Milica Pekic on the institutional crisis and the student mobilisation in Serbia
On the 1st of November 2024, the canopy of the newly renovated public train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, collapsed, killing 16 people. This was the culmination of a series of crises that had unfolded since the Covid-19 pandemic, which included: the intensive privatisation of public assets and natural resources without public debate; ecosystem destruction linked to new mining projects; large-scale state-backed construction projects that bypassed existing legal regulations; and, in 2023, a school shooting in central Belgrade in which a 13-year-old boy killed nine classmates and a school security guard, followed the next day by a second mass shooting that killed nine more people and wounded thirteen. Each crisis was met with the same government response: the system did not fail; nobody is responsible, resume business as usual. Citizens protested against these various events but slowly everything drifted back to normal. Schools reopened; prosecutors filed no meaningful charges; police remained under government control, while parliament and much of the media continued to manufacture narratives serving the interests of the few. And then the canopy collapsed.
This event triggered one of the largest and longest student movements in the country’s history. It began on the 25th of November 2024, when students at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts occupied their building, halting all regular activities. Within weeks, every university in Serbia was blocked, with exams, lectures and other activities suspended as students began to organise. They demanded accountability from state institutions: prosecutors to charge those responsible, police to investigate, courts to try cases independently, universities to suspend normal activities, and citizens to support the protests and demand an end to business as usual.
Most importantly, they didn’t limit themselves to demands; they acted. They blockaded highways and public squares, introduced daily sixteen-minute commemorative silences, and organised mass protests across the country, including the largest public protest in Serbia’s history, held on the 15th March 2025 in Belgrade. They marched hundreds of kilometers through towns and villages, mobilising people along the way. They inspired citizens to self-organise in neighbourhood assemblies, unions, and professional associations. It has become the largest social mobilisation in Serbia’s history, drawing support from farmers to medical workers, artists to engineers. The movement has no leaders. Decisions are made collectively in student forums known as plenums. Responsibilities are shared, and legitimacy is built through participation rather than representation. This horizontal structure has made it remarkably resilient: despite severe police violence, arbitrary arrests and relentless media attacks, it continues to grow.
After almost ten months of blockades, faculties gradually resumed their regular activities, but the movement entered a new political phase. Aware that their demands would not be met by the current government, students called for early parliamentary elections. With most opposition parties having lost public trust, they began a long, uncertain process of assembling their own list of candidates, mobilising hundreds of people to help shape a new programme. The movement’s core values include workers’ rights, democratised institutions and the protection of natural resources and ecosystems, with health, education and culture understood as public goods rather than industries. Students act as facilitators of a broader social process involving professionals, workers and citizens from across society.
Repression against anyone publicly supporting the students has reached an unprecedented scale: censorship, dismissals, police violence, media attacks and mobbing by an obedient managerial class have become everyday practice. Culture and the arts were among the first sectors to experience this pressure. [1] Although elections have still not been announced, and despite numerous open and covert attacks on the movement, social and political mobilisation continues. By every poll, the student movement remains the strongest political force in the country, with the widest public support.
Over the past two years, most people in Serbia have, in some capacity, been part of this movement. The process is intensive, frustrating, and slow. Political conflicts and generational misunderstandings are common. Yet the experience of change is ever present, and the need to rethink, unlearn, and work together is obvious. When BITEF, Belgrade’s international theatre festival, was censored by the government in 2025 for the first time in its nearly sixty-year history, its curatorial team refused to comply. Instead, together with students of Faculty of Dramatic Arts they organised a counter-festival Ne:Bitef, under the slogan: Bitef is wherever we gather! Over the past two years we have learned that the same can be said of democracy. It is shaped through the practice of people, through participation, not delegated and removed representation. It is a dynamic process that resists the capitalist obsession with efficiency, measurable outcomes, and immediate results. It is a process that takes time, trust, care and tolerance, and offers no certain outcome. Where it will lead us remains to be seen.
[1] For a detailed account of how this logic of capture played out across Serbia’s cultural institutions see Tatjana Rosić’s chronicle in ArtMargins