Author: Regionalni Abolicionistički Feministički Kolektiv

Genocid u Palestini se nastavlja s punom potporom tzv. Zapadnog svijeta uključujuči i sramotnu potporu država našeg regiona. I Srbija i Hrvatska ponovno uvode obavezni vojni rok na način koji diskriminira one koji se žele pozvati na priziv savjesti. Kreće radikalno naoružavanje Europe pod vodstvom Europske komisije i Frau Genocide Ursule von der Leyen koje će koštati oko 800 milijardi eura, istih onih milijardi eura koje nema za zdravstvo, obrazovanje, socijalu itd. Dijelimo tekst naše Laure Pejak o tome zašto je abolicija vojske neodvojiva od feminističke abolicije i oslobođenja svih nas.

On September 14, 2024, the president of Serbia announced his intention to reinstate military conscription for all young men aged between 18 and 30. With this act, President Aleksandar Vučić – whose role should in principle be largely ceremonial within Serbia’s parliamentary republic, but who has been de facto dominating Serbian politics since he took office in 2017 – blatantly bypassed all normal governmental and parliamentary procedures, clearly illustrating the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Serbian regime.

However, this move needs to be examined in a much broader context. On the one hand, it is part of a greater global and regional trend of increased militarization and rising right-wing authoritarianism. The whole of Europe is in a process of drastically increasing its military budgets, considering the reinstatement of the draft, as well as witnessing a drastic growth in tensions with neighbouring Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Israel’s war on Gaza, the rise of right-wing populists in Europe, Latin America, India, and elsewhere, military coups and growing conflicts in Africa, all paint a grim picture of a growing global militarization, and a shrinking space for non-violent, democratic and diplomatic solutions of national and international problems.

While, on the other hand, the public idolization of the military (which, along with the Orthodox church, consistently ranks as the most trusted institution among Serbian citizens) and its prominent role in Serbian politics, are also products of specific national conditions. The wars Serbia fought against its former Yugoslav co-constituent states in the 1990s led to Serbian society being entirely dominated by a militaristic nationalist fervor – resulting in mass conscription, state repression and omnipresent violence – not just by the military and the police, but also by organized crime groups and far-right paramilitary forces (which were often one and the same thing) tacitly working for the government. The terror and ethnic cleansing committed by Serbian (military, paramilitary and police) forces in neighbouring countries (as well as Kosovo, at the time still largely under Serbian control), was happening side-by-side with mass terror against Serbia’s own citizens, especially those who were against the policies of the then-current regime.

This militaristic character of Serbian society, however, was not wholly unique, nor was it an entirely new phenomenon. A similar process of militarization, creation of paramilitary forces, repression and ethnic cleansing was happening in neighbouring Croatia, whose right-wing government didn’t lag too far behind in processes happening to its then-archnemesis. At the same time, Socialist Yugoslavia itself – which was in many ways a more progressive society than the right-wing nationalist regimes that immediately followed it – was also a deeply militaristic society. Its entire national mythology was built on the glorification of war – specifically the War of National Liberation that the country’s communist movement had led during World War II. A state-sanctioned obsession with the heroism of wartime resisters permeated movies, TV shows, popular songs, comic books, children’s media, basically the entire culture of the country. This heroism, to be clear, is certainly not something to be disparaged – the bravery and actions of anti-fascist resistance fighters are still something to be celebrated, admired and highly thankful for, despite smear campaigns by later anti-communist post-Yugoslav politicians. 

At the same time however, such an obsession with and glorification of war – without a deeper examination of its horrors (discussions of the Holocaust took an entirely secondary seat to the story of the resistance, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav citizens were murdered in concentration camps) and its fundamental causes. Nationalism, the root cause of fascism and nazism, was never seriously examined in the Yugoslav public sphere, but was instead redirected towards a federalist patriotism for the multi-ethnic state, a patriotism that was no less fanatic or all-pervasive in its character than earlier (or later) ethnic nationalisms.

The militarization of the Yugoslav state also led not only to a bloated military budget – Yugoslavia consistently topped the lists of biggest military spenders in Europe, averaging around 50% of the country’s entire yearly federal budget – but to a complete dominance of military society over civilian life. Young men would lose up to two years of their lives serving the military, being trained to kill and prepared to see potential enemies, both national and political, on every side. Children as young as 12 or 13 years old would learn how to shoot from rifles as part of their regular school curriculum. A large military-industrial complex developed, which mass-produced weapons not only for Yugoslavia itself but for export to various militaristic regimes and armed groups abroad. Serbia has partially maintained this legacy (without the pretense of socialist internationalism, non-alignment and anti-colonialism that had previously guided it, at least in rhetoric), and Serbian-made arms are still being used in conflicts all around the world, from Gaza, to Syria to Ukraine.

The product of this constant glorification of war, the preparation of the populace to be ready to wage war against internal and external enemies at any moment, and the mass military build-up was an interconnected series of wars in the early 1990’s, which together comprised the largest military conflict in Europe since WW2, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in a mindless and in the end, largely pointless inter-ethnic killing, where there were no clear victors, and whose consequences are still felt in all of our countries to this day.

The most important progressive politics that emerged in Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s was the anti-war and anti-military movement. Feminist groups, LGBT+ activists, student groups, liberal-democrats and socialists (at least those who opposed the nominally “socialist” far-right government of the time) all had their main focus on countering this horrific crime of war being committed by the state. A specific leftist-pacifist social theory formed in the wake of this upheaval by feminist activists from organizations like the Women in Black. Some of the most notable include Staša Zajović or the late Dejan Nebrigić. Unlike the anti-war movement in the US during the Vietnam War, the Serbian anti-war movement in the 90’s garnered no illusions about ideas of national liberation, of heroic guerillas fighting an evil empire, or the promise of worldwide communist revolution. It knew firsthand that the enemies the Serbian forces were fighting against were at best only marginally more inclined towards respecting the lives of civilians or towards the creation of any sort of free society. There were no “good guys” in war (and certainly not in this one), even if there were aggressors and perhaps even lesser and greater evils. Even the promise of freedom and prosperity in liberal democracy didn’t animate many of the anti-war activists of this time. Their contacts with Western anti-war movements had, for many of them, dispelled such illusions, as had the deeply ambivalent and largely inadequate responses that governments in Europe and North America had towards the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and the rest of Serbia-Montenegro itself. Most of the activists remained committed leftists, even as the fall of Yugoslavia and world communism, as well as the context of war and rising repression, meant re-examining what exactly this could mean.

