Shifting Sands: Serbia in Transition.

 

 

Seeking safety and security, we humans lean on things we can control. If we wear this outfit and stay away from these neighborhoods, our bodies will be safe. If we parent this way, we can protect our children from harm.  These ideas may provide a temporary sense of control and safety, but ultimately they are untrue. One especially dangerous, yet common lie about security is: If we avoid this ethnic group/ race/ religion, we will be secure. It is a lie that is the basis of nationalist ideologies.

The idea that racist nationalism attracts a certain kind of human—a kind that we are not capable of being—is itself a pernicious lie. I have been thinking about the dangers of ethnic nationalism since I was a child, hearing my father’s story of escape from Nazi Germany. In the 1980s, I continued to think about it as an activist in solidarity with liberation struggles in Central America that took nationalist forms. I have researched and written about it as a scholar. None of this thinking, acting, and researching has inoculated me from absorbing group demonization. 

For the last three years, I have been traveling with my spouse, spending months in Latin America, Asia, the United Kingdom, North Africa, and Western Europe. We have also spent a good deal of time in the Balkans, a part of the world so identified with interethnic struggle that the word Balkanized is an adjective, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as  “divided into smaller, often hostile or uncooperative parts, groups, or regions.” 

During my time in the Balkans, I found myself getting sucked into ethnic hatred for one particular group of people with whom I had no personal experience. In Albania, we viewed a graphic exhibit of Serbian crimes against Kosovar Albanians. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we learned about the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, when children and elders ran across city streets searching for food, dodging bullets. A photo exhibit on the massacre of 8,372 men and boys in Srebrenica filled our nervous systems with the weight of these crimes against humanity. Our connection to Bosnian Muslim suffering at the hands of Serbs intensified on May 31 — White Armband Day- when we marched to declare Never Again to ethnic cleansing, and laid flowers on the Sarajevo memorial for massacred children.

At Sarajevo City Hall, I took in stories of violent siege and musical resistance. Outside the building, I stared at the words SERBIAN CRIMINALS, carved into marble, and decided we needed to visit Serbia. Ethnic hatred is contagious. I needed an antidote. In September of 2025, during a three-day visit to Belgrade, I learned that far from being a monolithic, demonic society, Serbia was dynamic, with a growing, vibrant, and inspiring student-led social movement. I wanted to learn more. I planned a month-long stay for the summer of 2026.

What a time to visit! We arrived on  August 14, the day the Serbian student movement held a mass rally in Valjevo. During our stay, Ratko Mladić, Military Comander of the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of Srebrenica, died in prison in The Hague and was buried in Belgrade with military honors; the Serbian President dissolved Parliament and called snap elections; the student movement put forward a slate of candidates, collecting signatures in preparation for opposing President Vučić in the election, as he prepared to step down and run for Prime Minister.  The day we left, Kosovar commanders were sentenced in The Hague for crimes against Serbians.  

In the 1990s, when ethnic violence plagued a devolving former Yugoslavia, people sought hope in the idea that transitions could end in something better. In the summer of 2026, Serbia was going through another period of transition.   We could feel this tumult the minute we got off the bus in Belgrade. There was FCK BLK graffiti everywhere. The student movement called itself BLK for Blockade. FCK stands for what you think it does. The irreverent tagging even hit venerable buildings like Churches — an appearance of youthful radical support for the regime. If one did not know better, one might conclude that Serbian youth were the regime’s most fervent supporters. While we contemplated the regime’s graffiti tactics in the Capital, a mass rally was happening southwest of Belgrade, in the industrial town of Valjevo.

 

Serbian Students Rising 

The Blockade movement began as a youthful demand for government accountability after a railroad trestle collapsed, killing 16 people, on November 1, 2024. The story resonated with me because I come from a city that had a bridge collapse that killed thirteen people and injured 145. I was not in Minneapolis at the time. I remember thinking, The Governor just voted against transportation funds. He will have to resign. I was wrong about Minnesota. The Governor served out his term. In Serbia, however, the bridge collapse was the catalyst for a protest movement that has the potential to bring down the regime. 

