Background

Since Fall 2024, student-led mass demonstrations against government corruption have been roiling Serbia. According to a statement by the Minister of the Interior Ivica Dačić issued in October 2025, some 20,000 protest rallies were held over the previous 10 months in 28 cities and more than 145 municipalities across the country (Todorović Reference Todorović2025). Protests often occur simultaneously, but people also gather in cities designated by students for demonstrations that they carefully coordinate and organize. These events routinely break records for the largest protests in Serbia and in this part of Europe, with tens—and sometimes hundreds—of thousands of people showing up each time. So far, the largest protest gathering took place on 15 March 2025 when, according to some estimates, about 325,000 people filled the streets of Belgrade.Footnote ¹ Students chose this date for their most ambitious protest to that point as a symbolic tribute to the 15 victims who died in the incident that sparked the massive anticorruption campaign (they named the protest “15 for 15”).Footnote ²

The event that triggered the civil unrest occurred on 1 November 2024, when a 300-ton concrete-and-iron canopy collapsed at the newly renovated railway station in the city of Novi Sad. It instantly killed 14 innocent passersby, and two additional victims succumbed to their injuries in the subsequent days and weeks. It was the latest, and most devastating, in a series of deadly incidents where evidence convincingly pointed to government corruption as the cause. While most citizens of Serbia encounter petty corruption in their everyday lives, experts point out that large-scale apex corruption typically exploits major infrastructure projects. The government of President Aleksandar Vučić, who was a prominent member of a radical nationalist party involved in war crimes during the 1990s, has been exceptionally active in such projects since coming to power in 2012.Footnote ³

Protest gatherings of citizens, activists, and opposition parties began in the days following the tragedy, demanding that officials conduct a swift and effective investigation and indict those responsible for the canopy collapse. On 5 November, the first major protest of roughly 22,000 citizens took place in Novi Sad. The crowd marched from the railway station to City Hall, where they broke windows and covered the façade with graffiti. Some protest signs alleged that the station incident amounted to “murder by corruption.” No charges were ever brought for the acts of vandalism during this demonstration, which raised suspicions that some of the perpetrators were planted provocateurs. This was followed by several unwarranted arrests, including that of a student from the University of Novi Sad. In the weeks that followed, the protests, which went under the title “Serbia Stop” (Stani Srbijo), spread from Novi Sad to Belgrade and then to other Serbian cities. Subsequent protests involved a simple public ritual of mourning: at 11:52 a.m., the exact time of the canopy collapse, protesters held a 15-minute silent vigil commemorating the victims, often blocking city streets and squares.

On 22 November 2024, students, faculty, and staff of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (Fakultet dramskih umetnosti, hereafter FDU) in New Belgrade organized a protest vigil in front of their school. During the 15-minute vigil, a group of drivers (the state media described them as “frustrated citizens”) left their cars, which had been stopped in the middle of the street, and physically assaulted the protesters. The students retreated into the FDU building. On 25 November, they presented a set of demands and declared that they would remain in their school building until the demands were met. This was the first “blockade.” In the days and weeks that followed, all faculties (which refers to individual schools) at the two public universities in Belgrade—Belgrade University and the University of the Arts—were occupied by striking students. The wave of blockades soon spread to public universities in Novi Sad, Kragujevac, Niš, Novi Pazar, and other cities with satellite campuses. Many high schools also initiated blockades.

Before long, striking students took their protests from university buildings to city streets and squares, as well as to the roads and highways of Serbia. Since then, the students have transformed the political landscape of the country, and they continue to do so. In the process, they have also transformed the playbook of public protest performance. It is impossible to compress even a fraction of their protest actions during 2025 into this report. Throughout the chronology of events we outline here, Serbian students have utilized a range of interventions in reimagining public protest performance.

Blockades

After the assault on 22 November in front of FDU, the students’ initial impulse was to withdraw into their university premises. This move was both symbolic and strategic: on the one hand, it signaled that the school was their safe haven; on the other, it gave them time to decide their next steps. They report that, the following day, while they waited to see whether the police would investigate the incident, video recordings of the attack began circulating on social media. “Citizens identified the attackers in these videos, not the police, even though the police assured us they had checked their IDs and taken down their information.”Footnote ⁴ As it turned out, the main assailants were members and ranking officials of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (Srpska napredna stranka, SNS).Footnote ⁵ After establishing the blockade of their school building, students presented their demands: 1) the publication of the complete documentation related to the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station; 2) the identification and prosecution of the attackers who assaulted FDU students on 22 November; 3) the immediate withdrawal of criminal charges against students and citizens arrested in the Novi Sad protests after the railway station tragedy; and 4) a 20% budget increase for higher education, since, as they put it, the authorities had “starved the universities” over the previous decade.

