CREES Annual Borka Tomljenović Lecture. Student-Led Direct Democracy in Serbia’s Hybrid Regime

Gazela Pudar Draško will explore the emergence of participatory plenums as a student-driven strategy in Serbia’s recent wave of protests, sparked by the November 2024 infrastructural disaster in Novi Sad. She will examine how, under conditions of institutional capture, media domination, and creeping autocratization, students in Belgrade and Novi Sad employed decentralized tactics to circumvent repression, foster deliberation, and sustain collective agency. Drawing on deliberative democracy, sociology of emotion, contingency theory, and political opportunity structure, Draško will showcase insights from in-depth interviews on how plenums function less as fixed ideologies and more as pragmatic tools for rebuilding trust and effective voice. While acknowledging limits to scalability, she argues that flexible, direct-democratic practices offer critical lessons on challenging entrenched power dynamics in constrained political environments.

Gazela Pudar Draško is a political sociologist and currently serves as Director at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, widely recognized for its commitment to engaged scholarship. Her research interests span deliberative democracy, participatory democratic innovations, social movements, and gender studies. Draško’s work is motivated by a dedication to evidence-based social sciences and advancing participatory governance practices.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at crees@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.