The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990’s represented an entirely nihilistic, necrophilic movement of extermination – and, perhaps, that’s all that any war ever was. For the new progressive movements emerging in Serbia at this time, ending war, military conscription, the military itself and finding a way to solve conflicts nonviolently was far from an idealistic pipedream. It was a deep and unavoidable necessity, where the alternative was genocide – cultural, spiritual and, in the end, physical extermination of the society we lived in.

Militarism, the Abolitionist Movement and Where We Can Go from Here

The movement for prison abolition began in the United States as a response to a specific set of socio-historical conditions present in that country. The movement and corresponding theory have been developed through the insight of largely Black social and political thinkers (as well as the lived experiences of Black incarcerated people). The focus is on how the prison-industrial complex operates in the US and so it deals with concrete social issues that directly affect the lives of many.

And while this analysis is deeply tied to history and practices in the United States and could hardly be traced in the same way in other countries (although mileage may vary), it has still proven relevant in raising certain questions in a global context. Abolitionism has led all of us from all over the world, from various positions of marginalization and criminalization, to examine the role that police and prisons play in our societies, in our (queer, immigrant, sex worker, Roma, etc.) communities and to question their legitimacy. 

The largely US-based and Black-American-led movement for abolition, in the process of advocating for these ideas, also needed to devise plausible answers to questions raised by such a movement in the eyes of “common sense”. “How would we deal with crime without prisons?”, “What do we do about murderers and rapists?”, “How can harm be prevented without a police force?”, and many others that I will not recount answers to here. The very real and inescapable necessity of ending prisons and police in the context of (Black) American lived reality led to these questions being taken incredibly seriously. And while the different potential answers to these questions aren’t final or even agreed upon by all abolitionists, they are being developed in a creative and quite rigorous process through the use of both theory as well as putting different ideas into practice, leading to answers for concrete policies we can try to implement in creating a post-prison, post-police society.

Probably the main question that we attempted to raise in organizing the Novi Sad School for Feminist Abolition was how approaches to abolition might be applied to the context of the Balkans – mainly referring to the post-Yugoslav countries, and to a certain extent other post-communist states on the peninsula – as well as what insights we, the people from this region, might have to offer in the further development of abolitionist and feminist theory. And while I believe the school itself was quite fruitful and led to us thinking in a lot of different ways about these issues in our local context, it was only later, as militarism and right-wing authoritarianism have continued to rise, both within Serbia and in the world at large, that an idea was able to crystalize in my mind of what some answers to these questions might look like.

With my above reflection on the development of both Yugoslav and global militarism that we are facing today, I wanted to see what insights might be gained from both our own experience in the post-Yugoslav space, as well as similar experiences that we are witnessing all around the world – and to apply the perspectives drawn from both the abolitionist movement and the Serbian anti-war tradition to the issues of rising militarism and repression facing our world today. The following are four key insights I would like to highlight:

1. Police repression of dissent and minority populations is directly tied to an increase in international tensions.
   

This is a lesson that we need to carry with us as the world rearms and the role of the military becomes more dominant in society. What happened in Serbia, specifically during the 1990’s, was the rise of both a militarized, war-time state, as well as a highly repressive police state. Bosniak Muslims, who were being targeted for genocide by Serbian (para)military forces in Bosnia, were being seen as potential fifth-columnists in Serbia itself, leading to mass police violence, torture and incarceration of Bosniak citizens of Serbia. Similarly, any and all political opposition was crushed or sidelined in the name of maintaining national security in the face of supposed external threats.
We are seeing a clear repetition of this in contemporary Russia, where its war against Ukraine has justified draconian, decades-long prison sentences not just for anyone who dares question the war in the slightest, as well as crackdowns on different minority groups – most notably LGBT+ people, but also various minority ethnic groups and colonized nations as well.
Western democratic states are far from immune to these tendencies (although they have yet to be taken to such extremes there). The United States went through a similar transformation after 9/11, where Muslims were disproportionately targeted for police harassment, checks at the borders and deportations, their loyalty being viewed as inherently questionable. It also allowed the Bush regime to enact anti-protesting laws and crack down on people who were trying to express their dissatisfaction with the warmongering, conservative and white-supremacist politics it was implementing.
Even Ukraine, which is fighting a defensive war in the name of upholding “freedom, democracy and European values” in the face of Russian authoritarianism, has turned to cracking down on army deserters, trade unionists and others who are seen as disruptive to the current war effort. War against external enemies always leads to – and is sometimes even primarily an excuse for – a crackdown on internal opposition and an increase in police presence and power.

2. The military and the police are two sides of the same coin.
   
   The Serbian war against Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, and the subsequent massacres and displacement of Albanian civilians, was actually spearheaded not by the army, but by the police. The line between these two institutions eventually began to blur – as the police were given access to more and more military-grade weaponry and began to apply military tactics in “fighting terrorism”.
   This clearly illustrates the extremes to which the militarization of the police can go. And Serbia is far from an isolated case. The United States police forces are increasingly becoming militarized, given large amounts of military surplus equipment, and taught to combat protestors using military tactics. And all over Europe, we’ve seen the military being deployed to safeguard borders – not from potential invaders, but rather from people who might attempt to cross those borders “illegally” – a law-enforcement role that is usually within the clear domain of border police.

