung (Zug) and the City of Geneva.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet ber http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de . ISBN 978-3-8329-7806-8

1. Auflage 2012 Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2012. Printed in Germany. Alle Rechte, auch die des Nachdrucks von Auszgen, der fotomechanischen Wiedergabe und der bersetzung, vorbehalten. Gedruckt auf alterungsbestndigem Papier. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically those of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying machine or similar means, and storage in data banks. Under 54 of the German Copyright Law where copies are made for other than private use a fee is payable to Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort, Munich.

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Contents

Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Acronyms Introduction 1. (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Activisms: Marginal(ised) Phenomena 2. Putting (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Activisms in Motion 3. Crossing the Lines: Feminist Anti-War Activism 4. Recruitment to High Risk Anti-War Activism: Anti-War Campaign of Croatia 5. Between Fragmenting and Multiplying: Scale Shift of Anti-War Initiatives 6. Sustaining Activism beyond Armed Conflicts: Belgrade Women in Black 7. Power in Activism: Impacts and Meanings of Anti-War Engagement Afterword: Bending the Gaze Selected Bibliography Appendices

7 9 13 17

37 59 83 109 137 159 179 199 205 213

Acknowledgements

Witnessing the disintegration of the country into which he and many of his friends invested energy and ideals, Vane Ivanovi, one of the founders of the European Movement, said that Yugoslavia was created by the best and destroyed by the worst.1 I enjoyed the research which I present in this book because it provided me with an opportunity to meet many of the former. I crossed borders smoothly, changed dialects, and talked to some of the greatest Yugoslav writers, lawyers, architects, philosophers, human rights defenders... I was astonished by their interest in my topic and the willingness to share their knowledge, books, experiences and emotions with me. Over the three-year-long fieldwork, I conducted more than a hundred interviews across the former Yugoslavia and in other European countries. I am grateful to all of my respondents for such an unambiguous expression of intellectual solidarity and support. Although I do not reveal their names when giving excerpts from my lengthy interviews with them (unless they specifically allowed or asked me to do so), I do list all of them at the end of this work as a small acknowledgement of my appreciation (Appendix 1). This book is a result of my intention to point to Yugoslav anti-war enterprises as an alternative history and a knowledge gap in the studies devoted to the wars of the Yugoslav succession. I envisioned the pages that follow as a rostrum, however inconsequential it may be, that has been too frequently denied to many protagonists of this book socially, politically and academically. Irritated by an overabundance of (un)intentionally distorted interpretations with which they cannot identify, some of my interviewees believed that my research could make a difference. I very much hope that I have at least to a certain extent risen to their expectations, although I know that I could not have possibly satisfied all of them. Since each of us, like anyone else, is already various people, it gets rather crowded, says Gilles Deleuze in his Letter to a Harsh Critic.2 This multiplicity of being and the necessity of sharing and co-constructing are probably nowhere as pronounced as in academic work in spite (or because) of the solitariness and seclusion which it necessarily entails. At the very early stages of this research as I was still sharpening my focus I received valuable comments from: Ana Devi, Chip Gagnon, Stef Jansen, Donatella
1 2 As cited in <www.svetozarjovanovic.com/files/svastara-06.pdf> (Accessed 12 August 2012). Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 7.

della Porta, Sabrina Ramet, John Keane, Lepa Mlaenovi, Orli Fridman and Nick Crossley. At later points, I benefited a lot from my encounters and correspondence with: Dragomir Oluji, Boris Buden, Ildiko Erdei, Milo Uroevi, Marko Vasiljevi, Ljiljana Gakovi, Zlatoje Martinov, Jasna Dragovi-Soso and Maja Kora-Sanderson. Eric Gordy was there throughout, supervising my work with wisdom and assuring that he made my life easier whenever he could. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the whole book reviewed by Paul Stubbs whose sociological imagination and thorough knowledge of the region pushed me towards rethinking and strengthening my arguments. Vesna Jankovi, my friend and colleague from the University of Zagreb, was a constant source of inspiration. It is only due to our long conversations and email exchanges if my study manages to capture how fundamental activist agency is for its protagonists. Christophe Solioz patiently coached me through the publishing process. This book would not have appeared had it not been for his trust and support from the earliest stages of our cooperation. Goranka Mati, Biljana Rakoevi and Dejan Dragosavac Ruta generously shared with me their photographs/figures which have enriched my work. Ruth Sutton proofread the whole manuscript with a lot of delicacy, rescuing the essence of many of my rough formulations with minimal interventions. This book derives from a series of articles and chapters which have appeared over the last two years and I am grateful to the respective editors for allowing me to use my previous publications.3 I would also like to thank the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies as well as the Open Society Fund and its kind London staff, without whose
3 These include: Bojan Bili, Recovering (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War and Pacifist Activism: A Research Agenda, The South Slav Journal, 30 (2011) 12, pp. 2456; Bojan Bili, (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Engagement: A Topic Awaiting Attention, Filozofija i drutvo, 22 (2011) 4, pp. 83107; Bojan Bili, In a Crevice between Gender and Nation: Croatian and Serbian Women in the 1990s Anti-War Activism, Slovo, 23 (2011) 2, pp. 95113; Bojan Bili, Staying Sane (And Even Growing) in Times of Chaos: Serbian Anti-War Activism as Therapy, Antropologija, 11 (2011) 1, pp. 4565; Bojan Bili, A Concept that is Everything and Nothing: Why Not to Study (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War and Peace Activism From a Civil Society Perspective? Sociologija, 53 (2011) 4, pp. 297 322; Bojan Bili, Hod po tankoj ici: artikuliranje antiratnog angamana u Hrvatskoj ranih 1990-ih godina, in Vesna Jankovi and Nikola Mokrovi (eds.), Antiratna kampanja 19912011: Neispriana povijest (Zagreb: Documenta, 2011), pp. 21228; Bojan Bili, Contentious Socialists: Precursors of Anti-War Engagement, in Paul Stubbs and Christophe Solioz (eds.), Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), pp. 4970, Serbian version: Bojan Bili, Opiranje zlu: jedno socioloko promiljanje postjugoslovenskog antiratnog angamana, Republika, (2012) 520-521, pp. 1322; Bojan Bili, Movementising the Marginal: Recruitment to the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia, Narodna umjetnost, 49 (2012) 1, pp. 4159; Bojan Bili, Not in Our Name: Collective Identity of the Belgrade Women in Black, Nationalities Papers, 40 (2012) 4, pp. 60723, Serbian version: Bojan Bili, Kolektivni identitet kao strategija preivljavanja beogradske aktivistike grupe ene u crnom, Antropologija, 12 (2012) 2, pp. 187207; Bojan Bili, Between Fragmenting and Multiplying: Scale Shift Processes in Serbian and Croatian Anti-War Activisms, Nationalities Papers, in press.