While FDU was the first faculty in Serbia to implement a blockade that fall, its students did not have to develop the strategy from scratch. In fact, there was a rich and long history of protest occupations of university buildings that these students could draw on. That history dates back to June 1968, when Belgrade University students conducted a week-long strike, the longest and most visible in any socialist country that watershed year (aside from the protests that erupted in response to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that August). The practice resurfaced in the 1990s during the Yugoslav wars: in 1992, students organized an antiwar strike and occupied university buildings for more than a month.Footnote ⁶ They repeated this in the winter of 1996/97, during widespread unrest in response to Slobodan Milošević’s election fraud. The legacy of student protests in the 1990s played an important role in Milošević’s ouster on 5 October 2000, after yet another attempt at election fraud.

In the 2000s, students protested primarily against changes in higher education and declining living standards. In 2006, students at the Faculty of Philosophy initiated a blockade to oppose the introduction of tuition fees at public universities, imposed by government decree after six decades of free education (first in Yugoslavia, and later in Serbia). The same faculty staged blockades again in 2011 in opposition to a higher education reform, and in 2014 against austerity measures implemented by Aleksandar Vučić’s government. During their 55-day blockade, students established a Blockade Council and organized a blockade festival featuring lectures, film screenings, workshops, and even yoga and fencing lessons. Smaller blockades occurred in 2015 at the Law School in Belgrade, in 2017 in Novi Sad, and again in Belgrade in 2019. In short, the students who initiated blockades in late fall 2024 were the children of a generation that protested war and authoritarianism in the 1990s, and they learned from older colleagues who organized blockades and protests in the previous decade. The blockades that erupted at Serbian universities in the winter of 2024 were by far the most numerous and long-lasting of any that preceded them. By late December 2024, all faculties at all public universities in Serbia were under blockade, and they continued until Fall 2025.Footnote ⁷

A blockade is, in itself, a complex organizational performance. As the name suggests, its key feature is the control of public space. Unlike the “occupations” that took place during the Gaza protests on US American campuses, blockades do not involve setting up encampments or completely taking over university buildings. The primary goal of a blockade is an around-the-clock stoppage of academic activities: classes, exams, laboratory work, and studio operations. Students allow entry only to holders of student IDs for that particular faculty. At the same time, they recognize that obstructing the administrative operations of their school could jeopardize the livelihood of professors and staff, so they do not prevent them from entering university buildings or doing administrative work. Some students choose not to leave at all, except to participate in protests outside of the blockaded faculty, effectively turning many university buildings into long-term living spaces.

Recognizing this, citizens began donating food and other necessities. Managing these supplies required additional organization. Following the example of FDU, many faculties established their own social media accounts to communicate their demands to authorities, publicize information about protests, and stay connected with one another. Some evolved into small media centers. Finally, students extended their activities beyond university buildings and organized hundreds of protests and marches throughout Serbia.

All of this requires a considerable level of coordination.

Plenums

Student protests in Serbia are based on principles of egalitarianism and horizontality, secured through collective decision-making and direct democracy. The single most important body responsible for all decisions made by protesting students is the plenum. A plenum is a standing meeting open to all students who wish to participate. Each faculty establishes its own plenum, all guided by the slogan “As the plenum decides!” For example, the blockade at FDU was preceded by the creation of its plenum, which voted on the next steps. Soon, all schools that initiated blockades established their own plenums.

When creating plenums, students also did not have to start from scratch. They learned from the mistakes of their predecessors in the protests of the 1990s, as well as from new models that emerged during protests in Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia in the early 2000s. During the 2009 blockade at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, students successfully established the plenum as the main governing structure of their protest. The citizen unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2014 also saw a widespread rise of plenums. After the 2009 blockade, students at Zagreb University’s Faculty of Philosophy produced The Blockade Cookbook (Blokadna kuharica), which provides a useful template for setting up and running a plenum.Footnote ⁸ While the plenums of the 2009 Zagreb protests, the 2014 civil unrest in Bosnia, and the 2024–2025 student protests in Serbia share structural similarities, this report focuses on the most recent protests, which are by far the most long-lasting and massive. Several key features define the plenum as a form of collective political performance.

A plenum is a form of direct democracy. In the model that emerged at Belgrade University, all students at a particular school are invited to participate in its plenum, and all decisions are made by majority vote. The same agenda item may be voted on more than once. Unlike representative democracy, the purpose of the plenum is not to elect representatives. Its main goal is to eliminate mechanisms of representation altogether and prevent the emergence of leaders. Students learned from the protests of the 1990s that “representatives” and “leaders” can easily become alienated from the movement or coopted by the government. Anonymity also protects students’ safety.