3. The military is an institution of racist and patriarchal dominance.
   
   Much has been said about the racist and patriarchal nature and history of the police: they specifically target and criminalize members of racialized groups, they support and reinforce patriarchal logics in their dealings with gender-based violence, and members of police forces often perpetuate racist and patriarchal violence, both in their work and in their private life.
   This same critical approach needs to be levelled at the military as well. While the mission of the police is largely to control subaltern populations within the boundaries of the state, the mission of the military forces is primarily to conquer, control and/or exterminate “enemy” and subaltern populations outside the state’s borders. In this role it is not only a racist institution, but one into whose very existence the potentiality for genocide against the racialized Other is built-in. On the other hand, when it comes to internal racial politics of the state, the military often takes one of two approaches, which, while seeming to be opposites stem from the same place of racial/ethnic oppression.
   One approach is for the military to target ethnically undesirable populations for recruitment or drafting in order to reduce their number in the population at large. This logic was applied in the Serbian military during the Yugoslav wars, where members of the Hungarian minority were targeted for the draft in highly disproportionate numbers, with the idea of sending them off to die so that the multi-ethnic region of Vojvodina might be ethnically “purified”. Similar examples can be found in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, where many of the young men sent off to die for the Russian state are disproportionately made up of Russian colonial subjects and members of other ethnic minorities; or in the US war on Vietnam, where Black people were disproportionately targeted for the draft and sent off to die.
   The other approach consists of an exclusion of undesirable ethnic populations from the military, since they are viewed as inherently disloyal and thus untrustworthy to be given weapons to. This is the approach that Israel takes with its Arab Palestinian population: although they are technically allowed to serve in the IDF if they so wish, they are automatically excluded from a draft that is otherwise mandatory and near-unavoidable for all other segments of the population.
   The patriarchal nature of the military can be seen perhaps even more clearly than is the case with the police. In almost all countries, men are the only ones targeted for the military draft, leading to a reification of the idea of men as inherently violent and good at killing – whereas women are weaker and in need of protection – while at the same time imposing a specific form of gendered violence onto people assigned male at birth who are forced to take part in such an institution. The military is also a hotbed of abuse – perhaps more so than any other institution – both physical, emotional and sexual. The violent nature of military life (both in the inherent acts of violence the military was created to carry out, as well as in the informal acts of violence within the military hierarchy itself) leads many to further perpetuate this violence once they come back to civilian life. Military veterans are disproportionately likely to physically abuse their spouses, as well as to be perpetrators of terrorist attacks, murders, and mass shootings.
   Patriarchal violence is, of course, present in the regular dealings of the military with enemy forces as well. Mass rape of women in occupied territories, different forms of sexual violence perpetrated against POWs (both men and women), treating all civilian men as “potential combatants” and singling them out for extermination (as was the case in Srebrenica in 1995), are all just some of the examples of the deeply patriarchal violence the military inflicts against the “enemies of the state”.
   In fact, the military might be the one institution in our societies that most openly serves no other purpose than to perpetuate racist, patriarchal, colonial and ethnic violence. If we are interested in dismantling these systems, ending the military needs to be a key part in this process.

4. The abolition of the police and other forms of internal state violence necessitates a parallel (or even primary) abolition of military forces and a cessation of state violence against “external enemies”.
   
   Considering the above arguments, abolishing the police and working towards a rethinking of the way we deal with crime and safety within our own (civilian) communities, cannot be uncoupled from the project of abolishing the military as well, and rethinking the way we deal with international or inter-ethnic conflicts.
   A state (or even some form of non-state organization of society) that has no police or prisons, but that still maintains armed forces, is a state that is still able to kill and repress its own population when the need arises. And in fact, military repression of civilians is often a far worse prospect for a social movement than police repression. Whereas the police are (at least in principle) expected to show some restraint and have different tools of responding to dissent at their disposal, the military has one purpose and one purpose only – to murder with extreme prejudice. Such a nightmare scenario could be seen in situations such as the Assad regime’s use of extreme military force for repression of Syrian revolutionaries in 2011 onwards – which led to one of the worst civil wars in recent memory, leaving hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions displaced.
   This prospect may seem distant or even unimaginable in democratic countries, but we should be aware that we are always a few missteps away from such a possibility and may even already be on a course towards just such a potential future. Opposition to mandatory conscription, increased military spending, military interventions in other countries, military alliances, to any and all preparations for the prospect of war needs to come to the forefront of our activist movements. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t oppose actions of states that are repressing their populations, disregarding human rights or invading other countries, far from it. But following their logics of war, military build-up and repression of dissent will necessarily lead to the eventual victory of the logic of such regimes. Even if such a state is defeated through military force, the virus of war and militarism will have spread and its further influence will continue to seep through the institutions created and transformed in its wake.
   If we wish to imagine a world without prisons, police and borders, we must first imagine a world without war.

Suggestions for Potential Ways Forward

How then, might an anti-militarist abolitionist movement look like in practice? What are some ways that we can apply the above-mentioned goals in practice, and how might abolitionist ideas for dealing with harm, such as transformative justice or community care, help us in moving forward in our movement?

I shall sketch out a few ideas for this below. These are by no means meant to be exhaustive or final; they are merely suggestions for some of the concrete actions that anti-militarist abolitionists may take in working on the much broader goal of a world without state repression, the military, prisons, police and armed conflict.

