(Trans)national Advocacy in the Ousting of Milošević: The Otpor Movement's Glocal Recursions

Abstract

Over the past decade a remarkable number of revolutions worldwide imitated the touchstone youth movement Otpor, which played an influential role in ousting Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Given the continual presence of Western organizations and resources in Otpor's uprising, I argue that the movement demonstrates a type of communication termed glocal recursion—a rhetorical strategy that invites social change by imitating global methods of resistance, with slight variations, in local contexts. In addition to its time-based connotations (in which activists ground new messages in old texts), glocal recursion advances a space-based understanding of recursive appeals (with activists creating local messages from global structures). This essay analyzes four aspects of Otpor's glocal recursions, including its technological conditions, structured spontaneity, indigenous adaptations, and dialectical reappropriations. Various implications are drawn for communication research.

Keywords:

• Glocal
• Movements
• Recursion
• Rhetoric
• Transnational Advocacy Networks

Acknowledgments

This essay was presented for the Rhetoric and Public Address division at the 2011 National Communication Association conference.

Notes

These “glocal” interactions are similar to Witmer's (1997) study of an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, which found that “structures from the global organization are disembedded by the founder, transformed, and recreated in the local organization” (p. 324).

I do not mean to import Habermasian and other conventional notions of “spheres” here, instead using the phrase “networked public sphere” (Pfister, 2011, p. 141) broadly to describe the use of digital sites and other electronic media as resources for collective deliberation or activism (see Warner, 2007).

Gladwell (2005) also has used the phrase “the structure of spontaneity,” though in different contexts.

Former Otpor members returned to demonstrations in a Serbian city square years later, however, as one activist stated, “the October 5 [2000] changes have been curtailed, and there is a danger we will return to the ways of ten years ago,” clarifying the opposition leader they helped put in power was “a big mistake …. [he] nowadays reminds us more and more of Slobodan Milošević” (“Otpor says,” 2008, para. 2, 4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Don J. Waisanen

Don J. Waisanen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York.