The internal organization of a plenum promotes equal participation in decision-making. The structure is simple and nonhierarchical, consisting of a moderator (or two, in larger gatherings), a notetaker, and students responsible for technical support (microphones, projectors, computers, etc.). The moderator’s task is not to “lead” the discussion but to ensure that all who want to speak can do so and that speakers take turns in an orderly fashion. Moderators are not allowed to monopolize or exploit their position. All plenums follow the principle of moderator rotation: the same person may moderate only once. At each session, a new moderator (or set of moderators) is elected for the next meeting. If a moderator who was approved by a majority vote fails to fulfill their role, they may be dismissed during the session, also by vote. On rare occasions when there are no volunteers, a former moderator may be reelected. Plenums are even stricter about students who speak to the media: each student may do so only once. This again aims to prevent the appearance of leadership and to maintain safety. As one Faculty of Engineering student explained, “We wanted to show that there are no leaders, and that all students participate equally in the same struggle, in the same way.”

Plenums are widely publicized in advance. Although they are open only to students enrolled at the faculty where the plenum is held, students sometimes invite their professors and members of the university leadership. This prevents situations in which only a small number of student representatives meet with administrators, which could allow leaders to emerge. As an added benefit, professors and administrators gain firsthand experience with direct democracy and may adopt, or at least support, some of its principles. Plenums are closed to outsiders, including journalists, and only rarely do students allow nonmembers of their faculty community to observe proceedings.

The frequency and size of plenums vary. In the early stages of the protest, some faculties held plenums daily (e.g., the Art School), while most met three times a week (e.g., the Philosophy Faculty in Novi Sad and the Faculty of Engineering in Belgrade). Meetings increased in frequency when circumstances required. Quorum rules also differed: while the Art School set a quorum of 60 participants, other faculties had no formal threshold. Attendance generally ranged from several dozen to several hundred, depending on urgency.

As dynamic gatherings, plenums are performances of communicative democracy. Large lecture halls holding hundreds of students can easily slide into mass behavior reminiscent of a sports arena rather than fostering constructive dialog. Students quickly developed rules to facilitate orderly discussion. Some of them were adapted from The Blockade Cookbook, and some devised from scratch. These included a system of warnings issued by moderators for those who tried to monopolize the conversation and “red cards” for individuals who violated rules of conduct. Direct democracy is time-consuming: everyone has the right to speak and be heard. For this reason, discussion of each agenda item is limited (usually to 20 minutes). Each speaker is given two minutes, with one-minute replies. Students developed a gestural language to allow nonobstructive reactions. The aim of these gestural signs, which vary from one school to another, help in expediting discussion. For example, crossing both arms in a large X signals disagreement with the speaker (a sea of X’s indicates that the majority disagrees). Agreement is signaled by the sign language gesture for applause. And there are many others. As a result, each plenum becomes a collective performance of impressive coordination. This practice of self-discipline and mutual respect enabled students to organize massive gatherings outside university buildings, on streets, squares, and roads across Serbia, with exceptional efficiency.

Each plenum creates a number of working groups responsible for implementing collectively made decisions and helping with everyday activities during the blockade. The number, structure, and names of these groups differ across schools and universities. Common working groups include those for security, strategy and tactics, planning street actions, public relations, internal activities, and hygiene. Some groups manage food and clothing donations from citizens, while others prepare protest marches. Students self-select for their participation in the working groups, on the basis of their skills, interests, and experience.

Decentralized across schools and universities, decision-making required considerable coordination, especially when planning large protests and marches. In addition to plenums at each faculty under blockade, students created a coordinating body, called a “megaplenum,” at the university level. The third body is the High Council, where delegates (also rotated, to prevent them from becoming leaders) from all plenums carry the votes of all schools and universities in blockade. There is also a “mezoplenum,” open to students and all university employees, from professors to custodians. In the mezoplenum, everyone has an equal right to participate, though the body is primarily advisory. These structures facilitated the spread of direct-democratic culture and respectful dialog, inspiring the emergence of citizens’ councils in the spring of 2025.

If students are transforming the political landscape of Serbia, they are doing so at the capillary level of everyday behavior, beginning in the plenum. One of the basic rules of plenums is that participants must leave political affiliations and ideological beliefs at the door. A plenum is a decision-making body, not a debate club. Disagreement is welcome but must be respectful. Plenums quickly established high standards of civilized public conduct, putting to shame the Serbian parliament, where members of the ruling coalition often bully and berate opponents, and foul language is commonplace.

Students’ public political performances begin in plenums, and they carry the norms they develop and rehearse there into the streets and squares. The mutual respect and integrity practiced in plenums draw in large part on the heterogeneity of the student body. In the student anticorruption protest, unlike in many earlier ones, women not only participate actively but take prominent roles in decision-making and public actions. For this reason, they have often been targeted by police and by thugs deployed by the ruling SNS party to intimidate protesters. Students have consistently responded with nonviolence. Their self-discipline and organizational capacity have been met with massive and enthusiastic support from ordinary citizens.Footnote ⁹

Mass Demonstrations

Initially, the 2024–2025 protest vigils were relatively small, consisting of several dozen to a couple of hundred students in each gathering. Within weeks, they swelled to hundreds of thousands of participants. How did that happen?

