Reflections on Authoritarian Times

Serbia is often defined as a hybrid democracy or partocracy, with the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) composed of 700,000 members in a country with a population of over six and a half million. A semi-peripheral, non-EU European country under the uncontested power of its president, Aleksandar Vučić, it is also described as stabilitocracy: a type of government that claims to “secure stability, pretends to espouse EU integration and relies on informal, clientelist structures, control of the media, and the regular production of crises to undermine democracy and the rule of law.”¹ Otherwise, Serbia is referred to as a captured state, in which an oligarchic political party exploits public resources and wields the levers of state power for private gain to the detriment of the public good.² Importantly, the country’s society is captured as well. Such social capture weakens trust in democratic institutions, encloses the population in a matrix of corruption, reduces its capacity for technological progress, impedes the development of culture, and establishes the conditions for brain drain. ³

The form of authoritarianism cultivated in the SNS can be called transactional authoritarianism. The broker of these transactions, in the international arena and at home, is the president, who appears as the face and voice of the party, identified with the state and the people. Politics is declared a bad thing: the “state” and the “people” do not do politics; they build and broker – with the West and the East, as well as with the state’s subjects. In exchange for a vote and submission to the regime, one is awarded a job, a certain amount of influence, or simply a free lunch at staged protest gatherings. In this type of authoritarianism, liberties are not just reduced, but sold off, on the assumption that everyone is corruptible and that lives do not have too high a value. Anything can be used in a transaction: European values, nationalism, gender equality, Orthodox worldviews, a strip of local road, petty employment, or a free ride to the capital.     

The six vignettes of dissolution that follow illustrate how transactional authoritarianism gradually corrupts life, turning people into depraved creatures who resign from the exercise of thinking and nurturing social bonds. The popular uprising in Serbia today is a direct response to this notion that anything—human life, the earth, justice, values—is up for grabs.⁴   

The Dissolution of Dignity

In 2017, Milomir Milivojević, a twenty-five-year-old worker at the Namenska factory, died as a consequence of an accident at the workplace. It took more than two years for the factory managers to be charged with mismanagement, and that took place only after the family of the deceased reached out to the President of Serbia, the single person in the country who solves things, large or small. This was, however, only the beginning of the trial – which even today lacks a legal resolution – better described as a trial of dignity. In front of the court, the family was pitted against three hundred factory workers, neighbors and former friends, who were brought to boo and hiss at them in support of the factory director. This “support” was staged as were innumerable subsequent public demonstrations of loyalty: the people were enlisted, given a day off, and transported to the spot to display their support for the director. Yet, how much can one be paid to holler at the family that has lost a son? On that day, those who watched this profoundly shameful, unbearably cynical scene felt that part of our humanity as a people had died.

The Dissolution of Public Access to Truth

In January 2019, Stanika Gligorijević lost her life in a car accident, caused by an official state vehicle carrying two passengers, one of them a high-ranking official of the ruling party and the other the supposed driver. To this day, the details of the accident are unclear. However, since it took place at the toll plaza, it was recorded by security cameras. The public was alarmed by the fact that the videos were declared to be publicly unavailable and were shown only to the president, who then would later explain what transpired. When he did so, he effectively vouched for the innocence of the official. The truth of how the accident happened was made known to only one person, and that person was the only one allowed to interpret it. The disputed official resigned from his position citing moral reasons, but remained in place for a full year afterwards. The driver of the car who allegedly caused the accident was charged and sentenced two years after the accident, but managed to postpone going to prison. It is still unknown whether he is imprisoned and, if so, where. The entire trial was shrouded in secrecy and protected from public scrutiny.          

The Dissolution of Justice

Another car accident, in 2023, speaks to a complete perversion of justice, a motif present in all of these vignettes. The president’s best man, driving a Mercedes McLaren under the influence of cocaine and alcohol, injured two people. Police who came to the scene let him go on the spot. A brave policewoman from a small town in Western Serbia, Katarina Petrović, checked the documentation and sent it to the opposition MP. Upon its publication, it was Petrović rather than the driver who was taken into custody; she was then suspended from the police force. The “best man” has not been charged to date, while Petrović had to face a new disciplinary proceeding initiated against her for speaking about the matter in public. She said, “I believe that the public must be informed about the work of institutions, and that institutions are obligated to implement laws without discrimination. In this case, the law was not the same for everyone.” Law in Serbia is now by rule not the same for everyone; this is taken as a given. What makes the case extraordinary is the presence of a whistle-blower who trusted in the institution she represented and refused to bargain when justice was at stake.

