Not in our name: collective identity of the Serbian Women in Black

Abstract

The Belgrade-based activist group Women in Black has been for twenty years now articulating a feminist anti-war stance in an inimical socio-political climate. The operation of this anti-patriarchal and anti-militarist organization, which has resisted numerous instances of repression, has not been until now systematically approached from a social movement perspective. This paper draws upon a range of empirical methods, comprising life-story interviews, documentary analysis and participant observation, to address the question as to how it was possible for this small circle of activists to remain on the Serbian/post-Yugoslav civic scene for the last two decades. My central argument is that a consistent collective identity, which informs the group's resource mobilization and strategic options, holds the key to the surprising survival of this activist organization. I apply recent theoretical advances on collective identity to the case of the Belgrade Women in Black with the view of promoting a potentially fruitful cross-fertilization between non-Western activism and the Western conceptual apparatus for studying civic engagement.

Keywords:

• Women in Black
• Serbia
• collective identity
• anti-war activism

Notes

This paper is a part of a broader research project on the post-Yugoslav anti-war activism for which my interview sample included 60 activists in Serbia, around 20 of whom have been at some point during the last twenty years associated with WIB. The participants were recruited through snowball sampling – an approach for locating information-rich respondents whose number increases as they themselves suggest additional informants. In order to increase variance, I interviewed group members who took part in the earliest street performances as well as those who joined the group recently. Whereas the majority of women included in the sample come from Belgrade, I also talked to those members who live in other parts of Serbia. Data collection was conducted in December 2009 as well as in January and July 2010 by means of mp3-recorded semi-structured interviews lasting between 40 minutes and three hours. All participants were interviewed face-to-face, mostly at the WIB headquarters in Belgrade.

Feminist initiatives on the Yugoslav territory, which can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century, were coloured by socialist ideology from the very beginning (Slapšak). In 1919 Croat and Serbian women founded the Secretariat of Women Socialists which operated within the Socialist Workers' Party. They could, thus, rather quickly establish ideological linkages with young communists and anti-fascists who in 1941 initiated the People's Liberation War.

Although the Yugoslav partisans mostly counted on women's material and logistic support (collection and distribution of food, finding accommodation for refugees and children, etc.) many Yugoslav women were active fighters and a few of them were also declared national heroes by the post-war Tito regime.

It is important to note that WIB nowadays represents a loose world-wide network of women activists committed to peace and justice.

The public performance A pair of shoes, one life took place in July 2010 in the Knez Mihailova Street in downtown Belgrade. It was jointly organized by the members of WIB and independent Belgrade artists (e.g., DAH theatre) to mark the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. The organizers invited Serbian citizens and the international public to donate a pair of shoes with a signed message to the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide and members of the victims' families. The purpose was to collect a pair of shoes for each genocide victim. The collected shoes were put on the WIB banners extended along the street and the accompanying messages were read in Serbian and other languages.

Note that Serbo-Croatian, like other Slavic languages, has grammatical gender. This means that all the associated words (adjectives, verbs etc.) must have specific inflections reflecting the gender of the noun which they accompany. WIB challenges the “gender-neutral” language usage which traditionally applies masculine nouns when referring to both genders. Thus, the word free here is slobodne (in the Serbian original) meaning free women.

The Yugoslav armed conflict did have some civil war elements. For example, the people of the so-called Republika Srpska Krajina, a self-proclaimed Serb entity within Croatia (1991–1995), were fighting against the Croatian state. See also Bolčić (1992) and his idea of “internal war”.

The International Court of Justice also based in The Hague, the Netherlands, has recently absolved Serbia from responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre, to which it also referred as an act of genocide. The Court, however, did rule that Serbia was responsible for failing to exert its influence to attempt to prevent it and punish its perpetrators (Summary of the Judgment, 2007).

The need for maintaining unquestionable ideological consistency has sometimes made Women in Black choose rather problematic strategic options. For example, in the summer of 2010 the leader of the organization along with a few other members took part in the Peace March (from the Bosnian village of Nezuk to the Memorial Centre in Potočari) which takes place every year to commemorate the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. The March participants, however, were greeted by Naser Orić, a Bosnian military officer sentenced by the International Crime Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for failing to prevent the murder of Bosnian Serb detainees.