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three-year-long financial support I would not have been able to complete my doctoral thesis which has now been transformed into this book. Moreover, my sister Jelena untiringly printed out and arranged my articles and helped me with the final version of the bibliography. My other sister, Bojana, also assisted rarely, though, but she told me that her name must find its way into these acknowledgements. Our Aunt Dragica Bili has been a model of moral temerity and human dignity and she has supported me for years discreetly, but unwaveringly. My friend Georgia Mavrodi taught me the value of patience and perseverance, these precious skills which are so difficult to master. Finally, this book is more than anything else, a work which I owe to the cherished Yugoslav experience and the leftist orientation of my parents and to the fact that, in spite of their more than 75 working years, our family became appreciably poorer when many of our friends and neighbours did. It could not have been otherwise. I thank my Dad, Jozo, for encouraging me to know that, while having titles is not a bad idea, one must always rely much more on the potency of ones own mind and the clarity of ones opinions the audacity and freedom to express them and defend them and on the flexibility to change them while concurrently respecting those of others. His belief that this work was a purposeful enterprise stimulated me throughout. When my Mom, Desanka, was twelve, she was brought for the first time, by her parents, to see the centre of our small Vojvodina town. When I was twelve, she sent me to live with an English family in Colchester, England. Whereas her father would not let her attend the medical high-school to which she was accepted because female children need no education, she enabled me to study across Europe and she listened with patience and understanding to all of that incessant prattle about activists, movements, protest cycles, papers, conferences... Sometimes I think that this is an amplitude worth more than one generation. I dedicate this book to my Mom the invisible foundation block of my joyful eagerness to get to know the world.

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The old world is dying away and the new world struggles to come forth: Now is the time of monsters.1 Antonio Gramsci

Let us try to do something ourselves for our own lives, so that we do not surrender our destiny to someones uncontrollable hands. If we do not even try to become citizens with full civil rights, how can we know what our real prospects for freedom and democracy are; for peace and not for war; for honest and not for falsified elections; for a dignified life and not for brutality; for tolerance and not for military competition; for enterprising and success instead of inertia and apathy? We have a choice.2 Neboja Popov

1
2

Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 276. Neboja Popov, Imamo li izbora? Republika, (1990) 7, p. 1. If not otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

Introduction

On 6 April 2012, Sarajevo that city which dies and is at the same time born and transformed marked the twentieth anniversary of one of the longest sieges in the history of warfare.1 A large installation, which comprised 11,541 red chairs, stretched along Maral Tito Street all the way up to Ali-Pashas Mosque, commemorating the same number of victims of the crime with few parallels on the European continent.2 While the images of this event spread across the globe, hardly anyone remembered that, in June 1992, thousands of Belgrade citizens poured into the streets to protest against the siege and express solidarity with Sarajevans.3 They carried pieces of black paper which once united formed a kilometre long ribbon, a symbol of their condolence and compassion (Figure 1). A couple of years later, some of those who took part in this undertaking also travelled via Croatia and Hungary, crossed the Igman Mountain and walked through the Sarajevo Tunnel4 to enter the besieged city and bring to its people a message that many on the other side were against the senseless destruction. More than a decade after the end of the Yugoslav wars (19911999), there is little that we know about the processes through which the imminence of an armed conflict awakened dormant social networks and strengthened existing activist circles or created new ones. Even less is known about the plethora of ideological positions driving civic engagement, its tensions and fragmentations. There are no social scientific accounts that are sufficiently appreciative of the relevance of anti-war organising for the intricate geometry of the present day civic linkages and resistances in the post-Yugoslav space. All of this constitutes a serious although not entirely surprising lacuna in the burgeoning amount of research on Yugoslavias dissolution.
1 2 Ivo Andri, Jedan pogled na Sarajevo, Jugoslavija, (1953) 7, pp. 203. Available at: <www.lupiga.com/vijesti/index.php?id=5685> (Accessed 11 April 2012). For more information of the practices of resistance in the besieged Sarajevo itself, see Larisa Kurtovi, The Paradoxes of Wartime Freedom: Alternative Culture during the Siege of Sarajevo, in Bojan Bili and Vesna Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil: [Post-]Yugoslav Anti-War Contention (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), pp. 197224. See Gordana Logar, Sramno utanje Beograda, Danas, 8 April 2012. Available at: <www.danas.rs/danasrs/kolumnisti/sramno_cutanje_zvanicnog_beograda.883.html?newsi d=237798> (Accessed 15 July 2012). The Sarajevo Tunnel was dug by the citizens of Sarajevo in 1993 to connect the neighbourhoods of Butmir and Dobrinja which were controlled by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through it, food, humanitarian aid and weapons could enter the besieged city.

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This book is based on extensive fieldwork in the region and it draws upon the conceptual apparatus of social movement studies to start recovering anti-war activisms in Serbia and Croatia.5 They constitute a complex phenomenon both in relation to the value orientations of their protagonists as well as in terms of their effects and strategic options. By taking a social movement/civic contention approach, I offer a framework for collecting and evaluating empirical information and generating knowledge on the collectively organised and sometimes institutionalised ways in which many Croatian and Serbian citizens resisted the 1990s armed conflicts.
Figure1: Demonstrations against the siege of Sarajevo (Black Ribbon), Belgrade, 7 June 1992

Goranka Mati

I use the word activisms to underline the geographical, ideological and strategic diversity of the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement.