On August 14, 2025, protests against corrupt and deadly building practices became a mass movement. On that day, police attacked protesters, leading to many injuries. It was Serbia’s George Floyd moment, when Blockade began engaging broad sectors of society and developing a full political agenda. They targeted corruption, police brutality, and an economic system that was unraveling the commons and bowing to IMF mandates to cut healthcare, education, and other social services. Now, in 2026, the movement had a comprehensive set of demands and a vision for a government that prioritized human needs. They demanded that President Vučić step down. Their base had widened to encompass all ages, trade unions, and other sectors of society. Their tactics were varied and creative. For example, while we were there, wildfires erupted in Serbia’s parched forests. Blockade raised funds for what firefighters needed, while pointing out that this was what the government was supposed to be doing. They were committed to engaging communities in deep and decentralized small-d democracy,

Serbia, Blockade Movement and the EU 

In addition to FCK BLK graffiti, the other message that greeted us as we entered the city was a giant sign saying Welcome to Serbia, the next new member of the EU.  Serbia has been a candidate for fourteen years. Some say the EU wants the Balkan candidate states: Albania, Montenegro, and Serbia, as bulwarks against Russia. My own opinion is that the EU wants no nation poorer than its poorest member. They want no Muslim nation. They wanted and did not get wealthy Iceland, far from Russia. They were happy to negotiate a new association with Canada, even farther from Europe’s Russian borders. They don’t want Balkan states as members. They want them as forever candidates they can manipulate.

The students fighting the oligarchy in Serbia were making demands that Western Europe did not care about, and some that the EU opposes. The students were not demanding that Serbia blockade Russia. They did not loudly condemn the war criminal Ratko Mladić, who died during our visit.  And the students were not calling for Serbia to recognize Kosovo. They did not all agree on any of these issues, nor were they united on the desire for Serbia to join the EU. The students opposed IMF austerity. They were suspicious of an EU that seemed more interested in opening a lithium mine in Serbia than issues of democracy and corruption.

 The Death and Funeral of Ratko Mladić

Serbia, like the rest of the Balkans, is a European backwater from an EU perspective, a place of resource and labor extraction for the West, not often in the global limelight. But in August and September 2026, the illness, death, and funeral of Ratko Mladić caused the Western world to turn its attention to Serbia. Mladić’s health declined steeply in August, and he began receiving palliative care in The Hague hospital. On August 18, his family petitioned for humanitarian release so he could die in Serbia. On August 20th four of the six judges in The Hague voted not to issue the release. He died on August 27th. His body was returned to Belgrade, and a funeral was held there. His casket was draped in the Serbian flag and carried by active-duty soldiers. Fifteen thousand people came to pay their respects. The President did not attend, but other government officials did. Photos of crowds lining up to view his casket made headlines across the globe and were roundly condemned across the political spectrum.

And it was indeed a scary spectacle. We were not in Belgrade at that time of the funeral. But during that week, in Subotica, a nationalist band played in the Liberation Square, outside our window. Young men—literally wrapped in flags—jumped and saluted to nationalist lyrics while an old man projected photos of Mladić on the great white theater wall. We did not sleep that night.

Luckily, the night of the nationalist concert was not our first in Subotica. We had been there two weeks and had already witnessed inter-ethnic solidarity unfold in front of our window, most drawing much larger crowds than the nationalist group.

• On our first night we saw farmers present bread to everyone in the square, and costumed dancers lifted their knees and voices in a celebration of the wheat harvest.
• A few nights later a four-day international ethnic folk festival began, with Bolivian, Chilean, and Indonesian groups joining Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, and Serbian dancers and musicians—a celebration of diversity and borderless solidarity. Having recently been in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, we were momentarily unsure where we were as Andean flute music wafted across the plaza.
• One night a band played ABBA’s greatest hits, all sung in English. Everyone seemed to know the words to I Have a Dream and Dancing Queen. 
• A Hungarian Band called Republic was hugely popular. Two band members are political in Hungary but on opposite sides. I read that they stay together by singing only light, happy, apolitical music.
• There were four other nights of children’s folk dancing and singing in the four languages of Subotica.
• The biggest crowd—10,000 people filling every nook for blocks around—was for the wildly popular 58-year-old Yugoslav urbo-folk singer, Dragana Mirković. In contrast to the nationalist band, her event was a family affair, with babies and grandparents singing along to her anguished ballads of lost love.