• Applying restorative justice in war-torn communities: Communities that have been through war or are in a consistent state of conflict with one another – and specifically those which, despite those conflicts, still continue to share a broader geographical, physical and social space with each other – are places where methods of restorative/transformative justice are especially relevant in preventing further death and suffering, as well as creating space for inter-community life and organizing around shared issues. The way that we can move forward in such circumstances will inherently involve a process of accountability, (re)building trust and finding ways to overcome harm done in the past. It is necessary to not just involve individuals who have taken part in harmful behavior, but to have entire communities overcome their notions of “collective guilt” or the need for “collective punishment” for the Other, despite what may have happened in the past. Peace activists have been doing such work throughout (post-)conflict zones, from the former Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland and beyond. These are practices that abolitionists can learn from and apply, but which they can also contribute to with their knowledge and experience in applying restorative justice practices in other contexts.
• Preventing the involvement of the military in civil affairs and the militarization of the police: All policy moves that broaden the role of the military to involve any sort of “law enforcement” need to be resisted. Similarly, the use of military weapons and military tactics by the police, or the deployment of police forces in armed conflict, needs to be opposed and reversed in the opposite direction as much as possible. Not only should the police not own armored vehicles, rocket launchers, assault rifles, grenades and other military-grade equipment, but both the police and military should be brought into a process of gradual disarmament. Reductions in military armaments would ideally be done alongside deals with neighbouring/rival states as a way of building peace regionally and globally.
• Demilitarizing our own movements: While leftist movements have been instrumental in shaping the insight that the violence of the state or oppressive social forces more generally and the violence of the oppressed shouldn’t be equated, there is still much to be said about an uncritical adoption of military logics into progressive movements. The militarization of a movement leads to it becoming hierarchical, often dominated by (violent) men and can not only further isolate it from the wider community, but can lead to internal divisions escalating into deadly armed struggles, where otherwise they would have, at worst, led to a split in the movement. We have seen many such cases, both in large-scale armed marxist groups in many non-western countries, as well as in the much smaller Western left-wing urban guerilla groups of the 60’s and 70’s. And while some sort of violence for self-defense and self-preservation of oppressed communities may in many cases end up being necessary, its necessity must always be questioned and resorted to only when all other options have been exhausted. Democratic, community-based processes that include everyone (not just militants) need to always be at the center of all of our decision-making and society-building efforts.
• Advocating for non-military solutions to international conflicts: This means never treating war as an inevitability, even if armed attacks – like for example, the ones on September 11th in the US, or October 7th in Israel – have already occurred. Instead, even in such extreme circumstances of militaristic fervor, we must insist on avoiding military responses and work on advocating for a broad-based international diplomatic response, with the goal being de-escalation and – where applicable – addressing underlying issues that may have led certain members of a community to act in such a violent way. Even if a non-military response ends up being impossible, or our efforts at advocating for such solutions fall on deaf ears, we should never stop advocating for a de-escalation and ceasing of hostilities in order to return the conflicting sides to the negotiating table. 
• Supporting refugees and migrants dismantling borders: The work of border abolition has long been part of different abolitionist movements around the world, especially in the EU and North America. Borders themselves are not only oppressive and racialized institutions – maintaining the global unjust division of labor and resources by preventing people from moving where they would like to live or where greater opportunity potentially awaits them – they are also a fundamentally militaristic institution. Generally speaking, nearly every border in the world was created through military conquest and had the express function of constructing an ethnically homogeneous space. Whether we are talking about the Nakba in Palestine, the “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey, the mass exodus of Serbs from Croatia at the end of the War in Croatia, or the Partition of India, establishing modern national borders almost always involved mass suffering, death and ethnic cleansing. Maintaining border regimes is a continuation of that oppressive and genocidal legacy and something we need to actively oppose. Supporting refugees and migrants through various forms of mutual aid, sea rescue operations, resisting deportations and aiding them in defense against police, military and far-right violence is an integral part of this. On the other hand, we also need to be advocating for our countries to relax visa regimes – and in the long term, create and/or greatly expanding borderless arrangements such as those that exist in most of Europe or in Central America – while avoiding a militarization of the newly externalized borders for such open border areas, as we have witnessed happening with the Schengen zone.
• Working on building internationalist global politics and resisting nationalist hostilities at home: An important aspect of preventing conflict is ensuring the existence of just, democratic, equitable and effective international institutions, that can be used as a tool in resolving conflicts justly and building compromise instead of resorting to military “solutions”. It also means resisting nationalist rhetoric in the public discourse that attempts to paint any state as an enemy or an obstacle to the geopolitical interests of “our own” state/nation. While this certainly doesn’t apply to all criticism and actions taken to sanction states that are actively committing harm against its citizens or the citizens of other countries through war, it does mean that we must also be vigilant in recognizing the reasons why our media or government officials might decide to single out a particular state for criticism and/or sanction; while at the same time not applying a similar standard to states considered “our allies” (or even the very state that we live in) that are carrying out similar violations. Nationalist rhetoric must especially be taken seriously when it is aimed towards the exclusion of groups within our own societies. Any such discourse or actions taken against specific ethnic groups by the governenment, police, military or parapolice and paramilitary groups need to be viewed as a prelude to genocide and must be blocked, disrupted and reversed by any and all available means. 
• Supporting conscientious objectors and working on campaigns against joining the military: In militarized societies where all (male) citizens of a certain age must serve the military for a certain amount of time in their lives, we need to fight for the introduction, expansion and adequate implementation of the right for individuals to refuse to perform such service on ethical grounds. We also ought to promote this idea among young people in our communities and teach them to view being part of the military in a negative light. In states where mandatory military service doesn’t exist, similar campaigns of creating a negative view of the military and dissuading potential recruits from serving (especially within marginalized, impoverished, rural or deindustrialized communities that may be disproportionately targeted for recruitment efforts) should be carried out. 
• Advocating for complete military abolition: This needs to be the end goal for our movements, even if it might seem like a daunting task to take on. However, in the same way that “abolish the police” eventually became a widespread slogan in the movement against racialized police violence, so too should “abolish the military” move from being seen as the utopian dream of hippies and idealists into a space of policy that we can actually collectively demand. All of the steps outlined above – while they may be carried out in broader coalitions with other movements which  may not share our goals – for us need to be placed in a broader context where the continued existence of the military (and the police, prisons and other institutions of state violence) is utterly unacceptable. While this view may be seen as fringe or “unrealistic” initially, we still need to emphasize it and put it to the forefront whenever possible. This is especially true for situations where issues around the military are raised – such as the reintroduction of military conscription, rising international tensions or an increase in military spending – which may individually be viewed as unpopular, but that our movements need to place in a broader context that expands out from them into the view that ultimately solving these issues will necessarily require abolishing the armed forces. 

