Grammar, context and power: securitization of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade

Abstract

In the wake of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, right-wing extremists portrayed the event as a threat to public morals, while liberals framed homophobia as a threat to democracy. While these moves managed to polarize and mobilize the public, the government didn’t heed their calls to adopt extraordinary measures. The Parade took place on 10 October and the extremists organized unchecked violent counter-demonstrations. By drawing on Securitization Theory, we triangulate content and discourse analysis to understand why these securitizing moves had a low success. Our analysis shows that although both moves followed the grammar of security, they were only partially embedded into the wider discursive context and were not enunciated by securitizing actors with strong positional power.

Keywords:

• Securitization
• Pride Parade
• positional power
• Serbia
• LGBTIQ

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank Nebojša Vladisavljević, Katrin Voltmer and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.This study is based on the project ‘Media, Conflict and Democratisation’ (Principal Investigator: Katrin Voltmer, University of Leeds, UK). The project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 613370. For more details about the project see: www.mecodem.eu. The quantitative data in this study have been collected by Work Package ‘Media Representations of Democratisation Conflicts’ (Work Package Leader: Nebojša Vladisavljević) and Serbia Country Team (Country Team Leader: Filip Ejdus). Data have been collected by Filip Ejdus, Aleksandra Krstić and Davor Marko.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, according to opinion polls conducted in March 2010, 67% of Serbian citizens believed that homosexuality was a disease, 56% that it was dangerous for the society, while 53% held that the state should suppress homosexuality on a regular basis (Blic 2010).

2. Quantitative methods, often associated with positivism in social science, have rarely been used in securitization studies. For some rare examples see: Vultee (2010) and Baele and Sterck (2015).

3. In addition to this ‘general grammar of security’ each sector – political, societal, military etc. has a dialect of its own.

4. It is worth noting that Holger Stritzel has critiqued the model presented by Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde for its implicit tension between two centres of gravity: internal and external. The internal centre of gravity encompassed in the first facilitating condition is post-structuralist as it focuses on the grammar of security and the threat text itself. The external centre of gravity, contained in the second and third facilitating conditions, is according to Stritzel, social-constructivist as it focuses on the context in which a securitizing move takes place (Stritzel 2007).

5. Many other actors, including state representatives, also used security language when discussing the event. However, as they did not advocate for the adoption of extraordinary measures that break the normal rules of the game and for the expansion of security prerogatives that would not otherwise be seen as legitimate, these actors were not treated as securitizing actors in this article.

6. It should be noted that not all conservative opponents of the parade called for violence against LGBTIQ people or even for banning of the event. By the same token, not all liberals called for harsher security measures against the right-wing extremists either. In this article, only the actors on both sides of the political spectrum who called for some sort of extraordinary action will be treated as (liberal of conservative) securitizing actors.

7. While there were around 1000 peaceful protesters at the parade, the counter demonstrations gathered around 6000 people (B92 2010b).

8. The period covered in the content analysis was extended until 31 October in order to capture not only the speech acts made before but also after the parade took place. This gives us a fuller insight into the media representation of the entire event.

9. The codebook consisted of 37 variables, 11 of which were used in this article which are ‘voice 1’ (V13), ‘voice 2’ (V14), ‘voice 3’ (V15), ‘conflict party 1’ (V24), ‘conflict party 2’ (V25), ‘treatment option’ (V27), ‘evocation of the past’ (V32), ‘overall tone: emotions’ (V34), ‘overall tone: bias’ (V35) and ‘overall tone: polarisation’ (V36). A group of two PhD student coders from the Faculty of Political Sciences/University of Belgrade were trained to code the sample. Inter-coder reliability (proportion agreement) was 0.93.

10. In this variable we coded only references to feelings that are explicit in the text. If a reference to normal feelings (e.g., ‘I fear that…’) was present in the text we coded the article as ‘somewhat emotional’. In cases when attributes of strong feelings were present in the text (e.g., ‘I was utterly terrified to hear..’) were present, we coded the article as ‘inflammatory’.

11. It should be noted, however, that behind the scenes, the Serbian Police engaged in backstage securitization. In contrast to their declaratory commitment to constitution and rule of law, in their communication with the organizers of the event, the police exaggerated the threats to the parade and thus tried to convince them to call it off. This will change in 2011, 2012 and 2013 when the state officials publically used securizing moves to justify the ban of the parade (Ejdus and Božović 2016).

12. Some authors translate this term (ser. ‘Druga Srbija’) as ‘the other Serbia’ (Omaljev-Russel 2016).

13. Dveri transformed into a political party in February 2011 and gained seats in the National Assembly for the first time after general elections held in 2016.