Whose Security? 
- repression as a norm, not an exception.

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, intensified occupation of the West Bank, Lebanon, Syrian Golan Heights and other 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 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (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? 

Sofija Stefanovic & Nataša Prljević

December 23, 2024

***

This text was born from a conversation and a loving process between the two of us <3. We fought and mocked our inner critics and perfectionism, wrote for younger selves and younger generations who bravely enter political movements, looking forward to the beginnings and continuation of collective conversations and actions.

We wrote the text at the invitation of the Novi Sad Feminist Abolitionist Collective, which is preparing its printed edition at the beginning of next year.

***

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.

See for example the works of Louis Althusser on policing as part of the 'repressive state apparatus'; Alex Vitale’s work on police abolition and Mark Neocleous’s critical theories of policing.

Section 2 

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

(1) ‘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.

(2) 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.

Stojan Kesić, Slobodan Bosiljčić. Radnički pokreti u Boru i okolini do 1941. godine. https://searchworks-lb.stanford.edu/view/3010245

“Trepča 1965-2000”. A report to LLA by Michael Palairet, Reader in European Economic History, University of Edinburgh, U.K.

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 Instagram: Život u i oko Rudarskog basena Kolubara, Foto i video zapisi, (uglavnom) privatna arhiva | Life in and around Kolubara mining complex, Photo and video documents (mostly) personal archive linktr.ee/sedamkora

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

Section 3

(3) For example the first recorded country to buy a Pegasus from Israel, Mexico, did so under the pretext of fighting drug cartels, and quickly moved to police and military use to crack down on dissent by indigenous people, environmentalists, and human rights activists.

(4) Frontex has recorded a 5,233 percent increase in funding since 2005 (from €6 million to €320 million in 2018).

(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.

Section 4

Making Abolition Geography in California Central’s Valley, Funambulist Magazine, Ruth Wilson Gilmor i Léopold Lambert, 2018

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

brown, adrienne maree, We will not cancel us: and other dreams of transformative justice. Chico, CA : AK Press, [2020].

Istraživanje o prisilnoj kontroli u intimnim partnerskim odnosima, Autonomna ženska kuća Zagreb, 2024.

Transformative Justice Resource Compilation

Prison Industrial Complex and Abolition