 

Monofocused Western Media

After the funeral of Mladić, the European Union issued daming statments, condemning Serbia for embracing the memory of a genocidaire, and threatened to end the country’s fourteen-year candidacy for EU membership. The Western Press paid little attention to how politically split Serbia was, with fissures deepening after Mladić’s death. As one Balkan news agency pointed out: “The Freedom and Justice Party, Movement of Free Citizens, the Green-Left Front and the Democratic Party – {all said} that state institutions need to prevent the glorification of convicted war criminals and that Mladić cannot be a role model for future generations, that his death cannot erase the facts established by international courts, and that facing up to the past is not directed against the Serbian people.” NGO’s added to the chorus of disdain for the deceased war criminal.

The European and US media, across the political spectrum, seemed to miss these fissures and the multiplicity of perspectives. Three that we heard:

1. Mladić was a hero who saved Serbian lives. (If you find this logic hard to fathom, think about how the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified in the United States.) 

2. Mladić was one of many war criminals. Some of those who have not been tried include Bill Clinton, Jaque Chirac, and Tony Blair.

3. Mladic was guilty of genocide. We must not let him be a symbol of Serbian culture.  

The first perspective was the one the Western media tended to focus on. It was ironic, for these journalists all work within nations that are themselves deeply divided. Serbia is no different.

 

 

Shifting Sands: Subotica

We spent the bulk of our time in Subotica, a city in Vojvodina Province, in the North Bačka region, on the Hungarian border.  In 1974, while still part of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Vojvodina achieved regional status distinct from Serbia, under the Yugoslav umbrella. Today it is still called an autonomous region, but what that means is unclear..

A dizzying array of peoples planted roots in this sandy soil, staking claims, absorbing and being absorbed, replacing, and being replaced. Celts, Illyrians, Byzantines, Romans, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians. In the last hundred years, so many regimes have come and gone: The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires crumbled after World War I. Subotica became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, survived the Nazi Occupation, and was a northern border town of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. And now this town on the Hungarian border is  part of the Republic of Serbia.

 Subotica has four official languages: Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, and Bunjevci, a tongue recently elevated from dialect to language spoken by about 3,000 people in Subotica. They now have the right to study their language and culture in school. If you go back to the 1750s, the Bunjevci were the majority population—a people who had migrated from Herzegovina.

Subotica sells itself as a city of Art Nouveau architecture, and indeed the turn-of-the-20th-century fairytale palaces covered in hearts, flowers, beehives, and symbols of everyday life are stunning. But the first thing we noticed when we emerged from the bullet train and stepped into the streets of Subotica was the trees: what an unusually thick and diverse canopy for an urban center! Elm, oak, eucalyptus, and sycamore. The sweet shade protected us from scorching mid-August heat. Though some of the trees are obviously centuries old, I learned they are not old-growth. None were here when humans settled. Two and a half centuries ago, the inhabitants planted saplings down every avenue to build roots in the shifting sands. Some of those first plantings — oak, yew, mulberry–are still alive. Most have been replaced to preserve the original deep canopy that cools, beautifies, and oxygenates the city.

 

Subotica: Center of Serb Nationalism and Haven From It. 

The region has both been a center of intense Serbian nationalism and a haven from it. For most of the 20th century, Hungarians were the demographic majority. Now they make up 1/3 of the population. Serbians are another third. Croats and Montenegrins, Roma, and Bunjevci have shifted up and down in the margins. Those numbers don’t tell you the nature of internal immigration within current Serbian borders. Today, more than half of the Serbians in Subotica are refugees of the 1990s wars, from Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, and other parts of southern Serbia. Hungarians fled across the border when NATO bombing began. 

Taking into account the push and pull factors, these seemingly subtle shifts in ethnic population amount to a granular avalanche. 

It shook me to learn that NATO targeted oil refineries and TV stations in this region, so far from the Kosovo border. And it explains the level of social PTSD that I could feel. It explains some of the reactions we got as English-speaking people. The stress of adults in Subotica—especially those in my generation—was palpable. In my three years of travel—in places where I don’t know the language—I have come to rely heavily on non-verbal greetings to feel like I’m part of humanity. Sometimes in Subotica, I received a grimace in response to my smile. I knew it wasn’t personal. One man on a bicycle stopped to let us know–using his few English words–that the NATO bombing might have been 30 years ago, but to him it was yesterday. He hated Americans, he told us. We listened. He reached out and shook David’s hand before riding off,

To be a refugee in your own land is a particular experience I had not contemplated before my time in Subotica. Coming from a nation of intense racial hierarchy where Europeans lost their ethnic identities for the privilege of becoming white, it took me some time and sensitivity to adjust to ethnic diversity in a community of people who look and sound alike to my uneducated ears. I came to understand and appreciate the efforts of city officials to mediate tensions among them through myriad ethnic festivals, language recognition, and diverse school curricula.