Figure 2.

Marking 100 days of the blockade of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, 4 March 2025. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

Blockades and the decision-making structures that facilitated direct democracy—the plenums—played an important role. Equally significant was the use of digital media. Students leveraged their social media expertise to bypass the main broadcast outlets, which are under government control (only two television stations, N1 and Nova, are independent, and they have a limited range). Soon after initiating the blockade, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) students created social media profiles and began producing informational videos about their activities. These future film and stage directors, editors, cinematographers, sound designers, scriptwriters, playwrights, actors, VFX professionals, animators, and video game designers, all part of an excellent department of film and TV production, used their skills and technical resources to establish a strong digital media presence. As the protests spread beyond FDU, students established media centers at other schools and universities, helping to mobilize citizens for large protests outside university grounds. Speed and secrecy were crucial; keeping the timing and location of actions limited to the participants in plenums built suspense and enthusiasm before each protest and kept authorities in the dark. Citizens learned to read the signals (relatively oblique references to important milestones in the calendar of demonstrations, such as the first month from the railway station tragedy, the first 100 days of blockades, etc.) sent by students and remained prepared to take to the streets even if they did not know the destination until the last moment.

Since it is impossible to survey all of the mass demonstrations, our summaries of the main features are based on landmark events from November of 2024 until the end of 2025.

On 12 December 2024, students and citizens gathered in front of the Serbian television station in central Belgrade. They made noise during the main evening news and invited employees to join them. They repeated this on 10 March 2025 with a 24-hour blockade, and on a much larger scale in April 2025, when they set up a 14-day blockade of the national television headquarters. Students blocked all entrances around the clock, sleeping and living under the April sky. Citizens responded, bringing tents, blankets, food, and guarding the sleeping students. The blockade disrupted news production, reducing daily television programming to reruns and live shows with makeshift graphics and studio sets.

Figure 3.

Protest at Slavija Square in Belgrade, 22 December 2024. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

On 22 December 2024, students organized the first mass demonstration at Slavija, a monumental roundabout in central Belgrade. According to the Archive of Public Gatherings, over 100,000 people attended. It was at Slavija that the main features of large public protests organized by students were established. They rewrote the playbook of direct-action performances of previous decades, both in Serbia and internationally. Some of the most striking characteristics of these gatherings include:

1. 1. Nonpartisanship—The student protest is highly heterogeneous, reflecting Serbia’s fractured political and ideological landscape. Students set aside all differences in pursuit of the central goal: forcing the government to release complete documentation of the Novi Sad railway station renovation. Effectively, this is a demand for equality before the law. As a result, no party or ideological insignia are displayed at protests.

2. 2. Security and Crowd Management—Since the regime often refused to provide even minimal police security, student security working groups took over responsibilities of traffic control, ensuring no one was injured, that ambulance routes were cleared, and that marches proceeded in an orderly manner. They wore yellow signal vests with their school names on the back so citizens could easily identify and follow them. Unlike the “Yellow Vests” protests in France (2018), where all participants wore vests, in Serbia the yellow vests were reserved exclusively for student security officers.

3. 3. Nonviolence—Students demonstrated remarkable restraint in the face of provocations by regime thugs and plainclothes police. Arrests, car attacks, and acts of physical brutality were often directed against student security officers and other participants. Yet no incidents were caused by the students themselves. They demonstrated their self-discipline in other ways. For example, they showed that they are not an unruly mob by consistently cleaning the public spaces where they staged their protests. This care for the commons became one of key aspects of their protest performance.

4. 4. Symbolism—Early on, simple and effective symbolism emerged. The slogan “Your Hands Are Bloody” was paired with an image of a bloodied hand and expressed in the gesture of raising a hand wearing a red glove. Soon, actors in many theatres adopted this symbol, raising red-gloved hands during curtain calls.

5. 5. Time and Place—As demonstrations grew, students used public space and calendric time symbolically. Milestones, such as one month, 100 days, six months, a year since the Novi Sad tragedy, served as warnings to the regime that the clock was ticking. Designated locations also carried messages: for example, on 12 January 2025, a large march went to the Palace of Justice, taking the protest directly toward the judiciary’s failure to do its job. Novi Sad became the endpoint of long marches on 1 March 2025 and 1 November 2025, marking three months and a year since the building collapse.

