This article investigates the discursive logic of the antibureaucratic revolution through discourse analysis of three Serbian dailies: Politika, Borba, and Večernje Novosti. We conceptualize this discursive logic as a “hybrid discourse,” employed by Slobodan Milošević’s faction of the political elite and by prominent Serbian press outlets in their discussions and reporting on the diverse Serbian protest movements of the day. The core of the hybrid discourse, as our analysis demonstrates, consisted of the symbolic interweaving of different types of citizens’ discontent in order to present them as one single demand for societal “reform” that resonated with the agenda of the Serbian political elite. We argue that the hybrid discourse and the antibureaucratic revolution itself had a structural role related to the crisis of systemic legitimacy in Yugoslavia. The hybrid discourse performed the operation of what we term the “reversing of the symbolic fixing of antagonism between the ordinary actors’ discontents and the structurally inevitable reforms,” introducing instead the discursive fusion of the two vocabularies.

This article details how an increasingly educated and urban Buryat population became both the creators and consumers of new leisure activities in the late Soviet period. It argues that central and local authorities believed that leisure activities could help them to impress upon the Buryats that there were great benefits to living in the Soviet Union and to adopting a more pan-Soviet identity within the brotherhood of nations. They also presumed that leisure activities could aid in the building of a culture that was Buryat, Soviet, and more modern. This article examines why authorities assigned great importance to leisure and how they used and created cultural-educational institutions and mass media content to implement, direct, and promote cultural development. It analyzes various institutions such as museums, clubs, and theaters, as well as the production and consumption of local newspapers and television and radio programming that promoted educational leisure activities. In addition, it explores authorities’ concerns about the rise, especially among youth, of more taboo leisure activities that deviated from the official ones that they encouraged.

Most scholarship on Serbia’s antibureaucratic revolution of the late 1980s has emphasized elite actors while ignoring the motivations of ordinary participants. How do ordinary people describe their involvement? Moreover, given the antibureaucratic revolution’s dark side—such as exclusionary nationalism and political authoritarianism—it is important to investigate whether participants are willing to critically engage their personal political histories. What do they now say about their roles in this episode? In order to provide answers to this question, six focus groups with a total of 34 participants were organized in the town of Novi Sad, the location of one of the best-known rallies of the antibureaucratic revolution, the so-called yogurt revolution. Most people see their involvement in a rather negative way and regret taking part. However, two blind spots also appear that lessen their sense of personal responsibility: conspiracy theories and notions of urban superiority. The former shifts blame onto secret forces and the latter onto nonurban outsiders. Overall, the long-term legacies of the antibureaucratic revolution are negative: they are associated with cynicism and apathy.

Moving the focus away from the epicenters of the antibureaucratic revolution, this article looks at the echoes of this movement in the provincial, multinational, working-class community of Priboj, Serbia. A microstudy of Fabrika automobila Priboj, the town’s largest employer, and its surrounding community through records of self-management and party meetings and through the local press reveals some of the less-researched aspects of the social mobilizations in Serbia in the late 1980s. Without downplaying the spread of national grievances, this study highlights parallel phenomena taking place on the ground, such as labor solidarity, growing socioeconomic grievances, and the participation of non-Serb (in this case, Muslim) populations. The argument is that the presence of a large factory with a multinational workforce in the center of the municipality as the organizational core of the mobilizations and their focus on local problems helped Priboj’s antibureaucratic bevolution resemble the proletarian, pro-Yugoslav image that the leadership of the Serbian party often hoped to project.

This special issue of Nationalities Papers presents an attempt to provide a fresh perspective on Serbia’s and Yugoslavia’s “antibureaucratic revolution” of 1988 and 1989. The 30th anniversary of this turbulent episode provides an opportunity to rethink our interpretation and offer a new appraisal of the event as well as open several new avenues of potentially productive research. This special issue builds on older research (Vladisavljević 2004, 2008; Vujačić 1996, 2003) and is part of a series of more recent as well upcoming contributions (Musić 2016; Musić forthcoming; Archer et al. 2016; Grdešić 2016; Grdešić forthcoming; Vujačić 2017; Archer and Musić 2017). Given the complexity of the event, the contributions collected here cannot exhaust all of the antibureaucratic revolution’s many facets. We do, however, hope that these contributions cover some of the main lacunae in the scholarship published so far. We also hope that this special issue will spark researchers to turn to this immensely interesting and deeply important event.

Can nondemocratic leaders initiate a crackdown against mass protesters and suffer little in the way of political-reputational costs? In conceptualizing a “crackdown” as a government-orchestrated violent restriction of civil society involving the killing of civilians, this article analyzes how the use of force is perceived by ordinary citizens when their government represses a portion of the populace. In analyzing the findings of a 2016 survey that gauges contemporary attitudes toward the overthrow of presidents Askar Akaev (in 2005) and Kurmanbek Bakiev (in 2010), this article argues that Kyrgyzstanis evaluate the Bakiev administration more negatively than they do the Akaev administration because of the former’s resort to forceful measures in attempting to quell mass protesters in April 2010. Such findings imply that nondemocratic leaders who employ force against mass protesters incur significant political-reputational costs, irrespective as to whether the wider public views the mass protests as legitimate or not.

This article investigates how in the Soviet Arctic researchers and indigenous communities searched and understood the mammoth before and during the Cold War. Based on a vast number of published and unpublished sources as well as interviews with scholars and reindeer herders, this article demonstrates that the mammoth, as a paleontological find fusing together features of extinct and extant species, plays an in-between role among various environmental epistemologies. The author refers to moments of interactions among these different actors as “environmental encounters”, which comprise and engage with the physical, political, social and cultural environments of the Arctic. These encounters shape the temporal stabilisations of knowledge which enable the mammoth to live its post-extinct life. This article combines approaches from environmental history and anthropology, history of science and indigenous studies showing the social vitality of a “fossil object”.

Nationalism has been one of the domestic constraints to progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, especially in the Balkans that are dealing with multiple postwar transition realities. Ethno-nationalist challenges, often influenced by religion, have been significant in Bosnia-Herzegovina given weak state identity and democracy, competing institutionalized ethno-national identities, and slow Europeanization. Through the lenses of gendered nationalism, the societal security dilemma, and political homophobia, this article analyzes how the politics and discourse of LGBT rights during the past decade in Bosnia reveal tensions between competing and multiple identities and narratives—European, multiethnic, ethno-nationalist, and religious—using the violent response to the 2008 Queer Sarajevo Festival as a key illustration. However, in the past decade, LGBT rights have progressed and antigay backlash to LGBT visibility (in addition to stronger external leverage and other factors) has resulted in stronger activism and change. The public discourse and response to the announcement of Bosnia’s first Pride Parade represents another turning point in LGBT visibility that seems to reveal that ethno-nationalist challenges may be lessening as LGBT rights norms gain strength.