Povodom policijske brutalnosti nad studentkinjama i studentima tijekom blokada u Srbiji dijelimo tekst iz naše publikacije o širom okviru nasilja i policijskog djelovanja od naših Sofije Stefanović i Nataše Prljević.

With the analysis that follows, we are attempting to contextualize the ongoing state repression in Serbia within a broader context of violence and policing, drawing on insights from abolitionist feminist practices and perspectives. Our goal is to highlight synchronized systems of repression that reproduce this violence across time and geographies, inviting solidarity and collective imagination through interconnected struggles. 

We challenge the idea that police brutality and this “wave of criminalisation” are somehow an aberration of a “functional liberal democracy”. We analyze it as an integral part of a deeply violent global system dependent on disposability and dehumanization. What happens when we recontextualize new “episodes” of brutality as central evidence of how the police state is meant to operate, by design? How does our understanding of the system change?

Who Are the “People” of the “People’s Police”?

“The criminal-legal system was not set up to reduce harm in society, but to protect private property and the interests of capital and ‘imperial expansion’ […] The law functions as a key component of capitalism, meaning that it upholds a system where the priorities of powerful and wealthy elites are elevated above the lives of everyday people.”

– Leah Cowan, Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?

After the Constitutional court reinstated project Jadar, mass protests against the Rio Tinto lithium mine resumed nationwide. In response, police have stepped up their crackdown on protesters speaking out in the streets and online. Hundreds of special unit policemen were sent to break up a railway blockade in August, arresting three protestors who were later sentenced to 30 or 40 days in custody in an unprecedented verdict without trial that protestors successfully challenged in the streets. In the aftermath, dozens of people were brought in for questioning by the police and state security, apprehended at border crossings, and even denied entry into the country. At least a dozen young people were arrested – and later jailed for weeks – at the mass protests sparked by the killing of 15 people when a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad following the completion of a renovation led by the ruling party cadre and a consortium of Chinese companies CRIC&CCCC. Protestors have since regularly clashed with the gendarmerie, plainclothes policemen and unidentified “thugs” while engaging in ongoing blockades of government buildings and universities across the country. 

The myth that the police and prisons are there to protect “the people” persists. Some protestors still engage with the police in a way that reflects this assumption. What is the purpose of policing if not to protect? Any answer to these questions must engage with histories of policing as an institution and a process by which power is maintained. Many critical theories of policing highlight the emergence of police as a way of controlling working-class, marginalised and subjugated populations. Historically, higher mobilizations of citizens into the police force went along with the economic crisis, preventing worker and citizen rebellion. Serbia has seen an increase and diversification of the police force since 2009 with the introduction of a new communal police force, promising youth more stable employment and benefits, systemically stripped in other sectors. According to data on imprisonment from 2023, Serbia belongs to a group of 16 European countries with a very high percentage of the population in prison. Offences classified as drug-related account for 28.5%, theft 22.7%, robbery 10%, road traffic offences 1.5%, homicide 12.8%, rape 1.9%, other types of sexual offences 2.1%, and other offences combined 13.8%. On the other hand, economic/financial offences account for only 4.5%. Similarly to many other countries, the police or the political class are rarely held accountable for murder and other violence, white-collar theft is rarely prosecuted (when it is considered a “crime” at all), and the majority of people in prison are there as a consequence of the criminalization of poverty. 

Numerous cases of police brutality and discrimination continue to unravel the structurally racist, sexist, ableist and queerphobic character of “public security”. In February this year, officers harassed and assaulted women in their homes while raiding a Roma neighbourhood in Palilula, Belgrade. In the same month and neighbourhood, the police broke into a home allegedly searching for drugs, and sexually abused and harassed a young queer man and woman after seeing an LGBT+ flag in the residence. Despite media coverage, a hunger strike in front of parliament and a public campaign, there have been no sanctions for any of the police officers involved. In another case, the head of the criminal police unit Ninoslav Cmolić used dehumanizing and racist language to speak about the Vlach minority when commenting on the arrest of two murder suspects. The police in Bor subsequently beat the brother of one of the suspects and a witness in the case, Dalibor Dragijević, to death claiming he “died of natural causes” which was refuted by the official autopsy. There have been no consequences for the police officers who murdered Dalibor, and Cmolić got away with publicly stating “he didn’t mean to offend”. Despite existing laws on policing and anti-discrimination, the police intimidate, harass, abuse and kill with impunity while authorities remain silent.

The obvious problem with relying on anti-discrimination (or any) laws for protection is that laws are not respected by those in/with power. Beyond that, the legal system is unable to respond to collective societal problems by serving “justice” through the punishment of individuals who commit “crimes”. Focusing solely on legal approaches traps us inside of an endless cycle of harm and responding to harm by demanding more enforcement. This is a punitive loop that we need to break out of. 

Reforms of the legal system are what now enable “progressive” laws and regulations to be weaponized against protestors. For example, the case of activists from Ne dam / Nu dau in Majdanpek who were preventing detonations and pollution from the ZiJin-owned copper mine demonstrates the synergy of physical police violence and violence by legal means. After physically blocking mining works, the local activists were arrested, brutally beaten at the police station and then charged with “racially motivated” attacks against the Chinese workers. This is just one example of the use of minority laws to criminalize activists. Fueling tensions along racial/ethnic lines (in this case between the Vlach minority and Chinese workers) is an age-old tactic that diverts attention away from who profits from these projects and who suffers the consequences (locals and workers). Neither the police officers nor private security involved in removing and beating the activists were ever held accountable.