The Dissolution of Information

On February 24, 2022, the day Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, the front cover of the daily Informer read, “Ukraine attacked Russia!” This is, in short, how media functions in Serbia. The national frequencies for television broadcasting all belong to pro-government stations, mushrooming tabloids likewise tailor data to fit the governmental construction of reality, and “bot-people,” human software employed at public institutions, receive monthly salaries to perform online harassment, besmirch dissenting voices, and cheer for the president. In 2023, a list containing over 14,000 names linked to various social media accounts was leaked, demonstrating that all over the country there are people whose only job is to flood the media with staged support for the ruling party or staged attacks on those who oppose it. Media forces that do not serve the government, in particular investigative journalists, are in a continuously precarious position, characterized as foreign mercenaries and domestic traitors.        

The Dissolution of the Value of Knowledge   

Elektroprivreda Srbije, a joint stock company, advertises itself on its website as the largest nationally owned company in Serbia and the economic and energy backbone of the country. Its main activities are the generation of electricity, supply services, distribution, and trading. Yet, for four years, it was led by a person with a questionable B.A. diploma and the former owner of a local shop specializing in selling roasted meat. This is hardly an isolated example, but an instance of a general rule: loyal incompetence is rewarded. Incompetence, conjoined with readiness to steal and falsify, is of massive importance to the transactional approach to knowledge and its value. Various key regime figures have been accused of plagiarism, among them the Governor of the National Bank of Serbia, the Minister of Finance, the Mayor of Belgrade, the Minister of Internal Affairs, to name but a few. The record of their lack of academic integrity, amplified by the countless non-academic affairs related to corruption, seems to fortify their untouchable status. Despite the regime’s early calls to join the ranks of those supporting the party and president, Serbian academia never responded in a satisfactory manner, which turned them into a target. And in a populist frame, where the elite are constantly contrasted with the people, the people are taken to be represented by the President against the academy.      

The Dissolution of Common Sense

The authoritarian mode of governing characteristic of partocracy relies on the power not just to manufacture “truth,” but also to continually create general disorientation. Deploying narratives composed of lies, half-truths, and confusing and contradictory statements is a form of managing public life as well as a form of violence against common sense. This is a destructive creation of reality, instanced by the fall of the canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad on November 1, 2024, which has led to an unprecedented popular resistance to the government.  Built in 1964, the station was fully renovated and re-opened in July of 2024, accompanied by great government pomp and self-congratulatory celebrations. Four months later, the concrete canopy collapsed, claiming sixteen lives of travelers who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The immediate reaction of the officials, the President, the Minister for Construction, Transportation and Infrastructure, as well as the Prime Minister, who formerly served as the Mayor of Novi Sad, was that “the canopy was not reconstructed,”  as if no eyes saw the history of its closure and reconstruction, no one retained a memory of it, and no record of that process existed. No one could be held accountable for the accident since no one ever reconstructed the canopy in a way that led to its collapse and the ensuing fatalities. Since the reconstruction never happened, justice cannot be expected.

The students’ protests began at the end of November 2024 and continue daily as of this writing. What these protests effectively say is: “The canopy was, in fact, reconstructed – we saw it with our very eyes – and it collapsed. It randomly took away sixteen innocent lives. This is a simple truth that no governmentally crafted misinformation can distort. The knowledge of people who know how to construct and build secure canopies was not respected. The money that should have gone into the concrete reconstruction went elsewhere. The institutions responsible for taking account of why this happened, and why it may happen again, must not be silent. Justice must not be derailed. The dignity of the dead, and of the living, is not a transactional matter.”

1. Florian Bieber, “The Rise (and Fall) of Balkan Stabilitocracies,” Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development 10 (2018): 176. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48573486?seq=1. [↩]
2. Predrag Petrović, “State Capture in Serbia — A Conceptual and Contextual Introduction,” in Security Sector Capture in Serbia, ed. Katarina Djokić et al. (Belgrade: Belgrade Center for Security Policy, 2020), 11-19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep27053.5.pdf. [↩]
3. Predrag Cvetičanin, Jovan Bliznakovski, and Nemanja Krstić, “Captured States and/or Captured Societies in the Western Balkans,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 24, no. 1 (2023): 41–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2023.2170202. [↩]
4. Adriana Zaharijević, “Serbia’s Students are Showing the World How to Restore Democratic Hope,” The Guardian, February 6, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/06/serbias-students-showing-world-democratic-hope; Filip Balunović, “Something Extraordinary Is Happening in my Country,” The New York Times, May 12, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/serbia-protests-students-vucic.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Gk8.PsZy.RIsrju5ILH8G&smid=url-share.
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