Independent Cultural Organisations as Catalysts for Citizen Mobilisation in Croatia and Serbia

How can we explain public mobilisation for green-left politics in the post-socialist, post-Yugoslav countries of Croatia and Serbia? The recent emergence and the electoral success of the political parties such as Možemo and Zeleno-levi front show that a change occurred in the ways citizens in these countries engage with politics, both on the streets and at the polling stations. Most of the current scholarship tackling this topic focuses on the profiling of movement parties and the evolution of their electoral strategies, especially through developing innovative activist repertoires and the diffusion of campaign tactics throughout the sites of contention (see, for instance, Dolenec, Doolan, Tomašević 2017; Kralj 2022, 2023; Milan 2023; Milan and Dolenec 2023). While the available body of work provides many valuable insights, we’re often missing a deeper understanding of the specific positions and roles of different actors in these developments. This Paper advances the proposal that independent cultural organisations, a specific set of civil society actors, are one of the key factors in public mobilisation for green-left politics in Croatia and Serbia. The practices they have developed within civil society and their contribution to catalysing social movements suggest a more dynamic role for civil society actors than the literature on democratisation in former Yugoslav territories suggests (see, for instance, Mikuš 2018; Vetta 2018). Rooted in close observation of the sector’s activities as both practitioner and scholar over several years preceding the breakthrough of the new green-left political actors, this Paper uses a range of electronic and archival sources to demonstrate how independent cultural organisations shifted the traditional function of civil society actors by instigating social movements centred around public interest and citizen participation.