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My central argument is that these civic enterprises did not appear in a political vacuum. Rather, various (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activisms appropriated and developed dormant social networks created through student, feminist and environmentalist engagement in socialist Yugoslavia. Anti-war activisms, in turn, served as platforms for generating social and material capital which enabled the establishment of present-day organisations devoted to human rights protection across the ex-Yugoslav space. Throughout this book, I argue that Yugoslav anti-war activisms cannot be understood without appreciating both the inter- and intra-republican cooperations and contestations, occurring in the context of Yugoslavias socialist experience. I employ a trans-national approach which treats Croatia and Serbia as a nexus that comprises an abundance of antagonistic war perceptions and ideological vantage points which condition divergent activist strategic options. In this regard, the compound (post-)Yugoslav is used to indicate that the civic engagement to which I am referring was initiated during Yugoslavias existence and continued after the countrys dissolution. (Post-)Yugoslav is most frequently employed as a geographical term pertaining to the abovementioned spatial core of my interest, in the context of its relays with other Yugoslav republics.6 I am, however, explicit about those instances in which the term Yugoslav signifies a set of internally dynamic ideological orientations towards the ethnic, cultural and linguistic affinities of the South Slav people, both independent from and in relation to a possible federal organisation of their territories.7 The title of this work could suggest that within its pages the reader would find the entirety of (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activisms dissected and explained. Its broad formulation could welcome an array of research foci and take students of conflict and contestation down many exciting interpretive paths: trans- and intra-national networking, social memory, the economy of collective enterprises, the construction of responsible citizenship, democratisation, transitional justice, to name but a few. Nevertheless, the neat syntax of (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activism is not a manifestation of my ethnographic authority. The social scientist as a knowing subject that Lacanian sujet suppos savoir is constituted through acts of drawing personal research experiences through the prism of theoretical abstractions. By doing so,
6 7 For an outline of anti-war activities in Montenegro, see Sra Pavlovi and Milica Dragojevi, Peaceniks and Warmongers: Anti-War Activism in Montenegro, 19891995, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil, pp. 13758. For Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Yugoslavism is the vision of the South Slavic community as an essential unity despite differences in language, religion and historical experience. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 1. See also Dejan oki, Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 19181992 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). For a brief account of the relationship between Yugoslavism and anti-nationalism, see Ljubia Raji, Jugoslovenstvo kao antinacionalizam, Republika, 3 (1991) 17, p. 12.

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(s)he supposedly generates exhaustive knowledge on the phenomena of his/her interest.8 Given that this work cannot be all-encompassing, I seek to identify the broader socio-political trajectories of anti-war organising in Serbia and Croatia. This book, in principle, leaves numerically smaller or geographically narrower but undoubtedly important instances of anti-war engagement outside of its empirical grasp. It cannot consider many local officials and (individual) citizens who showed enormous civic courage when trying to promote peace and tolerance in their communities.9 For example, Josip Reihl-Kir (19551991) was the head of the police department in Osijek, Croatia, who was killed, along with Goran Zobundija and Milan Kneevi, in a political murder in 1991 by (a Croat) Antun Gudelj, when returning from a negotiation with the Serb community in Croatia.10 Sran Aleksi (19661993) was a Serb beaten to death by a group of his co-nationals in Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, because he tried to defend his Muslim fellow-citizen, Alen Glavovi. Sran was posthumously awarded the Charter of the Helsinki Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina and streets and passages were named after him in Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Panevo.11 In a poorly known episode of individual resistance to war, Vladimir ivkovi, a forcefully mobilised reservist from Valjevo, Serbia, drove a Yugoslav Peoples Army [Jugoslovenska narodna armija, (JNA)] armoured personnel carrier all the way from the Vukovar frontline and parked it in front of the Yugoslav Parliament in

8 9

10 11

Richard Handler, On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism and Ethnicity, Journal of Anthropological Research, 41 (1985) 2, pp. 17182. How shocking war must have appeared as a solution for the Yugoslav crisis, is testified by the results of research done by the sociologist Vladimir Goati in all of the Yugoslav republics and provinces in 1991. He found that only 6.7 per cent of the population thought that Yugoslavia would disintegrate and that numerous independent states would be formed on its territory. Public opinion polls carried out in Serbia in September 1991 showed that 80 per cent of the population favoured peace (75 per cent of men and 86.4 per cent of women). See Anelka Mili, Women and Nationalism in the Former Yugoslavia, in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (eds.), Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10922. A violent dissolution of the country could not have been envisioned by social scientists either: in a survey organised by Slaven Letica during a political science conference in Zagreb in October 1989, none of the 30 leading Yugoslav sociologists, political scientists and economists thought that civil war, terrorism or violence were possible; 18 responded that the status quo would prevail, 6 that there would be a strengthening of democratic tendencies, four that a sort of administrative arbiter (and a possible Yugoslav Peoples Army intervention) would appear and only two said that the country would disintegrate. See Silvano Boli, Sociologija i unutranji rat u Jugoslaviji, Socioloki pregled, 26 (1992) 14, pp. 925. An exhibition about Josip Reihl-Kir, entitled Who is Reihl-Kir for You? [Tko je tebi Reihl-Kir?] and prepared by Tanja Simi-Berclaz, was opened in Belgrade in July 2010 before touring other cities of the former Yugoslavia. In February 2012, Sran Aleksi was decorated for bravery by the president of Serbia Boris Tadi. See the documentary Sro (2007). See also Svetlana Broz, Dobri ljudi u vremenu zla (Banja Luka: Media centar Prelom, 1999).

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Belgrade, symbolically pointing to what he thought was the source of irrational violence (Figure 2). While I hope that all of these and many other similar cases will find a more prominent place in our memory, this research deals with the ways in which activists in their capacity of collective actors conceptualised the possibilities of resistance in the environments characterised by fundamentally different power positions within the armed conflicts. Whereas I examine the local, regional and republican organisational peculiarities as a function of power distribution within the conflicts, the resources which I had at my disposal prevented me from giving them equal treatment.12 My analytical chapters follow the protest cycle and discuss the anti-war collective organising in Serbia and Croatia, starting with the processes of recruitment and actor constitution and tracking their development during and after the Yugoslav wars.
Figure 2: Vladimir ivkovi parked a JNA armoured personnel carrier in front of the Yugoslav Parliament, Belgrade, September 1991

Art klinika13

However, this book cannot offer an analysis of all the cycle stages across cities and republics. It is limited to a series of case analyses, such as recruitment to the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia [Antiratna kampanja Hrvatske (ARK)] or the collective identity of the Belgrade Women in Black [ene u
12 Along with both local and foreign anti-war actors, there were groups of civic activists across Europe who were of Yugoslav origin, but living abroad. One such group Mi za Mir [We for peace] operated in Amsterdam and consisted of young Yugoslavs who wanted to evade military mobilisation. Nives Rebernak was one of the founders of the group which was also supported by the Dalai Lama. This photo, taken by Zoran Ra, was used in a dealing with the past campaign organised by the artist groups Art klinika, Led art and the Belgrade-based Centre for Cultural Decontamination. Available at: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sh/2/27/Tenkispreds kupstine.JPG> (Accessed 16 July 2012).