Brief Histories of Mining Strikes and Violent Policing 

One way to think about imperialism is in terms of control and domination to maintain extractive capitalism. Historically, different imperial interests influenced the shaping of contemporary global extractive industries and policing. In this section, we review how colonialism and the imperial expansion of Britain and the US played a key role in shaping policing models that spread globally. We then highlight several extractive industry struggles that speak to the role of policing and organised resistance in our context. 

A key origin of modern-day policing can be traced back to colonial counter-insurgency forces. In the early 1700s, slave patrols were created in the Carolinas with the mission of establishing a system of terror to suppress slave uprisings, protecting the accumulation of wealth of white slave owners. The first civil police, the London Metropolitan Police, founded in the 19th century, was modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary – the heavily militarized police force set up by British colonizers in Ireland. The Anglo-Saxon model permeated the colonies and became the foundation of today’s global police circulation. Civil police institutions in the UK and the US have covered up their colonial counter-insurgency and militaristic origins while actively employing these tactics domestically and internationally. Many counterinsurgency tactics are not about violent repression of dissent. For example, the tactic of  “winning hearts and minds” obfuscates violence by centering the humanity of the police officers, to convince a population that the police are on their side. This includes the theatrics of police kneeling in front of protesters, people trying to bring policemen to their side, giving them roses, policemen crying, and prioritizing identities suitable for building a favourable narrative, e.g. war veterans and survivors, family men and women with children.

In light of current anti-mining struggles, we turn to extractive industries as sites that clarify the collusion between the state, foreign companies, the police and the military industry and hold powerful histories of organized resistance in our context. In May 1935, revolting peasants and workers occupied and shut down the French-owned Bor mine in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, after suffering from toxic pollution while being denied access to information about its environmental and health impact. After arresting some 50 protestors and holding another 24 in jail, the police, at the request of the French capitalists, responded to further protests by shooting at the peasants, killing one person and wounding others. This response was preceded by years of persistent worker’s strikes and actions in the Bor area that were often met with police and military violence. 

Soon after, the Trepča Miner’s Union in Mitrovica organized worker’s strikes in 1936 and 1939 (violently suppressed) in a mining complex operated by the British company Selection Trust until March of 1941, just before they went under German control facilitated by Nedić’s regime. In the mines and a labor/slave camp within Trepča, refusal to work was considered a “violation of the interests of the German state” and met with severe punishment and death. That didn’t stop mine workers from organizing a Partisan-aligned Miner’s Troop unit against Nazi occupation. On July 30th, 1941, workers detonated backpacks full of explosives on three pillars of the mine’s cable car system, suspending more than 40% of the German military’s lead ore consumption. This was one in a series of disruptions and revolts in which hundreds of miners lost their lives. Later on, during FNR Yugoslavia, the Trepča mining complex continued to be a site of labor and power struggle. In 1953, the majority of the administrative labor force, or 68%, were Kosovo Serbs while they made up only 28% of the general population. Physical laborers, on the other hand, were predominantly Albanian and Roma men. Increasing state repression of “anti-state” demonstrations of Kosovo Albanians throughout the 80s, fighting against province underdevelopment and the threat of constitutional changes, led to a week-long underground miners’ strike in 1989. Close to 1,200 striking miners were suspended from work and sentenced to up to two months in prison. Only four were able to return to work in 1999 after the withdrawal of Slobodan Milosević’s army and police forces from Kosovo. Miners’ organising in Serbia contributed to the fall of Milošević’s regime on October 5, 2000, particularly the miner’s strike in Kolubara, the country’s largest coal mine, where 300 workers discontinued all production despite the pressure of the state, (para)military groups and officials.

Palestine is Everywhere  

The global imperial and (neo)colonial order structured by multinational corporations and imperial nation-states creates and is protected by a global police and military apparatus. With its foundations in colonial exchange, the contemporary web of circulation consists of states and corporations exchanging weapons, technologies, data, legal tactics and more. Understanding the imperial and colonial dynamics in Serbia, and across the former Yugoslav countries and Eastern Europe, is an ongoing and challenging task that requires pushing against many simplistic portrayals, including those coming from Western imperial centres, authoritarian regimes in the region and the Russian government’s propaganda. We offer a brief sketch of how these interests clash and align in corporate and ruling elites’ pursuits of profits.

Worldwide, Indigenous people have been brutalized by state, police, military and corporate actors in the defense of their lands for centuries. Occupied Palestinian territories, its people and land, have been the main collateral site for the development of military technology that is being sold as “ground-tested” worldwide by the Israeli regime towards national and state defences. Since October 2023, the genocide erased more than 902 families from the Palestinian register, with earlier death toll estimates of 45,000 from direct, and indirect factors surpassing 186,000 people. Joining the ranks of the US, UK, Germany and much of the EU, Vučić’s regime is materially and politically complicit in Western imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism in occupied Palestine. The government sent more than 23 million euros worth of weapons shipments to Israel since the start of the escalated genocide in Gaza and the intensified occupation of the West Bank, Lebanon, Syrian Golan Heights and further aggressions in surrounding countries. Following earlier allegations of the Serbian Security Service buying Israeli spyware and using it to target critics, a recent Amnesty International report documents the Serbian police hacking activists’ and journalists’ phones with the notorious Pegasus produced by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group and forensic extraction tools by Cellebrite. 