6. 6. Performativity—Understood and practiced in the true sense of speech act theory, performativity in this case came into play with one key stand taken by the protestors: one’s word is one’s bond. Following the Palace of Justice protest, students announced a 24-hour blockade of Autokomanda, a key highway and street junction in central Belgrade. They acted on their promise: on 27 January, thousands of students and citizens marched from across the city to Autokomanda. The choice of site was symbolic: komanda (command) signaled that students were taking charge. The timing and execution of announced actions became a hallmark of the protests, demonstrating reliability in contrast to the regime’s broken promises. When President Vučić claimed to have met all their demands, students responded that he was “not in charge”: not actually, because his promises were exposed as lies; nor legally, because according to the Serbian constitution, the office of the President has very limited prerogatives.

7. 7. Silence—During the first mass blockade at Slavija on 22 December 2024, rallies were initially loud, so that when a silent vigil began, the silence was deafening. During the 24-hour Autokomanda blockade, students created encampments, played badminton, volleyball, and chess, and organized workshops. Farmers from nearby villages brought tractors to protect the site from attacks. Local restaurants set up field kitchens to feed students. Protesters marched chanting anticorruption slogans, accompanied by vetted civilian vehicles for protection. Select a cappella choirs performed on site, and speeches, though rare, were never central. In short, there was a lot of noise, as could be expected from tens of thousands of people gathered in a relatively small space. However, the central event of the gathering was not (at Autokomanda or anyplace else) a speech by a leader to the masses, as is often the case at political gatherings. Instead, it was, and still is, the 16 minutes of silence, signifying lives being stopped in their tracks.Footnote ¹⁰ So many people standing together in complete silence with their phone flashlights on not only highlights the powerful imagery of tens, even hundreds of thousands of souls standing together, but makes a more resounding statement than any speech.Footnote ¹¹

Figure 4.

Student demonstration calling for a general strike, 24 January 2025. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

Through their short marches from faculties to city centers in Novi Sad and Belgrade, students discovered one of the most powerful tools of protest performance: kinetics.

Figure 5.

A puppet symbolizing student demand for disclosures about corruption, 15 March 2025. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

Protest Marches

Within weeks of the first demonstrations, the space of student protest performance expanded to encompass the entire territory of Serbia, and its duration extended to weeks and months. The early months of 2025, and again late October, were marked by massive intercity protest marches and gatherings across the country. Students were strategic in selecting both the dates and the cities for their largest demonstrations. They carefully built momentum from one protest to the next, each with its own theme, yet all connected to the overarching demands for the elimination of corruption and the enforcement of the rule of law. The narrative linking the largest and best-organized protests became an immersive performance of enormous magnitude, in which the entire country was the stage, and hundreds of thousands of participants were united by shared discontent and solidarity.

The first intercity and interuniversity protest gathering was announced for 1 February 2025 in Novi Sad, exactly three months after the railway station tragedy. On 30 January, a well-organized column of several hundred students began marching from Belgrade to Novi Sad. It took them two days to cover the approximately 70 miles between Serbia’s two largest cities, and in the process, two additional key aspects of the student protest emerged: solidarity and affect.

The marchers endured bloody blisters, sore muscles and joints, cold weather, and heavy rain, yet none yielded. Students sacrificed not only their time and education, many taking a year off from their studies to engage in the struggle for justice and the rule of law, but also their physical comfort, all for the common good. The students’ actions and the support they received from citizens led to a mass outpouring of emotions. Cathartic scenes erupted at every step of their journey.

As the marchers passed through villages and townships in the agricultural flatlands of northern Serbia’s Vojvodina province, farmers provided security by following the students on tractors; villagers came out spontaneously, lining the roads with tables laden with homemade food and beverages. When the small town of Inđija’s mayor, a die-hard member of the ruling SNS party, refused to open the local high school gym for the marching students to sleep in, residents offered their homes. Nevertheless, many students spent the night under the cold February sky. Many communities greeted them with fireworks and red carpets (literally!). Social media coverage of the march added to the increasingly widespread emotional response. At the time, it was not uncommon to see people crying over their smartphones in the streets or at work. When the marchers finally arrived in Novi Sad, tens of thousands of local students and citizens welcomed them with a massive rally, culminating in a 27-hour blockade of three main bridges over the Danube, an event marked “Three Months, Three Bridges.”

Figure 6.

Students on protest march from Belgrade to Novi Sad, 30 January 2025. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

Figure 7.

Arrival of students at one of the towns along the route to Novi Sad. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

This protest march set the stage for a series of similar campaigns. Only two weeks later, on 15 February, students organized a large gathering in Kragujevac, the first capital of modern Serbia and the fourth-largest city in the country, home to a major public university. Again, approximately 100,000 people attended, with marchers welcomed along the route with food and hospitality. Two weeks later, another mass gathering took place on 1 March in Niš, the third-largest city and the regional university center of southern Serbia. Many estimates suggest the Niš gathering exceeded that in Kragujevac. It was during these marches that the movement’s iconography changed.