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crnom (UC)], also in instances where a cross-case comparison might be plausibly expected. My reasoning has been that given the lack of literature on the topic a more deductive approach, outlining and illustrating dominant trends, should be preferred to a meticulous exploration of more specific issues. I hope to offer one possible framework which future research could supplement and revise. Whereas the body text represents an analysis of the broader trajectories of post-Yugoslav anti-war organising, the footnotes bring a more personal account, highlighting the main actors and giving their elementary biographical information. As is often the case when exploring fluid social phenomena, like civic enterprises, the list of names mentioned here is not exhaustive. While it is not my intention to personalise the movements and initiatives I study, I do believe that
[...] individuals are extremely important because activist work is a struggle against defeatism and passivity. Not a single programme, activity or organisation could have been created without the initiative and the efforts of the individual activists who are sometimes also called social entrepreneurs. People are the carriers of both war and anti-war initiatives and it is for this reason that the naming of civic participants is crucial for the acknowledgement of the value of civic engagement and resistance to evil. [...] The naming of the persons who took part in anti-war activities throughout the 1990s is all the more important given the fact that it was a small number of people who had the courage, craziness or both to struggle for these unpopular topics in hard times.14

This study has a distinctly ethnographic character because it deals with what Povrzanovi Frykman calls the lived experience of war.15 Grassroots perspectives, be it in relation to the war victims, soldiers and conscientious objectors, have often been eclipsed by the grand narratives of nationalism and the geo-strategic transformations after the fall of East European socialism.16 Dragovi-Soso claims that the academic literature on Yugoslavias break-up has been overly interested in elites at the expense of local, social and family histories and grassroots forms of mobilisation.17 I recover the agency of individual and collective actors who did not have the powerful political and mili14 Vesna Jankovi and Nikola Mokrovi (eds.), Antiratna kampanja 1991.2011.: Neispriana povijest (Zagreb: Documenta, 2011), p. 17. Available at: <www.documenta.hr/assets/files/publikacije/ARK_kb_novi.pdf> (Accessed 9 August 2012). Maja Povrzanovi Frykman, The War and After: On War-Related Anthropological Research in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Etnoloka tribina, 33 (2003) 26, pp. 5575, here p. 58. For an exception, see, e.g., Paula Pickering, Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 190. Jasna Dragovi-Soso, Why Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? An Overview of Contending Explanations, in Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragovi-Soso (eds.), State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavias Disintegration (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press), pp. 139, here p. 28.

15 16 17

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tary apparatus at their disposal. In this regard, my study departs from the premise that political violence works on lives and interconnections to break communities... and yet in the midst of the worst horrors, people continue to survive and to cope.18 Products of ethnographic encounters and social scientific accounts stemming from them, may have a transformative potential which should not be underestimated. Sociological imagination and analysis should constitute a platform for a critical intersection of a multitude of voices whispers, screams, silences19 that may have been marginalised both politically and academically. This book focuses on Serbia and Croatia because they are widely regarded as the central Yugoslav republics constituting the axis of Yugoslavism [jugoslovenstvo].20 On the other hand, Gagnon claims that these two countries/(ex-)republics represent cases of what Western observers characterise as extremist nationalism leading to violence, and they are often held up as the paradigmatic examples of ethnic conflict.21 It is, thus, all the more important to show that, throughout the 1990s, both Serbia and Croatia and, in particular, their capitals, were places of intense civic engagement that went counter to the elites efforts to impose congruence between ethnic identity and political position. While examining civic activisms in their various forms and strategic options, this book does not test a single social movement theory as a set of premises accounting for numerous aspects of movement emergence, opera18 19 20 Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Introduction, in Veena Das et al. (eds.), Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 130, here p. 1. Paul Stubbs, Nationalisms, Globalisation and Civil Society in Croatia and Slovenia, in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, (1996) 19, pp. 126. Available at: <www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/066.html> (Accessed 13 July 2012). The centrality of the Serbo-Croat political axis for the Yugoslav wars is also evident from the operation of a small Bosnian and Herzegovinian peace initiative called Peoples Peace Movement [Narodni mirovni pokret], organised by Vasvija Oraanin in August 1991 in Bosanska Dubica. On 4 August 1991, there was a peace gathering of around 15,000 Muslims, Serbs and Croats who crossed the bridge on the Una River which is a link between Bosanska [Bosnian] and Hrvatska [Croatian] Dubica. The movement had its own Peace Charter [Povelja mira] which was supposed to be signed by the presidents Franjo Tuman and Slobodan Miloevi. Franjo Tuman received a movement delegation led by Vasvija Oraanin at his official Zagreb residence Banski dvori on 17 August 1991. At that occasion Tuman agreed to sign the Charter. At the same time, another movement delegation left Bosanska Dubica for Belgrade where president Miloevi refused to sign the Charter. Soon after, Oraanin was forced to leave Bosanska Dubica after her husband was shot at. They moved to Ljubljana where she was helped by the Slovenian activist group Movement for the Culture of Peace and Non-Violence [Gibanje za kulturo mira in nenasilja]. Oraanin continued her pacifist engagement and worked on the preparations for a meeting of the Yugoslav peace activists from all of the republics and provinces with Lord Carrington as well as a peace protest in Strasbourg. See Vasvija Oraanin, Kako je pretuen mirovni pokret, ARKzin, (1991) 1, p. 8. See also Jankovi and Mokrovi (eds.), Antiratna kampanja, p. 59. Valre P. (Chip) Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. xix.

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tion and decay. Rather, the extant field of political contention studies is here approached as a Foucauldian toolbox which supplies the means for understanding collective engagement around the protest cycle.22 I select from this repository those concepts whose explanatory charge and abstracting potential I consider relevant to the issues in question. My research offers certain theoretical advances because it applies the conceptual armoury of social movement studies to a context in which it has not been extensively used. Nevertheless, the objective of my work is primarily empirical in nature. The pages that follow are a contribution to a corpus of historical data which should enable (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement to assume its proper place in the interpretations of the countrys disintegration. By drawing upon Western sociological scholarship, this book promotes a potentially fruitful cross-fertilisation between the non-Western episodes of political contention and the Western conceptual means for studying collective undertakings. While it focuses on anti-war contention, this study does not intend to relativise the nationalism argument or negate its primacy in accounting for Yugoslavias break-up. The turbulent history of the Yugoslav peoples points to the unwavering significance of their national questions. No other paradigm could substitute the relevance of the destructive Yugoslav nationalisms which reached their climax in the early 1990s. Attempts to dilute the importance of the nationalism argument could absolve the Yugoslav republican leaderships from their responsibility for the countrys painful demise.23 However, an exploration of anti-war initiatives diversifies the Yugoslav political scene and cuts across strictly national affiliations. It supplements the authoritative, but sometimes mono-focal, nationalism studies by pointing to political alternatives as important pieces in the intricate mosaic of Yugoslavias dissolution. Moreover, before proceeding, there is a need to conceptually differentiate between anti-war and peace activisms because these two terms are related, overlapping and sometimes interchangeably used. Anti-war activism can be an ambiguous concept because it refers both to a general resistance to an armed conflict and to civic engagement with a pronounced personal/local dimension. Anti-war activists in the latter sense experience private war-related grievances which stimulate resistance to a particular war happening here and now. They need not be against war as such, but may reject a particular war out of ideological convictions (e.g. that war being aggressive or unjust).
22 Foucault said: I would like my books to be a kind of toolbox which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area... I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I do not write for an audience, I write for users, not readers. Michel Foucault, Prisons et asiles dans le mcanisme du pouvoir. Available at: <www.michel-foucault.com/quote/2004q.html> (Accessed 6 June 2012). See Olivera Milosavljevi, Fatalistiko tumaenje razaranja Jugoslavije, Republika, (2003) 31617. Available at: <www.republika.co.rs/316-317/19.html> (Accessed 12 November 2011).

