Articulation of Resistance in the Discourse of the 1996/97 Serbian Protests: Political Struggle through Culture and Symbolic Geography

Abstract

The present article analyzes the discursive articulation of resistance to the regime of Slobodan Milosevic during the civil and student protests in Serbia in the winter of 1996/97. By applying critical discourse analysis to the opposition press of the time, we find that the rhetoric during the protests centered around the notions of civilization and culture. In variations of orientalism, balkanism and "urbocentric exclusivism," the "Us" and "Them" identifications were constructed through mutually interlaced semantic pairs: civilization-backwardness, culture - primitivism, Europe - Balkans/Orient, urbanity - rurality and democracy - communism. By drawing on existing research on the role of symbolic geography and cultural distinctions in the creation of social cleavages in the post-Yugoslav societies, our analysis presents how cultural traits and affiliations, "urbanity" and individual characteristics, such as intelligence, critical ability and sense of humor, were used for the framing of protests, but also as means of political struggle in the protests. A detailed reconstruction of discursive strategies of reporting on the protests allows for a contemporary assessment of the limits of protest politics articulated in this way, and its comparison with a recent wave of mobilization of citizens of Serbia in 2016 and 2017.