Serbian flags, the national coat of arms, and elements of traditional dress became prominent among marchers and protesters. Some prodemocracy activists expressed concern that the movement was taking a nationalist turn. Students are diverse: some hold strong national feelings, others are devoutly religious, still others secular, with some on the Left carrying Yugoslav socialist flags or LGBTQ flags. It quickly became clear, however, that the inclusion of national symbols was not a statement of political or ideological affiliation. Rather, it was a gesture reclaiming state symbols from a cartel of right-wing politicians who had hijacked and misused them for decades. As it soon became clear, the importance of the takeover and rebranding of the state symbols became instrumental in overcoming the ethnic and national divide going back to the wars of the 1990s.

A smaller yet profoundly significant protest took place between the large demonstrations in Kragujevac and Niš. In the days leading up to 26 February, students marched to Novi Pazar, the center of Serbia’s Muslim-majority Sandžak region, in the southwest of the country. For decades, this region had been marginalized and alienated from the majority Orthodox Christian population. In a show of solidarity unthinkable only months earlier, students of different faiths and ethnicities marched, chanted, and prayed together. Students from the small public university in Novi Pazar were the last to join the wave of blockades, but their contributions were instrumental to the movement. Their solidarity with students in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and other Serbian cities was met with overwhelming support. When their colleagues in Novi Sad and Belgrade could not return home for Easter break because they were committed to continuing their blockade of the state Radio Television of Serbia for an unprecedented 14 days, students from Novi Pazar traveled to Belgrade to relieve them, allowing them to spend Easter with their families. A large group of army veterans, who had pledged loyalty to Serbian students, declared that the students from Novi Pazar were “their children.” During the national television blockade, one veteran representative delivered a rousing speech denouncing all the wars in which the veterans had been misled. The student protest exceeded its initial goals, becoming the single greatest act of ethnic reconciliation in decades and a monumental demonstration of solidarity across social groups, genders, professions, regions, generations, and ethnic and religious communities in what had long been a deeply polarized country.

Another remarkable protest was the Tour to Strasbourg, when 80 students, mostly from Novi Sad, rode bicycles to the European Parliament headquarters to deliver a message about government corruption and repression in Serbia. Their journey covered 800 miles in 13 days, with breaks in cities where mostly ex-Yugoslav expatriates welcomed them with tears and hospitality. This action ensured that the European Parliament could no longer ignore the situation in Serbia, which is not a member of the EU but a candidate to join.

Government Response

From the very beginning of the student blockades, the authorities employed every tactic available to suppress and derail the unrest. After the 22 November debacle, when SNS party thugs used violence in front of the FDU, and seeing that blockades were spreading across the university and the country, President Vučić invited students to elect representatives for negotiations with the authorities. By refusing, the students made two important points: first, they steadfastly maintained the principle of direct democracy and collective decision-making; second, they asserted that their demands were nonnegotiable. When invitations to the negotiating table failed, the government turned to violence. Students were arrested, beaten, and attacked by SNS-supported thugs, some with criminal records. Faced with the spectacle of massive public support for the students, the government attempted to stage its own rallies, bussing in participants, mostly senior citizens and employees of state-run enterprises threatened with job loss, to orchestrated meetings in support of President Vučić. For months, the authorities tried to turn the protests into a popularity contest, claiming they could mobilize more people than the students. Compared with the genuine, spontaneous displays of solidarity by citizens, these contrived gatherings were pathetic, with only a fraction of the number of attendants in comparison with student-led demonstrations, and with no energy at all. Another goal of this tactic was to distract attention from corruption, the main issue of the protests, and redirect focus to the blockades themselves. This led to absurd situations in which senior citizens marched with slogans demanding the reopening of schools and universities so they could “study.” Throughout, the regime conducted a relentless smear campaign against the students through government-owned television networks and pro-regime tabloids. This proved ineffective, as there were no individual leaders to name as targets for character assassination. There are some 250,000 students in Serbia, and they have their families and neighbors who support them. It is simply impossible to smear a significant fraction of the population.

When all these tactics failed, the regime attempted to divide the students. In the days leading up to the large protest in Belgrade on 15 March, a small group of pro-regime students set up a tent encampment in a park in front of the government assembly building. Calling themselves “students who want to study,” they received police protection and extensive coverage in state-controlled media. Soon, it became clear that few of the occupants were actual students. In fact, it was, and remained until early January 2026, a paramilitary and parapolice encampment in the very heart of Serbia’s capital. Students nicknamed it “Ćaciland,” a wordplay on the fake students living in a fake fantasy land.Footnote ¹² Most days, the tents were empty, guarded only by active police forces. Students’ performativity consisting of scrupulous fulfillment of their promises forced the authorities to respond with a mirroring maneuver that can be best described as theatrical: using empty scenery to claim an urban area of strategic importance. The regime’s strategy is, ostensibly, aimed to prevent another “5th of October” scenario, when Milošević was ousted, even though the students had demonstrated in every possible way that they were not advocating a violent overthrow of the government.