 

Belgrade, September 14: When Blockade delivered their signatures and their Student List. 

On September 9, President Vučić dissolved Parliament and declared snap elections for October 25. On September 14, we arrived in Belgrade for a two-day visit before leaving the country. On our way to find food, we saw a group of eight young people with a banner we could not read. We followed them to Republic Square and the University, where the 8 joined eight thousand, and then thousands more. The crowd was all ages and seemed to encompass all of Serbia. They had gathered to march with the Blockade students to deliver the signatures collected from around the country in the last five days, to put a Student List of candidates on the October ballot.  A group of 100 motorcyclists dressed in black joined the parade. For a moment we thought they opposed Blockade, but it soon became clear they were there to provide deafening support. The crowd shouted, jumped up and down, marched and danced Serbian folk dances. 

For five days the youth had set up tables in communities across Serbia. Their candidates– mostly educators— had given speeches in Novi Sad and other locations.   And now, they were handing in their signatures and celebrating. The entire downtown Belgrade became a street dance. Not knowing Serbian, we watched faces. The lightness, the solidarity, the smiles we exchanged, would have made it clear—even if we had known nothing about the movement—that this was a liberating moment for the Serbian people. We felt blessed to have witnessed it.

 

Concluding Thoughts: 

I went to Serbia to make sure my brain and heart rejected a monochromatic and bigoted view of Serbian people. Belgrade and Subotica made that easy. On any day, Belgrade is a city filled with artists, bookstores, and thinking people with a wise, sardonic sense of humor. We had the honor of being there to see people dancing in the streets to build a new world. As for Subotica, the city was filled with children, and we got to see how they were treasured. Like kids everywhere, they dance to music with abandon and joy. And in Subotica, there was always music. These are images I will take with me. Not burdening the children anywhere with the trauma, guilt, and divisions of adults is our responsibility.

It is the children — the Serbian babies of 2026, who dance like they don’t care if you are watching, who were not remembered when someone carved the words SERBIAN CRIMINALS into marble on the door of the City Hall in Sarajevo. 

Spending months in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia (and in Montenegro, North Macedonia, Turkey, and Greece) did not make me a Balkans expert. It did make me respect and admire their diverse cultures as I attempted to understand their overlapping histories. It made me wary of Western stereotypes of the Balkans, and disgusted with blatant economic exploitation by the United States and the EU, hidden or couched in freedom rhetoric. It led me to search for the outside interference behind regional disputes. It also led me to look, with hope, to youth-led movements with concerns that can dissolve borders. Issues like climate catastrophes and the overreach of global capital. There is a network bringing together activists amongst the Balkans that were enemies in the 1990s, to organize together against their governments’ complicity in genocide in Gaza.  These movements are where hope lies in the Balkans.

The 90s cyclone never completely died down. During our visit to Serbia in August/September 2026, we could see the winds rising, sand shifting again. But the story is so much more complex and hopeful than Western pundits looking only for balkanization have conveyed. The region is filled with youth, reporting on their movements through social media. Look them up. 

It is natural and good to want safety and security. If we can make our world safer, it will not be through bombs or border walls or detention camps. It will require thinking and acting socially, locally, and globally. Students in Serbia, along with their generational counterparts in Albania, Peru, India, and elsewhere, are leading the way.

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PS. As I finish this essay, my social media feed is full of two opposing images: a police and military parade in Sarajevo and people dancing in the streets all over Serbia to celebrate the Student List.  I am doing my best not to reverse the biases I went to Serbia to undo. I know that both are true depictions of events, and only part of the complicated current realities in the two countries that were once one.

 

This essay about Serbia in August-September 2026 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present. You can see my interview series on Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA  here, and information about my book, Allegiance to Winds and Waters: Bicycling the Political Divides of the United States here.