Tatjana Rosić-Ilić

Fellow in the cluster "Knowledge transfer and concepts of Europe"

Love as a Political Force and the New Landscape of Culture of Resistance in Europe: Student Protests in Serbia 2024-2025

The 2024–2025 student movement in Serbia represents a significant social and cultural phenomenon that challenges dominant forms of political communication. It reveals new forms of collective action and expression, particularly among youth, as well as previously unseen alliances across ideological and class lines. Students define their protests as people’s liberation efforts, blending anticolonial and anti-neoliberal critiques with national sovereignty struggles. Emerging amid long-term legal suspension and necropolitical governance (Mbembe), it exposes contradictions in resisting the “politics of death” while introducing a distinctive rhetoric of the “mobilization of love,” reframing love as a political force. The new language of student resistance departs from conventional political discourse: symbolic acts, such as student collective walks between cities, and the use of national symbolism combined with guerrilla strategies, generate emotional cohesion despite ideological diversity. The “mobilization of love” activates economic, physical, psychological and emotional resources of citizens, creating movement infrastructures and heightening social awareness of Serbia’s political crisis. 

The lecture will analyze the cultural, communicative, and aesthetic modalities through which the “mobilization of love” materializes itself. These modalities—manifest in protest soundscapes, social media practices, visual iconography, and the performative choreography of student marches—constitute a semiotic and affective infrastructure that enables solidarity, empathy, and recognition as operative forces of social transformation. At the same time, these modalities establish a completely new language of the culture of resistance. The dissemination of this language occurs primarily through digital networks—especially student plenums’ Instagram accounts, creating what Castells terms “networked resistance.” 

Leaderless and slow-burning, based in the idea of plenary democracy, the student movement in Serbia transforms the existing resistance practices and opens up a different kind of political and cultural imagination of the European present and the social reality we inhabit. At the same time, it asks for a re-examination of the European tradition of resistance and the ways it is reactivated amid the pressing political and social questions of our time, transferring the new knowledge of societal change and offering a new type of culture of resistance for Europe and its semi-periphery.