The paramilitary camp was established just days before the “15 for 15 protest,” which marked the culmination of a carefully planned progression of student protests across Serbia. Despite fearmongering by state media, increased violence against protesters, including beatings, arrests, and obstructions of rail and road traffic, a huge crowd gathered in Belgrade. Conservative estimates put attendance between 250,000 and 350,000. Student security officers, wearing their recognizable yellow vests and equipped with megaphones and radios, managed the crowd. Many professors and university staff members volunteered to wear yellow vests to help. Tensions were high, with circulating rumors that violent clashes with paramilitaries were imminent. Some student security members wrote their blood types and parents’ phone numbers on their forearms. Yet, the protest remained peaceful and orderly until the regime attempted to incite chaos.

Figure 8.

Mass demonstration in Belgrade, 15 March 2025. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

During the 15-minute silence for the victims of the railway station collapse, a long-range acoustic device was deployed, producing a sonic boom that caused panic among thousands of peaceful protesters on Kralj Milan Street. Thanks to the quick thinking of the student security team, casualties were avoided. Minutes after the sonic boom, student security declared the protest over, removed their yellow vests, and directed citizens to retreat peacefully to avoid provocations. In the following days, authorities denied deploying the sonic device—despite hundreds of eyewitness testimonies and video recordings—and claimed it was an elaborate ruse. If the authorities’ claim that they didn’t use the device were true, the flight of thousands of protesters on Kralj Milan Street would have been the largest synchronized performance ever staged. It was just one more in a series of cynical gestures of the regime. In the early weeks of the protests, the government also attempted to mock the student symbol of the “bloody hand” with posters depicting a red middle finger. This cynical retort backfired, generating more public discontent, and was soon abandoned.

In the weeks after the reckless deployment of the sonic weapon against the mass of protesters, students added another demand to their list: a transparent investigation of this potentially deadly incident. When it became clear that the government would not meet any of their demands, on 5 May 2025, students added another one: they asked the government to call for snap elections, finally entering the political arena as a force that is capable of actively shaping the new political landscape in Serbia.

As summer approached and the school year neared its end, both sides adjusted tactics. Students called another mass protest in Belgrade on 28 June, a date of great historical significance in Serbia.Footnote ¹³ Ahead of the protest, students announced that they could not single-handedly lead the demonstrations while also preparing their election lists of candidates (they were doing this in great secrecy, but as far as we could surmise, this involved an elaborate process reminiscent of a jury selection, in which different stakeholders have the right to eliminate candidates, etc.). They encouraged citizens to take initiative, emphasizing that it was their protest as well. The protest performance agenda changed. For the first time, speakers from across the political spectrum, from the nationalist Right to progressive Left, addressed the crowd. At the rally’s conclusion, students lit green flares in Slavija Square, symbolically giving the green light for civil disobedience. That night, violent skirmishes erupted with riot police, resulting in mass arrests, mostly of students. In the following weeks, instances of civil disobedience multiplied: young men and women who blocked intersections with dumpsters and demolished ruling party offices across the country were pursued by riot police, followed by arrests, beatings, and interrogations. The anticorruption demonstrations appeared to be spiraling beyond students’ control.

Figure 9.

In Serbia, 1 September is traditionally the first day of classes in elementary and high schools. On that day in 2025, high school students joined the protest that marked 10 months since the collapse of the railway canopy in Novi Sad. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

By fall, financially drained universities, where staff had gone unpaid for five months, negotiated with the government a plan to resume instruction after nine months without classes. Facing the prospect of losing a full year, students’ plenums gave their support to university administrations. The year was compressed into several weeks of online instruction, but this did not diminish students’ demands. On 1 September, they organized another peaceful rally in Belgrade marking 10 months since the Novi Sad tragedy, attended by approximately 50,000 people. Later that month, students announced that they were nearly ready with their own election lists, composed of experts and public personalities with impeccable reputations. A public opinion poll in October showed students leading the government coalition by 12 points, despite the relentless state media campaign and lack of funding or formal political infrastructure.

In November, instruction and exams resumed at almost all universities. Some faculties briefly went on blockade, but these ended within weeks. Meanwhile, authorities continued to undermine higher education: prominent professors who supported students were denied promotion, students from smaller universities such as Novi Pazar were expelled on absurd grounds, and a new Faculty of Serbian Studies was established at Niš University without consulting faculty and students. In response to students’ public transformation of Serbia’s political landscape, the government is striving to reshape higher education.

Figure 10.

