Name of the project: The Fight Continues: Emancipatory Past and Present-Day Struggles in Central Europe and the Balkans
Project duration: 05.2025 – 11.2026
Donor: Visegrad Fund
Lead Partner: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade
Partners:
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Political Sciences
Our project establishes a network of institutions from Poland, Serbia, Bosnia and the Czech Republic to investigate the distinct emancipatory potential of progressive social movements in present-day Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on the 2020-21 Women’s Strike in Poland, the ongoing student plenums in Serbia, the 2014 citizens’ plenums in Bosnia and the 2019 “Million People for Democracy” movement in the Czech Republic. First, by building on existing data, we will examine these movements’ rootedness in non-conventional aspects of the socialist legacy. We will show that these movements are drawing, in complex ways, upon a common emancipatory heritage, so that a part of their strength comes from tapping into collective political memory in a way that provides citizens with a sense of belonging to what Alessandro Ferrara calls a “transgenerational sovereign people”, even across major historical discontinuities our societies have gone through. Second, relying on sources in the historical-materialist tradition, we will theorize the relationship between this form of rootedness and the “semi-peripheral” structural context of our societies, which creates favourable conditions for transformative political action. The outcome should be a theoretical model of the still unrealized potential of progressive movements in Central and Eastern Europe to bring about social change and possibly inspire global struggles of today. The model could be used in further research of the relevant phenomena, and it could inform the existing struggles and the broader public debate in our region.