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Anti-war attitudes are, then, plausibly articulated also from a nationalist perspective. Peace activism, on the other hand, is informed by a set of broader values according to which war or any other kind of military means must not be used for conflict resolution. Peace activism stems from a clear, mostly left-leaning, political stance. Simply put, an anti-war activist is not necessarily pacifist, whereas a pacifist is by definition anti-war oriented. For the lack of a more precise concept, anti-war (orientation) as a generic term suggesting resistance to armed conflicts is regarded as incorporating pacifism throughout this book, except in those instances in which I insist on a conceptual differentiation. In one of the very first attempts to engage with Serbian anti-war activism in a more theoretical manner, Paunovi differentiates between anti-war and pacifist movements and argues that an anti-war movement could only appear in a country which had not experienced any military activity on its territory.24 The overt support of the Serbian general public for the anti-war cause was relatively weak due to a lack of civic culture in which an anti-war stance is a matter of spontaneous citizen reactions (such as draft-dodging).25 According to him, anti-war activities in Serbia mushroomed between autumn 1991 and summer 1992, coinciding with the period of the most intense draft into JNA. It is only at this stage that one could talk about an anti-war movement.26
24 25 arko Paunovi, Mirovne aktivnosti u Srbiji: izmeu inicijativa i pokreta, Filozofija i drutvo, 20 (1995) 7, pp. 10725. It is, in this regard, also pertinent to differentiate between, on the one hand, draft-dodging as a spontaneous reaction which prompted people to hide from the authorities or leave the country and conscientious objection as a political stance, on the other. Although the Yugoslav regime insisted on peace (which was also one of the central principles of the NonAligned Movement [Pokret nesvrstanih]), serving in JNA was a legal duty of all mentally and physically able men. Refusing military service on the basis of conscientious objection was considered law infringement. One of the most well-known cases of conscientious objection in socialist Yugoslavia was Ivan eko, a Jehovahs Witness from Maribor, Slovenia. The Belgrade Military Court sentenced him to four years of imprisonment in 1979, five years in 1983 (three of which he actually served) and five more years in 1986. The case of eko was important in stimulating a public debate about the role of the Army in Yugoslav social life as well as about conscientious objection and civic service; see Slavenka Drakuli, The case of Ivan Cecko: Yugoslav Youth Stir It Up, The Nation, (1987); Available at: <www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-4839012.html> (Accessed 8 September 2011). For the relevance of conscientious objection for the Slovenian Peace Movement, see Marko Hren, The Slovenian Peace Movement: An Insiders Account, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil, pp. 6382. In his memoires, General Veljko Kadijevi argued that the operation of JNA was considerably affected by the failure of the Serbian authorities to mobilise reservists. See Veljko Kadijevi, Moje vienje raspada: vojska bez drave (Belgrade: Politika, 1993), pp. 767. According to CAA, turnout rates were around 5 percent in Belgrade and around 20 percent in provincial areas. Other reports give a figure of about 50 percent in Serbia and 15 percent in Belgrade. See Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War, pp. 1089. On the issue of conscientious objection in the Yugoslav wars, see Bojan Aleksov, Resisting the Wars in the Former Yugoslavia: Towards an Autoethnography, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Re-

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Also, among a vast majority of regional civic activists, Serbias involvement in the Yugoslav conflicts is regarded as aggressive in character. Political actions undertaken by the Miloevi regime throughout the 1990s stimulated many civic protagonists to contest the state from within. Somewhat paradoxically maybe, such a constellation tends to afford the Serbian (and almost exclusively Belgrade-based) activists the highest amount of discretionary leverage in the regional extra-institutional sphere. This, yet again, results in resistances and contestations that I discuss in the chapter devoted to the effects of anti-war engagement. Such a state of affairs is also related to the problem of unequal representation of the former republics in contemporary Yugoslav scholarship which has been noted by Dragovi-Soso and to a certain extent perpetuated in this book.27 Moreover, a lot of tensions among Yugoslav activists stemmed from the cleavage which separates anti-war from pacifist efforts. Spontaneously gathered activists do not cluster in one or the other group at the beginning of their public engagement. At that point they are motivated by opposition to violence and destruction which only later obtains relevant theoretical substantiations. The subtle difference between anti-war and pacifist stances becomes more prominent as a result of specific developments, such as, for example, foreign military interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995) or Serbia (1999). The Serbian civic scene became severely polarised when 27 of its protagonists appealed to foreign governments and NATO commanders asking for an immediate termination of the NATO bombing. A few activists, on the other hand, perceived this campaign as a legitimate means to oppose the Miloevi regime (see Appendix 2).28 Such sharpening of intra/inter-state attitude is a critical element in the existence of any collective enterprise and it is at the heart of a lot of segmentation processes within (post-)Yugoslav antiwar activisms.29 This book cannot fully appreciate the theoretical significance of the conceptual differentiation between anti-war and pacifist engagement, which
sisting the Evil, pp. 10526; Bojan Aleksov, Deserters from the War in Former Yugoslavia (Belgrade: ene u crnom, 1994); Aleksandra Milievi, Joining Serbias Wars: Volunteers and Draft Dodgers, 19911995 (Los Angeles: University of California, 2004 PhD Dissertation). Dragovi-Soso, Why Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? pp. 139. See Bojan Bili and Vesna Jankovi, Recovering (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Contention: A Zagreb Walk through Stories, Analyses and Activisms, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil, pp. 25 36. See, e.g., Nadeda Radovi, Pismo pod bombama, Vreme, 12 September 2002. Available at: <www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=321887> (Accessed 26 July 2012). For an analysis of the relevance of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign for the tensions among the Belgrade liberal intelligentsia, see Jasna Dragovi-Soso, The Partying of Ways: Public Reckoning with the Recent Past in Post-Miloevi Serbia, in Timothy Waters (ed.), The Miloevi Trial: An Autopsy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also Olivera Milosavljevi, Taka razlaza: povodom polemike voene na stranicama lista Vreme od 1. avgusta do 21. novembra 2002, Helsinke sveske, (2003) 16, pp. 618.