Protest march on New Belgrade to mark the first anniversary of the attack on FDU students, 22 November 2025. (Photo courtesy of FDU students)

That does not mean that the student movement ran out of steam. Far from it. Students can still mobilize in large numbers. Ahead of the first anniversary of the railway station deaths, a group of Novi Pazar students, some of them in hijabs, carrying the flags of their city, of Serbia, and of Palestine went on a 16-day (a day for each victim), 200-mile protest march across the country, from their hometown to Novi Sad. Social media and independent media coverage energized the protest movement. Again, there were rallies, hospitality, red carpets, fireworks, and roads lined with people greeting, cheering, and feeding the protest marchers. On 1 November 2025, a silent gathering of approximately 150,000 in Novi Sad reminded authorities that the movement’s energy remained undiminished. On 22 November, a massive column marched from the FDU in New Belgrade to the State Assembly, marking the anniversary of the assault that triggered student unrest. Still, no charges have been filed for that incident, and no court proceedings have been initiated regarding the Railway Station canopy collapse.

Prospects

At the time of this writing, in February 2026, it is clear that the student protests are far from over. At the same time, the government has not made a single concession. That, however, does not mean that the students’ struggle was in vain. There is no doubt that they have transformed Serbia’s political scene. By exposing the corrupt and authoritarian nature of the government, they succeeded where many more experienced political forces had failed. They accomplished this through a clear set of demands and a simple, effective set of performatic protest strategies. There are still no leaders, plenums are in charge, and equality rules. The students exposed the regime’s hypocrisy by creating a sharp contrast to its behavior. They are a force that cannot be ignored. By refusing to play by the rules of realpolitik, they have remained outside the traditional political fray, virtually unknown individually despite their great visibility and popularity. In attempting to neutralize these “unknowns,” the regime revealed its ugliest traits: vulgarity, violence, corruption, selfishness, greed, predation, and aggressive nationalism. For example, the day after the Novi Sad gathering marking the first anniversary of the tragedy, Dijana Hrka, mother of 27-year-old Stefan Hrka, who died in the collapse, began a hunger strike in front of the Assembly Building in Belgrade. The regime responded by blasting ultranationalist and warmongering songs from the paramilitary tent encampment, including one about a mother searching for her dead son. Their cynicism was not lost on anyone.

The inability to comprehend a political unknown extends beyond Serbia. International media coverage of the student movement has been poor, and often nonexistent. When reports do appear, they reflect the biases of the reporters more than the reality of the movement. In Russia, the protests were branded a “colored revolution,” a term referencing uprisings in countries within its sphere of influence, such as Belarus (“white,” 2020–2021), Georgia (“rose,” 2003), and Ukraine (“orange,” 2004–2005).Footnote ¹⁴ This label reveals more about the fears of the Putin regime than about the students themselves. The European Union and Western European media began paying attention only in fall 2025, after the Serbian regime started threatening the few independent media outlets still operating in the country. Even then, the EU’s concern was primarily about protecting its own rights-based order, of which media freedom is a cornerstone. In the United States, major media outlets largely ignored the movement. On 16 October 2025, PBS published an article titled “Gen Z Protesters Around the World Lead a Wave of Generational Discontent,” which covered youth movements in Madagascar, Nepal, and Peru, but not a word about Serbian students (Saaliq Reference Saaliq2025). The New York Times published one of its rare articles about the events in Serbia in relation to Dijana Hrka’s 15-day hunger strike in November, labeling her the “unlikely mother of a movement” and its “symbol” (Jakes Reference Jakes2025).Footnote ¹⁵ The article speaks more about the importance of personality in the American political culture than about the genuinely new model of politics that the students have been inventing, every day, for over a year. A movement that is egalitarian, leaderless, and largely above ideological divides simply does not register as “politics” in Russia, the EU, or the US.

This is not to idealize the students. A year is an incredibly long time in protest politics. Many have lost a year of their education, and some speak openly about the physical and mental toll of their struggle (on that point, too, they have demonstrated remarkable organization capacities, setting up an effective mental health support system). They are young, innocent, and naïve, in the best sense of these words. And they are fully aware of their youth and lack of experience. Still, they have made remarkably few mistakes, primarily because decisions in plenums undergo multiple rounds of vetting. When done properly, collective decision-making minimizes personal stakes, arrogance, and rushed judgments. The regime is playing a long game, trying to exhaust the students and delaying the call for elections. By law, the government does not have to hold elections until 2027, even as the country faces its deepest crisis since the wars of the 1990s. The students are patient and aware that they may need to endure much longer than they initially expected. Still, the movement faces its greatest challenge: institutionalization. At some point they will have to leave behind their protest performances, which they are so good at, to participate in elections—and then, perhaps, to govern as political leaders. The pressing question for everyone, but especially for the students themselves, is what will happen after the elections, particularly if their list wins. Will they be able to navigate success with the same honesty and integrity that sustained them through the hardships of the past year?