Naszego nie damy. Spory i obrazy polityczne w Chorwacji i Serbii po roku 2000
Authors: Wróblewska-Trochimiuk Ewa 
Published: October 2024

The aim of this book is to analyse the imaginary of political resistance of three large social groups in Serbia and Croatia. After 2000, each of them, both in the Serbian and Croatian contexts, for the first time has had the opportunity to present itself and demonstrate its visual resources and the values to which it refers through images. The appearance of these groups on the political scene is the result of a combination of social, cultural and economic processes which, to various extents, have been taking place in both post-Yugoslav countries in question since 2000 and are referred to as transformation. The involvement of new actors in the political process means that they need to struggle for visibility in public space. The book opens with an introductory chapter, providing a historical outline, presenting the conceptual framework of the study, and explaining its methodology. It is followed by three chapters which are devoted to three different groups – precursors of social transformations – and offer an analysis of the visual signs they use in the process of creating meanings. First, the issues of the visual complex of Serbian and Croatian war veterans, participants of the wars of the 1990s, are considered. The conclusions indicate there are certainly no analogies or parallels: in the case of Serbian veterans, we observe a socially produced invisibility and a refusal to allocate them a place on the map of visibility, in the case of Croatian veterans – an excess of visibility. The second analytical chapter is devoted to the actors of retraditionalisation, that is, the circles that are perceived as guardians of conservative values in both societies. In the Croatian case, the analysis concerns visual articulations produced by the anti-abortion circles, which, with the global conservative turn, became active in 2013 and then significantly expanded their activity and influenced almost all spheres of social life. In the Serbian case, the analysis considers the right-wing and nationalist circles, which most often appear in public space in the context of disputes about the Serbian past, national heritage and tradition. In these two cases, the local conservative paradigm mobilises two entirely different environments, conducting political disputes around different issues, and consequently using different visual languages. In the Serbian case, the visual language follows the processes of searching for identity differences as separating practices; it also follows the cult of heroes and heroism. In the Croatian case, it is a search for new ways of preventing the secularisation and liberalisation of the country’s society. However, the language used for the purpose is that of liberal democracy, and the process involves creating ideological illusions. The next chapter, and at the same time the last analytical part of the book, concerns movements that are most often characterised as anti-capitalist. In both cases, this mainly refers to urban movements, which began to be increasingly more visible on the political scene after 2000. The intensification of their activity against capitalist management and exploitation of public space resulted in the creation of an imaginary of anti-capitalist resistance. Taking a close look at the protests of the Belgrade and Zagreb urban movements enables us to trace the process of becoming of political actors by means of creating their own image. The analysis shows that today we are dealing with a scopic regime strongly conditioned by the practices of audiovisual capitalism, which anti-capitalist movements need to confront. The struggle for the streets and squares thus also becomes an attempt to find new strategies of seeing and being seen, liberated from hierarchical power relations. The final chapter provides a summary and overview of the findings of the study, including theoretical reflection on the concept of conservatism in Serbian and Croatian cultures, conservative logic and conservative images. It is guided by an idea emerging from the analysis of Serbian and Croatian imaginaries of resistance, an idea that contradicts the intuition that the world of images becomes liberated from frames, conventions and regimes, especially during protests, which have certain carnivalesque features. On the contrary, although the analysed protests and demonstrations display completely different political affiliations and different ways of articulating one’s political subjectivity, they produce and employ images constructed in accordance with the same logic. The images in question can be called conservative: owing to their internal structure (resulting from the conditions of their creation) and the cultural contexts of their functioning, they can be read as images permeated with hybrid conservative logic on many levels. In the visual field, this results in the lack of revolutionary images, ones that would bring about sudden and irreversible changes and diverge from the familiar and established ways of depicting resistance. The study identifies several categories of images with the underlying conservative logic: images of permanent crisis, moral images, images of salvation, images that are rooted, and images that exercise power.