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is also relevant when discussing the involvement of foreign pacifist activists in the Yugoslav conflicts. The following excerpt shows how a group of nonYugoslav members of War Resisters International (WRI) replied to the letter of Yugoslav anti-war activists in which they asked their international colleagues to protect Bosnia and Herzegovina by all means possible:
There is an alarming phrase in your statement, when you suggest defending the Bosnia-Herzegovinian state by all means possible. This could be taken to mean warfare without limit: at worst, nuking Belgrade; more probably, the sanitised language of surgical strikes belying a reality of massacred civilians and children, as in Baghdad. We assume that this is not what you meant. Perhaps our reaction to this phrase shows a difference in sensibility.30

Whereas it certainly constitutes an exciting research topic, I do not expound on the international dimension of the wars of Yugoslav succession. There are already a few publications regarding the engagement of international anti-war activists in the Yugoslav region.31 On the other hand, the role played by foreign diplomats and various political actors, mostly characterised by insensitivity and partiality, has been extensively although not conclusively or comprehensively covered elsewhere.32 Andrew Pakula, a long-term peace activist, argues that:
[...] international mediation in the Yugoslav crisis has been plagued by inconsistency, confusion, lack of coherence, disagreements about strategy, tactics and mandate, poor coordination and planning, inadequate understanding, idle threats, and the dominant role of self-serving, short-sighted national policies driven mainly by Realpolitik and nostalgia [...] At best, the engagement of the worlds political organisations in the former Yugoslavia has been ineffectual. At worst, it contributed significantly to the escalation and persistence of violence.33

There are two other important elements that have remained outside of the theoretico-empirical grasp of my research design: first, this book does not discuss the efforts of Kosovo Albanian activists to articulate a strategy of
30 31 See Appendix 3 for the full letter of the Yugoslav activists and an abridged version of the WRI response. See, e.g., Vesna Jankovi, International Peace Activists in the Former Yugoslavia, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil, pp. 22542; Barbara Mller, The Balkan Peace Team 19942001: Non-Violent Intervention in Crisis Areas with the Deployment of Volunteer Teams (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006); Judith Large, The War Next Door: A Study of Second-Track Intervention During the War in Ex-Yugoslavia (Stroud: Hawthorne Press, 1997); Christine Schweitzer, Strategies of Intervention in Protracted Violent Conflicts by Civil Society Actors: The Example of Interventions in the Violent Conflicts in the Area of Former Yugoslavia, 19902002 (Coventry: Coventry University, 2009 PhD Dissertation). See, e.g., Brendon OShea, The Modern Yugoslav Conflict, 19911995 (London: Routledge, 2006). Andrew Pakula, War and Peace: Yugoslavia, the Worlds Failure, Peace Magazine, (1995) 56, p. 16.

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peaceful resistance to the severely nationalising Serbian state. Given that I am interested in the broad dynamics of civic organising in the Yugoslav space, I believe that it would be useful to examine the relationship between the Kosovo-based civic actors and the efforts to maintain peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Croatia. I am aware of the specificities of the Kosovo political situation and the widespread disrespect of the Kosovo Albanians human rights which occurred throughout the second half of the 20th century.34 In this regard, I touch upon the issue of Kosovo to the extent to which it served as the criterion for gauging the democratic potential of any ideological option articulated within the Yugoslav political space throughout the rule of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia [Savez komunista Jugoslavije (SKJ)] and its Serbian successor the Socialist Party of Serbia [Socijalistika partija Srbije (SPS)].35 Although many protagonists of this work might have never visited Kosovo, their position on the complex Kosovo question was an important identification mark in the Yugoslav political arena.36 So much so that, as one of my interviewees told me, in the 1980s Yugoslavia there was a simple formula for finding ones place in the political spectrum: Tell me what you think about the Kosovo Albanians and I will tell you who you are. The importance of Kosovo for Yugoslav civil organising is evident in the words of Vesna Tereli, the long-term coordinator of ARK:
[...] I feel this was a mistake that we all made together, citizens of a country that later disintegrated through a series of wars. In fact, we all have some responsibility for mistakes made before the 1980s, because I believe if we had reacted more loudly to the violation of human rights in Kosovo, all the events that ensued might have never happened.37

Finally, it is not the primary goal of this book to contribute to the field of peace studies. Peace as a phenomenon and the efficiency of various strategies for achieving and maintaining it are not in the focus of my attention. I do not discuss the plausibility of the programmes or actions that my respondents attempted to implement, nor do I offer practical guidelines on where they

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For more information on various forms of civic resistance in Kosovo, see Gzim Krasniqi, For Democracy Against Violence: A Kosovar Alternative, in Bili and Jankovi (eds.), Resisting the Evil, pp. 83103. See also: Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo (London: Pluto Press, 2000). It was after his first official visit to Kosovo in April 1987, that Slobodan Miloevi consolidated his authority in Serbias political life. See Neboja Vladisavljevi, Nationalism, Social Movement Theory and the Grass Roots Movement of Kosovo Serbs, EuropeAsia Studies, 54 (2002) 5, pp. 77190. See Sra Popovi, Dejan Jana and Tanja Petovar, Kosovski vor: dreiti ili sei? (Belgrade: Chronos, 1990). Vesna Tereli, One Should Use These Unexpected Chances, in Helena Rill, Tamara midling and Ana Bitoljanu (eds.), 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change: Peacebuilding in the Region of the Former Yugoslavia (Belgrade and Sarajevo: Centar za nenasilnu akciju, 2007), pp. 7594, here p. 81.

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might have gone wrong and what should have been done instead.38 I do not, in principle, engage with peace scholars (or peace scholarship) although some of them have been quite active in the region.39 This work is interested in the articulation of political alternatives or in carving political opportunities for such articulations, in which peace becomes an imposed meta-topic, a fundamental precondition for their development and realisation. Methods This book is embedded in a qualitative research tradition where social enquiry is understood as a process in which questions are revised in the light of collected empirical material and bibliographical sources. Such a perspective, appreciative of the uniqueness of personal biography and the historical context surrounding it, acknowledges the researchers co-constructivist role in knowledge production. The ethnographic encounter is a rich and intricate tapestry of values, predispositions and behaviours for which shared experiences and shared language are essential. The arguments which I make in this book do not derive their legitimacy or their truth from the fact that I am a local. I hope to have destabilised such a possibility by crossing borders and working in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and across Europe, constantly and either willingly or unwillingly switching between the position of insider and outsider. However, a flow of sensitive information is, of course, facilitated in a meeting of two persons with an overlapping portion of lived reality behind the corpus of mutually understandable wor(l)ds.
Biases and preconceived ideas, even among those who attempt to shed them, are almost unavoidable, and this applies to outsiders as well as to insiders. Indeed, the outsiders view is not necessarily inferior to the insiders, and the insider is not necessarily anointed with truth because of existential intimacy with the object of study. What counts in the last resort is the very process of the conscious effort to shed biases and look for ways to express the reality of otherness, even 40 in the face of paralysing epistemological scepticism.