Using organized crime as an excuse to acquire technologies used to repress dissent is a tried and tested state practice. It is important to note that where technologies and “expertise” come from influences how they are wielded. Recent investigations show a rising trend of major acquisitions of surveillance technologies, including as a part of broader domestic security and cooperation in “law enforcement and surveillance technology” with China. In 2019, the Serbian government introduced thousands of Chinese tech giant Huawei cameras equipped with facial recognition software in Belgrade. Despite a successful campaign against the deployment of facial recognition, these “smart cameras” have been installed in the capital and quietly purchased by over forty municipalities across the country. In a precedent-setting case, the police used Huawei devices to film protesters and issue fines without police contact at the peak of the protests against the Rio Tinto mine in 2021. Far from being an innocent import of technologies, these “collaborations” reflect the strengthening of the influence of Chinese government and capital: much of Serbia’s large infrastructure projects have been funded through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in recent years and some of the largest formerly state-owned enterprises are now owned by Chinese companies, including the country’s largest copper mines in Bor and Majdanpek (ZiJin) and the steel plant in Smederevo (Hesteel Group). 

To understand the EU’s impact on policing in Serbia, we need to consider how notions of security, law and order that underpin EU policies dictate the flow of resources into the region. In particular, we need to pay close attention to the EU’s migration policy and the process of ‘border externalization’ whereby policing is exported to neighbouring countries, but also as far as Niger and Sudan. As documented extensively in the research on the border regime in the Balkans led by the Bosnian journalist Nidžara Ahmetašević, the surveillance structures, technologies and violent practices perfected at the border never stay at the border. Instead, the “transnational security apparatus” developed by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in the non-EU Balkan countries is integrated into existing police structures and moves from bodies on the move to bodies of other marginalized communities and any groups challenging state power. The brutal policing of people on the move at the Serbian (Bosnian, and North Macedonian borders) IS part of integration into Fortress Europe – the border regime led by the best funded EU agency Frontex which has killed more than 60,000 people since 1993 through its fatal policies. Appeals to the EU accession process and “European values” in response to repression in the region are detached from the reality of the repression within, and especially on the borders of the EU. A more generative direction is continuing to build transnational alliances as some grassroots and formal organisations are already doing, e.g., through the campaign to abolish Frontex. 

In the legal realm, the Serbian government’s recent use of the “intention to violently overthrow constitutional order” as an excuse to persecute and detain activists echoes tactics employed in numerous cases by the US, UK, Canadian, Indian, Tanzanian, Australian, Mexican and different European governments. Britain is one of the countries with the most intensified crackdown on climate activism, with new ways to justify arresting protestors before attending a planned protest/action (five activists got four to five-year prison sentences for planning to block a road). In November 2024, similar changes to the criminal law were proposed and dropped after public pressure campaigns in Serbia. During the unprecedented repression of the anticolonial, pro-Palestinian movement in the US, UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, governments criminalized dissent in a range of ways. In April 2024 alone, a Palestine Legal report accounted for university administrators calling in law enforcement to arrest over 3,000 students, professors, and solidarity activists on more than 80 campuses across the US. The US police force (including agents from the FBI, CIA and ICE) has been receiving training on “counter-terrorism” from Israeli forces, perfecting racial profiling and violent suppression of protests. This informed a national movement against the opening of Cop City in Atlanta, a militarized police training site for further exchange of tactics with Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), where the police killed one protester last year. 

Challenging Vučić’s cartel-like regime–a direct continuation of the Milošević era merger between the Security Intelligence Agency and organized crime–needs to go hand in hand with rejecting liberal fantasies of “civilized states”. The regime responsible for war crimes, genocide, criminalization of antiwar protestors, killing of journalists, and drug and weapons trafficking will not reform its police force to act towards justice, but neither will regimes upholding a ‘liberal democratic order’ through legalised and normalised brutality. We need to look beyond the horizon structured by violent systems of oppression to redefine our struggle for justice. 

Moving Beyond Legal Carceral “Solutions”

“Abolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything. Contemporary prison abolitionists have made this argument for more than two decades. Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.“

– Making Abolition Geography in California Central’s Valley, Funambulist Magazine, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Léopold Lambert, 2018

State repression is most direct towards bodies that live multiple marginalizations that intersect with class, race, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, “health”, ethnicity, citizenship. These positions are made less visible or invisible, often criminalized, preventing us from embodying a common struggle for collective liberation whose compass is always on the margins of society. Working from these experiences is necessary to confront the “nature” of violence that permeates all relationships. Criminalizing individuals while ignoring structural violence and the material conditions from which it arises is not a long-term solution. At the very least, the law should value life, taking into account the specifics of the survivors’ traumas, instead of retraumatizing them.

As frustrating as it may seem, it is necessary to seriously engage with socially sanctioned violence, not just as maintained by the state through the police and military, but also internally, interpersonally and institutionally. We are called to embrace alternative conceptions of justice: transformative justice frameworks invite us to practice accountability while making a distinction between “ordinary” people committing harm and people with institutional and other power committing harm.

Many tools and resources have been developed to support the work of the transformative justice (TJ) and community accountability movement which originated in the organising of Black feminists and marginalized communities in the US. While we are cautious about transplanting vocabularies and histories from elsewhere, we recognize that we exist in a common repressive system that tailors our capacities for collective liberation. Standing in the lineage of survivors, workers, peasants, Anti Fascist Women’s Movement in Yugoslavia, and revolutionary feminisms, we acknowledge the lived experiences and political education that enable us to recognise and connect the abolitionist practices happening everywhere around us, including in Serbia. 

We can’t contextualize the ongoing uprisings in Serbia as entirely a product of collapsing institutions but as a consequence and part of global police and state brutality. Considering the predatory logic of neoliberal capitalism, we caution that the end goal of demanding change via punitive means is an endless expansion of a carceral state. Putting more people in jail and harsher prison sentences is not what gets us to a place of safety we all desire and deserve. As seen globally, this expansion leads to privatization, deepening profit-driven dehumanization and exploitation. Reforming policing through “better laws” doesn’t guarantee better treatment at the hands of the police, and can even lead to making an inherently violent system more difficult to challenge. In this light, the calls of civil society organisations for internal investigations by the police or the legal system to investigate cases of police brutality are at odds with the realities of policing. Reform doesn’t invite a deep transformation of relational policing and punishment that sits at the core of patriarchal racial capitalism. 

