IT WAS DECEMBER 1996, and tens of thousands of people were filling the avenues and city squares of Serbia’s capital. Student leaders at Belgrade University, a key center of the demonstrations, felt that their target was in sight: they were going to take down Slobodan Milosevic, the strongman who had ruled over Serbia since 1989 and whose campaigns of ethnic cleansing had earned him the nickname “the Butcher of the Balkans.”
The previous month, a collection of antiregime candidates, working in a coalition known as Zajedno, or “Together,” had gained clear majorities in more than thirty races across the country, but Milosevic annulled their victories. Outraged, Serbians in dozens of cities and towns began holding daily rallies. By late November, marches in the nation’s largest city were regularly drawing more than a hundred thousand people. Foreign reporters noted a carnival atmosphere, with speakers set up on cars blasting music. The crowds of protesters were known for carrying whistles, which they blew loudly at any mention of Milosevic’s name, sending cacophonous echoes through the streets.1
On December 27, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) added to the momentum of the demonstrations by calling on Serbian officials to seat the local election winners. By then, the protests were attracting excited admirers far beyond Serbia’s borders. Indeed, the 1996 uprising in Serbia may have been the first time when the phrase “Internet Revolution” was excitedly used by tech boosters to describe a revolt against a repressive government.2
Many student activists who rallied in 1996 had been involved in previous waves of university-based demonstrations against the regime in 1991 and 1992. This time, however, it seemed like anything was possible. December 31, 1996, saw the largest demonstrations yet, with a massive New Year’s Eve rally. “This was the night when Belgrade found its soul again after all those terrible years of war and nationalist darkness,” activist Novica Milic wrote optimistically at the time. “This night of complete freedom from fear, of happiness that the future could bring us freedom, will always be our sign that we—the democrats in Serbia—will win!”3
Such enthusiasm turned out to be premature.
Demonstrations continued until February 4, when Milosevic finally backed down and acknowledged the opposition’s municipal victories. The announcement was a high point for movement forces, and yet winning the local elections was never their ultimate goal—they wanted Milosevic out. That did not happen. Over the next year and a half, the strongman consolidated his power, becoming more entrenched than ever. The regime skillfully amplified discord among the opposition parties, and “Together” quickly split into warring factions.
By the end of 1997, Milosevic had circumvented a term limit and engineered his election as president of Yugoslavia, with one of his close allies taking over as the titular head of Serbia. Shortly thereafter, Milosevic made decisive moves to root out two key pockets of resistance: universities and independent media. He passed a new University Law, increasing government control over faculty, as well as an Information Law that allowed the regime to levy large fines against any journalistic institutions deemed to pose a danger to the country’s “constitutional order.”4
Less than a year after what looked like a victory, the vigor of the mass uprising was a distant memory. All of the ambient, frenetic energy of the protests had fizzled. Worse still, young protest leaders found that they had no mechanism for reviving it. When they tried to call new demonstrations, few responded. The activists were left dejected and burned out after months of sleepless nights. Some left the movement or departed the country altogether; others spiraled into depression or drug addiction.5
In late 1997, coming off of the disappointments of the protests, a dozen or so veterans of the previous year’s uprising began gathering in drab city center cafés, sparsely decorated student newspaper offices, and each other’s apartments—anywhere they could talk. Over countless cigarettes and cups of coffee, they dissected what had gone wrong. One participant described it as a meeting of desperate friends. The activists were determined to find a new approach. In October 1998, they decided to found a group called Otpor, or “resistance” in Serbian.6
One of those who attended the meetings was Ivan Marovic. Today, Marovic is a father and self-described “retired revolutionary,” living a quiet life in Nairobi, Kenya. But in 1996, he was a student in Belgrade University’s mechanical engineering department—a place that became an unlikely refuge for antiregime activists, in part because aspiring engineers were given draft deferrals by the government. First as a student protest leader and then as a founding member of Otpor, Marovic would develop a reputation both as a shrewd strategist and as the movement’s prankster-in-chief.