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For a more activist approach to the issue of peace-building in the post-Yugoslav space, see Rill et al. (eds.), 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change; Goran Boievi (ed.), U dosluhu i neposluhu: Pozitivni primjeri izgradnje mira u Hrvatskoj u 90-ima i kasnije (Gronjan: Miramida centar, 2010); Jankovi and Mokrovi (eds.), Antiratna kampanja. Among the most prominent are Diana Francis, Adam Curle, Johan Galtung, Howard Clark and Dieter Senghaas. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 9.

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Social movements and other collective enterprises have been frequently compared to icebergs, whose substance is mostly hidden below the surface.41 Scholars wishing to reconstruct group initiatives must take a look at the way in which private grievances step over the threshold of public visibility into overt protest. While researchers of social movements have diverse theoretical leanings, they all address the vitally important questions of when, how and why people resist authority. Recovering and theorising (post-)Yugoslav anti-war contention is a challenging task, not least because the protest activities are separated from us by more than a decade. The individuals and organisations that engaged in anti-war activisms were pitted against political regimes and social climates that were not amenable to their development. The activists often did not have the time or financial means for documenting their engagement or they were not aware of the importance of such a practice. I relied on interviews, documentary analysis and participant observation to start recovering these often ephemeral enterprises which arose as a consequence of tenuous links both within and between trans-national activist networks. As a native ethnographer researching highly politicised issues which one can rarely access in their explicit(ly verbalised) form, I was faced with numerous epistemological and methodological dilemmas. During my fieldwork I met many people who were former colleagues and fellow-activists living in the same country, and who have, in the meantime, opted for divergent ideological and professional paths in the partitioned Yugoslav space. For some of my interviewees, I was an idealist who still believed in what they had, with wisdom and experience, already abandoned. For the others, I was something of a conservative expatriate able to afford high foreign university fees and interested in capitalising upon the activist experience of others while applying Western social science theory where it did not belong. Because of this, I was constantly challenged by the need to find a politically neutral starting point, so that the contact could be established and our conversation begin. This went rather smoothly once I managed to enter a sphere of friends and colleagues who would recommend me and willingly share their contact information within the circle. Challenges (suspicions, trust winning and questions) arose as I, consciously or not, crossed from one sphere to the other. I was, of course, never in pursuit of the truth, but of small personal accounts and different forms of reality constructions which I wanted to root in their social context(s). These narratives are a snapshot of the memories shaped by the current political, social and personal developments. They testi-

41

Elisabeth S. Clemens and Martin D. Hughes, Recovering Past Protest: Historical Research on Social Movements, in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds.) Methods of Social Movement Research (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 20130.

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fy to the veracity of James Cliffords claim that ethnographic truths are inherently partial, committed and incomplete.42 More specifically, throughout my fieldwork, I felt that among the respondents/activists across the Yugoslav space, there was a sense of saturation with interviews done by young and usually poorly informed and, therefore, insufficiently sensitive scholars. This irritation resembles the one provoked by a myriad of foreign experts/consultants who visit the region for a short period of time, frequently led by self-promotion goals. Among some respondents there was a feeling that (young) researchers use both emotion- and value-laden activist knowledge for personal career advancement in places that are removed from local political tensions and straitened financial circumstances. Nevertheless, the vast majority of my research encounters were pleasant and rewarding experiences. The interviews were most productive in those instances in which I shared with my respondents the idea that critical scientific exploration was an extension of their socially responsible civic efforts. Given my unique structural situation43 as a sociologist willing to mediate among conflicting parties, I knew that some of my respondents might perceive the social sciences as an enterprise which legitimises social reality and the authorities interventions in it. The need to preserve a critical voice even in the wake of repeated conversations invoking deeply cherished memories and values, made me painfully aware of Douglass argument that field research may be a traitorous activity.44 As a local sociologist/ethnographer whose study is primarily based on personal contacts with civic activists across the Yugoslav space, I was faced with the danger of romanticising and fetishising resistance.45 That is why the emphasis is here put on the broader social trajectories, their contexts and long-term determinants, rather than on the attempts to personalise activist initiatives. Whereas I mention people who are responsible for the occurrence of certain phenomena, this work should not idealise marginalised discursive practices or lament over their failure to exert a stronger societal influence. A critical approach to social marginality is an expression of respect to those articulating it because such a perspective by appreciating the features of

42 43 44 45

James Clifford, Introduction: Partial Truths, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 126, here p. 7. Hanspeter Kriesi, The Rebellion of the Research Objects, in Mario Diani and Ron Eyerman, Studying Collective Action (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 194216, here p. 194. Jack D. Douglas, Investigative Social Research: Individual and Team Field Research (London: Sage, 1976). Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: Etnografija otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2005), p. 57.

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the social environment in which it unfolds reduces their unconventionality.46

The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of critical inquiry. The standpoints of the subjugated are not innocent positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge. They are knowledgeable of modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively.47

In this regard, Foucault claims that power, however imposing, is not allembracing, but is constituted by an intricately interwoven tapestry of relations that interact and cut across each other throughout a social world. Power is a process of ceaseless struggles, confrontations and transformations because its manifestations are bound up with multiple resistances which continuously disjoin the chain that force relations would otherwise form.48 Caught in a constant conjunctural fluctuation, the mainstream and the marginal can alternate or even be combined within volatile social environments characterised by poverty and competition. The dissident status in former Yugoslavia often was not such a painful and precarious position as it might sometimes be presented by those who identify with it. It was in many cases related to appreciable amounts of social, symbolic and financial capital whose preservation sometimes made the activists choose strategic options which were not particularly well suited to the promotion of their cause. As I will argue, civic engagement after the wars of the Yugoslav succession can sometimes constitute an elitist platform on which middle-class professionals are prepared for assuming government positions.