All too often the first response when mentioning abolition is to dismiss it as “impractical” or “impossible”. This erases and invisibilizes the day-to-day work that many of us are already doing, whether or not we think about it as part of resisting violent systems of punishment or not. There are workers within the public sector with the skills, compassion and determination to do this work, often decapacitated to sustain their practice by the institutions they are part of. What would it look like to welcome them into more supportive networks where they can step into their power as practitioners of alternative forms of justice? Instead of relying on the state, how about we culturally and materially affirm the work that is already happening outside of formal structures and within the organizations of the civil sector that do not mimic carceral state solutions? 

It is an abolitionist practice when somebody in the community steps in to accompany survivors of domestic abuse as they navigate legal, emotional and other hurdles that come with untangling from an abusive relationship. Many of us are them and know of people in Serbia (mostly women) who take on these roles and become a lot more skilled and effective in accompanying survivors than the police or social workers. It is an abolitionist practice to educate on how cultural and structural violence informs and often normalizes intimate gender-based violence, which many organizations for women’s rights and survivors fight for. It is an abolitionist practice to serve as a secondary and tertiary caregiver in and out of the institutions essential for surviving a decades-long collapse of the healthcare system in Serbia. It is an abolitionist practice to hold space for understanding and education of marginalized youth that systemically experience discrimination and impoverishment. It is an abolitionist practice to embrace transition as a norm, and not as an exception. 

We see recent reports on young people overwhelmingly not trusting the police in Serbia as a possibility for building a bold abolitionist movement in our lifetimes. The heart of this change is the call for direct democracy as exemplified by daily assemblies, led by love, respect and collective courage by students and youth across Serbia. If we can agree on a common horizon then we can focus on collective study, practice of (self) reflection and accountability, as daily strategies of active commitment to dignified survival and non-punitive utopia. What can you, and we, do to strengthen and affirm the transformative work already happening in your surroundings, amplifying the power that is already there? 

References and resources

Section 1

Baletic, Katarina. 2024. ‘Student Blockades Roil Serbia as Teaching Unions Back Young Protesters’. Balkan Insight (blog). 20 December 2024. https://balkaninsight.com/2024/12/20/student-blockades-roil-serbia-as-teaching-unions-back-young-protesters/.

Beograd, N1. 2024. ‘(VIDEO) “Deca preplašena, tuku nas i vređaju”: Racija policije u romskom naselju u Beogradu’. N1. 10 February 2024. https://n1info.rs/vesti/video-deca-preplasena-tuku-nas-i-vredjaju-racija-policije-u-romskom-naselju-u-beogradu/.

Reuters. 2024. ‘Rio Tinto Welcomes Serbian Court Ruling on Lithium Project’, 11 July 2024, sec. Commodities. https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/serbian-court-rules-govt-decision-revoke-lithium-project-permit-unconstitutional-2024-07-11/.

Service, RFE/RL’s Balkan, dir. 2024. Serbian LGBT Activists Protest Over Reported Police Abuse. https://www.rferl.org/a/serbia-lgbt-protest-police-brutality/32850837.html.

Vasic, Milena. 2024. ‘For Serbia’s Govt, Law to “Protect Constitutional Order” Is an Anti-Protest Weapon’. Balkan Insight (blog). 27 August 2024. https://balkaninsight.com/2024/08/27/for-serbias-govt-law-to-protect-constitutional-order-is-an-anti-protest-weapon/.

Aebi, M. F. & Cocco, E. (2024). SPACE I – 2023 – Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics: Prison populations. https://wp.unil.ch/space/files/2024/11/SPACE_I_2023_Report.pdf.

Section 2 

‘CLEAR HOLD BUILD — HEKLER’. n.d. Accessed 21 December 2024. https://www.hekler.org/clear-hold-build.

‘From the Colony to the Metropole: Race, Policing and the Colonial Boomerang Tanzil Chowdhury’. n.d. Issuu. Accessed 21 December 2024. https://issuu.com/dogsectionpress/docs/abolishingthepolice/s/11983796.

Go, Julian, and Julian Go. 2023. Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Haxhiaj, Serbeze. 2023. ‘Kosovo Miners Remember Bravery and Betrayal of Underground Strike’. Balkan Insight (blog). 20 February 2023. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/02/20/kosovo-miners-remember-bravery-and-betrayal-of-underground-strike/.

@sedamkora on Instagram: Život u i oko Rudarskog basena Kolubara, Foto i video zapisi, (uglavnom) privatna arhiva. linktr.ee/sedamkora https://www.instagram.com/p/DAvTpNVMaoK/.

‘Spomenik Database | The Miner’s Monument at Mitrovica’. n.d. Spomenikdatabase. Accessed 21 December 2024. https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/mitrovica.

Section 3

(5) Connor Woodman’s essay ‘Defending the ‘liberal-democratic order’: the strategic-political logic of counter-subversion’ in ‘Abolishing the police’ edited by Koshka Duff.

Sekcija 4

Making Abolition Geography in California Central’s Valley, Funambulist Magazine, Ruth Wilson Gilmor i Léopold Lambert, 2018 https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/21-space-activism/interview-making-abolition-geography-california-central-valley-ruth-wilson-gilmore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2615-abolition-geography 

brown, adrienne maree, We will not cancel us: and other dreams of transformative justice. Chico, CA : AK Press, [2020]. https://www.akpress.org/we-will-not-cancel-us.html 

Istraživanje o prisilnoj kontroli u intimnim partnerskim odnosima, Autonomna ženska kuća Zagreb, 2024. https://azkz.hr/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/istrazivanja_prisilna-kontrola-1.pdf

Transformative Justice Resource Compilation https://resourcesharingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/RSP_2019_Compilation_of_Transformative_Justice_Resources.pdf 

Prison Industrial Complex and Abolition https://criticalresistance.org/resources/