Laura Meier

Junior Visiting Fellow in the cluster "In/equalities in the context of social transformation processes (focus on Southeast and Central Europe)"

Sustaining a Feminist 'we': Collective Organizing Against Sexual Violence and Femi(ni)cide in the Post-Yugoslav Space

This research project evolves against the backdrop of contemporary feminist organizing within the broader mobilizations against sexual violence and femi(ni)cide in the post-Yugoslav space between 2019 and 2024. It examines this organizing across Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Pristina, drawing on interviews with feminist activists to explore how activists sustain a shared feminist 'we' (Ahmed 2017) while navigating the tensions, hierarchies, and exclusions that can arise within collective organizing. Building on the premise that violence reproduces and stabilizes gendered inequalities (Butler 2022; Dorlin 2022; Vergès 2022), the project analyzes feminist organizing on two levels simultaneously: confronting violence as a mechanism that reproduces inequality, and examining how the process of sustaining a feminist 'we' can itself generate new exclusions and power imbalances within feminist collectives. Drawing further on theorizations of vulnerability (Butler 2016; Govrin 2022), the project shows how shared exposure to violence becomes a basis for collective organizing rather than a source of paralysis. At the center of this analysis is the concept of subversive collectivization, a form of feminist politics, grounded in shared space, affect, and experience, through which activists connect across differences without requiring a single, fixed identity. Situating the post-Yugoslav region within broader global feminist movements (such as #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos), the project contributes a grounded, regional perspective to debates on gender-based violence, collective identity, and inequality in Southeast Europe.