During Marovic’s childhood, Serbia had been one of the most open countries in Eastern Europe; its citizens were able to travel and to engage freely in music and the arts—“everything that ordinary people can do,” Marovic says. But just as other Soviet bloc nations were loosening restrictions in the late 1980s, the situation in Serbia deteriorated. “Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia was involved directly and indirectly in four wars, which culminated in the bombing of Serbia by the United States and its Western allies,” Marovic explains. “I lived in Belgrade during all that period, and I remember experiencing the biggest hyperinflation in the world since the Second World War. I remember economic sanctions, which totally destroyed our economy . . . I remember the total merging of the criminal segment of the society with the state. Economically and socially it was a bad time to live in Serbia.”7
“And on top of all that,” he says, “Milosevic used very brutal methods in order to keep the opposition in check. We had death squads organized by the secret police that were eliminating people—like Slavko Curuvija, the editor of the biggest newspaper who dared to write something against the government.”8
Although Marovic entered the university as an apolitical teenager, he found the mass protests to be exhilarating, and by 1996 he was fully immersed. “We were having street demonstrations during the day and parties during the night. I got mononucleosis as a result of that,” he says—referring to the so-called kissing disease—“and I met my current wife.”9
Marovic felt deep disappointment when the high period of resistance ended and the regime solidified its power. “They gave us a little victory, but after that there was a crushing defeat,” he explains. “We realized, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And for a marathon we needed a different type of organizing.”10
This realization would have historic consequences. Seeking to spark an unarmed rebellion, Otpor would set out to distinguish itself from the mass protest movements of the past. But it would also organize differently than the structure-based groups in the country—namely, Serbia’s opposition political parties and its established trade unions. Forging a middle path, it would use provocative, creative actions to produce a series of crises for the Milosevic regime and eventually accomplish what previous efforts could not.
The model that Otpor developed has been studied by movements in dozens of other countries and adapted to local circumstances in widely varied parts of the world. What it represented was perhaps the most compelling example to date of a hybrid between structure and mass protest—a powerful example of what can be called momentum-driven organizing.
For as long as people have experimented with building movements around strategic nonviolence, they have grappled with a dilemma: how to reconcile the explosive short-term potential of disruptive power with the need to sustain resistance to meet long-term goals.
Gandhi struggled throughout his life with creating a hybrid. He was famous for his campaigns of widespread civil disobedience, or satyagraha. But he combined these with an ongoing “constructive program,” through which local communities could build autonomy, as well as with efforts to build the grassroots reach of the Indian National Congress, which became the country’s leading independence organization. The Southern Christian Leadership Council was another attempt at integrating models. Although it specialized in mass mobilization, the SCLC built up an organizational infrastructure that allowed it to engage in a series of successive campaigns. Because of this, King’s organization could move from Albany to Birmingham to Selma and beyond rather than disappear after the peak energy of a single wave of demonstrations died down.
With its mixture of structure and mass protest, Otpor provided another innovative example of how dissidents employing militant nonviolent tactics could gradually increase pressure over time, escalating through multiple stages of uprising that were spread over years. Because lessons from the Serbian uprising came at a time when the field of civil resistance was reaching maturity, they could be integrated with the insights from the academic lineage that had grown out of Gene Sharp’s work. The result was an important leap forward for strategic nonviolence as an organizing tradition.
Over the past decade, the Serbian activists have been widely celebrated, but not for any one particular thing. Some commentators have noted that Otpor activists were hip and edgy, that they made protest fun, and that they used social networks to draw in large numbers of participants. Others have been impressed by their clever tactics and use of pointed humor. All these things are true, but none are necessarily unique: resistance efforts have long attracted recruits by projecting a sense of coolness; satire has been a perennial tool of dissidents; and all social movements are, by nature, social—dependent on interpersonal relationships as much as abstract ideology.
Although they are less frequently recognized, Otpor’s most distinctive innovations in fact involve the new type of organization they created: one that was disruptive yet highly strategic, decentralized yet carefully structured.
Throughout their year of coffee shop brainstorming, Otpor’s founders centered their discussion on how to create something distinct from the organizing traditions they had previously encountered. All of Otpor’s founders had been intimately involved in the revolts of 1996, and they knew well the excitement and energy that mass mobilizations could produce. Several were also veterans of earlier student demonstrations against the regime in 1991 and 1992. With no founding members over the age of twenty-seven, the fact that some had seen at least two sizable waves of movement activity come and go was a testament to the ephemeral nature of such revolts.
“The school of organizing I came from was the student protests,” says Marovic. “This organizing school was totally impulsive. It put no emphasis on establishing connections between people. It was about getting the greatest number of people and bringing them out on the street.