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Communities which do not welcome alternatives can hardly encourage theoretical reflection upon them. In both the Croatian and Serbian research contexts, there are only few sociologists studying social movements. Even those who do so, are not empirically oriented or they overly concentrate on certain theoretical paradigms (e.g., Vukain Pavlovi (Serbia) and Gojko Beovan (Croatia) focusing on civil society). Although there are exceptions in both countries, academism and elitism of nationally (or even locally) bounded professional networks stimulates identification with dominant values and obscures marginality as a legitimate topic for sociological inquiry. Sharing the destiny of their compatriots, regional sociologists were sometimes forced to interiorise the dominant and politically innocuous research agenda due to fears of unemployment. For example, the Zagreb Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar was established in 1991 in opposition to the Institute for Social Research (IDIZ) which was perceived as leftist. The Ivo Pilar Institute has been, in general, considered more appropriate by the nationalist authorities and it has been more generously financed. Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, Feminist Studies, 14 (1988) 3, pp. 57599, here p. 584. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1976/1998).

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Moreover, given that this book heavily relies on interview information, I need to consider possible disadvantages of this frequently employed research method. Interview shortcomings mostly pertain to the reliability and validity of retrieved information. How can researchers be sure that their interviewees are providing them with an historically veracious account which is not either over- or under-stating their involvement in the events in question? Can a certain critical distance, which such an account would necessitate, be at all possible when talking about emotionally charged events and probing into highly sensitive memories that are fundamental for activists self-perception? The instances in which my respondents cried or had passionate political tirades were not rare. It was obvious to me from very early on that the political activism about which I was enquiring, stemmed from a deeply rooted set of values lying at the heart of who these people were. Human memory is not the most reliable source of information especially when dealing with turbulent events which took place more than twenty years ago. While recognising that other empirical techniques are not free from various forms of bias, researchers take recourse to a discussion of obvious internal incongruities, compare different biographies and check interview data with other sources in a form of inter-method and inter-disciplinary research design. Life story interviews are only one out of several possible information sources and they are not particularly suitable to research oriented towards public events. They can be much more powerful when exploring the cultural and symbolic dimensions of social movements as well as personal stances and experiences related to such an engagement.49 When including a set of documentary sources in my empirical corpus along with numerous interviews, I was aware of Masons claim that different types of documents are constructed in particular contexts by particular people and with consequences intended and unintended.50 None of the documents that we will encounter throughout this book is straightforwardly evidential or supposedly capturing the events of interest in their objective entirety. Documentary sources, nevertheless, constitute a valuable source of information which calls for critical evaluation. They may well supply an alternative angle and provide an additional dimension to research questions. Clemens and Hughes warn social movement scholars that documentary material issued by groups involved in protest can overstate the degree of consensus among them.51 When documents are used in conjunction with other research methods, as is the case here, their function is mostly to contextualise, verify or clarify personal recollections and other information gathered through interviewing or observation.
49 50 51 Donatella della Porta, Life Histories in the Analysis of Social Movements, in Mario Diani and Ron Eyerman (eds.), Studying Collective Action (London: Sage, 1992), pp. 168 92, here p. 187. Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (London: Sage, 2002), p. 110. Clemens and Hughes, Recovering Past Protest, pp. 20130.

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Finally, the participant observation component of my research design refers to the two month long stay with the Belgrade-based activist organisation UC.52 Throughout the summer of 2010, I attended meetings of this small feminist group which were mostly devoted to the planning of a street performance called A Pair of Shoes One Life. With this initiative, the activists wanted to mark the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide in Knez Mihailova Street in downtown Belgrade. I was actively involved in the preparation for and carrying out of this event (doing translations, collecting shoes, reading messages in the street). Moreover, I took part in two silent vigils, one which traditionally occurs in mid-July at the Belgrade Republic Square and the other one at the Memorial Centre Potoari, near Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I used this time to become familiar with the organisation of this activist group, get to know their members, affiliates and international guests and interview them. Throughout my stay in Belgrade, I was subscribed to the organisations mailing list and I was kept informed about the latest developments in this rather intense period of the year. Structure of the book Chapter 1 outlines the most important reasons for the fact that (post-)Yugoslav anti-war enterprises have not, up to now, assumed a more prominent place on the East European social science agenda. It engages with recent scholarship on the region to identify trends which normalise the current situation and privilege the nation-state as the most appropriate research framework. My literature review shows that (post-)Yugoslav anti-war activisms have not, up to now, been approached from a clearly articulated theoretical perspective. This chapter introduces and substantiates the idea that Croatian and Serbian civic engagement cannot be recovered without appreciating the inter-republic contestations and cooperations which occurred in the context of Yugoslavias socialist experience. Chapter 2 brings an exposition of the theoretical framework in which I nest my empirical material. Here I account for an important terminological shift from a narrower, but possibly more elusive, concept of social movements to a conceptually broader contention which I consider more appropriate for my work. This chapter provides a short overview of the conceptual apparatus upon which I draw throughout the book and which is to a considerable extent embedded in the political process theory and the research paradigm known as dynamics of contention.53 Political process-based theoret52 53 Kathleen M. DeWalt and Billie R. DeWalt, Participant Observation: A Guide for Fieldworkers (Landham: AltaMira Press, 2002). Doug McAdam, Sidney G. Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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ical models have rarely been applied outside of the Western context. For this reason, I consider some of the dilemmas which arise when contention episodes are compared across countries and cultures. The presentation of the major theoretical advances, to a considerable extent, parallels the arrangement of my analytical chapters. My analysis begins with a closer look at feminist anti-war activism which, I argue, was one of the major strands of anti-war engagement in both Serbia and Croatia (Chapter 3). While I do not provide a gender/feminist theory account, I do track the dynamics of feminist organising before and throughout the wars of the Yugoslav succession. I posit that feminist anti-war activism reactivated and developed already existent social networks forged during Yugoslav socialism. Chapter 4 analyses the specificities of recruitment to high-risk anti-war activism in places in which an armed conflict is taking place. McAdams theory of high-risk contention serves as the theoretical basis for explaining recruitment to ARK. This is followed by a detailed account of the social mechanisms responsible for expanding the scope of anti-war engagement both geographically and strategically (Chapter 5). I compare the scale shift processes in Serbia and Croatia and account for their differences by pointing to long-term patterns of political organising in the Yugoslav space as well as to the uneven, but continually shifting, distributions of political and military power within the Yugoslav armed conflicts. Chapter 6 draws upon recent collective identity approaches to explain the surprising resilience of UC. Specific collective identity articulations can account for the capacity of this activist organisation to sustain its political engagement in an inimical social climate for more than two decades. The final analytical chapter (Chapter 7) discusses the ways in which Serbian and Croatian antiwar activists negotiate the meanings and outcomes of their undertakings. I expound on the post-war activist regroupings and tensions to show how antiwar enterprises have moved away from their empowering functions to the arena of professional enterprises characterised by significant power asymmetries. Here I also revisit the notion of civil society in the light of my analysis before offering a few personal considerations on social scientific engagement with the wars of the Yugoslav succession.

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