“We could draw out 10,000, sometimes 20,000 people, just from the university,” he explains. “The problem with this way of organizing is that it couldn’t last long, and we couldn’t take it outside our familiar terrain”—namely, the prominent college towns.11
Having been trained in mass protest, Marovic came from one side of the organizing spectrum. A different set of Otpor founders were individuals who had been reared in structure-based organizing. Various independent trade unions were present in Serbia, patiently trying to build up their membership rolls and exercise power in individual workplaces. Likewise, human rights groups and professional associations mobilized targeted constituencies to push for reforms. But the structure-based approach was best exemplified by the country’s long-established political parties. Several of Otpor’s founders had been groomed in the youth branches of different opposition parties. They were trained to build up chapters of local party loyalists and were given a glimpse of how they could make a career by rising through the parties’ carefully managed hierarchies. The operations that tutored them worked within the constraints of the system to eke out small legislative gains and to serve their members.12
“That school of organizing is based on building connections, building networks, and slowly growing an organization,” Marovic explains. The young leaders had learned important lessons there, but they were discontent. In the wake of a major electoral defeat in the fall of 1997, the youth criticized their parties. “My friends who had been involved with the political parties were frustrated with their way of organizing,” says Marovic, “because it was sluggish, and because it couldn’t reach people who weren’t already connected to their networks. They couldn’t bring in people from the outside like we could with our protests.”13
The need for integration was an idea that arose organically in the activists’ conversations. “It came out of both sides feeling frustrated,” Marovic explains. “When the two groups got together, we started thinking of a model that would incorporate elements of each tradition. It wasn’t quick; we were meeting for many months. But slowly we came up with a hybrid. And that hybrid was later named Otpor.”14
Otpor’s combination of traits usually found in disparate schools of organizing has been the source of confusion for many observers who have been unsure how to classify the movement. Looking back, some have described Otpor as a “genuine populist movement” and a “viral explosive which detonated in the consciousness of like-minded youths.” Others, such as sociologist Vladimir Ilic, have seen the group as an organization with “a rather well-developed structure” and “an invisible but efficient hierarchy” of leaders.15
Both are right. Otpor developed a type of momentum-driven organizing that is fundamentally based on deploying disruptive power but that takes a deliberate and disciplined approach to mass mobilization. Rather than waiting around for the next “Big Bang” that could send people into the streets, they began building a network with the ability to engineer its own spikes of unrest. They would start small. But they would end with a revolt of historic proportions.
Early on, the organizers decided that Otpor should maintain a firm commitment to using nonviolent tactics. Their reasoning was simple: Milosevic would slaughter them if they took up arms. Whatever rag-tag group they could assemble would be no match for the government’s soldiers and secret police—not to mention the regime’s partners in organized crime—if they fought on the terrain where those forces felt most comfortable. Instead, the activists set out to make the regime as uncomfortable as possible.
“Initially Otpor was viewed as just another student organization with no real political influence, and neither the regime nor the opposition parties paid much attention to it,” write former activists Danijela Nenadic and Nenad Belcevic. “By the time the regime realized the strength, impact, and significance of Otpor, it was too late to stop the momentum of resistance.”16
From the start, the movement was conscious about its look and messaging. The Otpor founders were savvy in their ability to steal ideas from corporate marketing campaigns to allow their message to reach people who were indifferent to the typical political advertisements and sloganeering of the opposition parties. The earliest and most iconic of these symbols was Otpor’s logo: a clenched fist, rendered in stylized fashion by activist Nenad Petrovic. After initially creating the Otpor logo, Petrovic submitted it as an assignment for a design class in branding, and he was given the equivalent of a C. Two years later, Otpor’s fist would be one of the most recognizable images in Serbia.
The fist had strong patriotic associations, recalling the icon of the Yugoslav Partisans who fought against Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. The allusion was a bow to the country’s older generation, which had first-hand memory of the earlier resistance movement. But it also had pop appeal: the Partisans were the subject of a 1970s TV show beloved by the country’s youth, a sort of Serbian version of the A-Team.
Otpor’s fist was easy to paint onto walls with a stencil or to slap onto a street sign as a sticker. It quickly began appearing throughout the country, sometimes accompanied by a single word, “Resistance!” T-shirts with the same design became a sought-after commodity, especially for Serbians under thirty.
In March 1999, US and European forces in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombed Serbia for seventy-eight days in retaliation for Milosevic’s war in Kosovo. Despite their hatred of Milosevic, Otpor organizers opposed the bombing of their country, witnessing how it rallied the population in support of the regime. During this time, the organizers—who had been slowly adding to their ranks—laid low. But when the bombing ceased that summer, Otpor reappeared, deploying a series of irreverent stunts that capitalized on public dissatisfaction and mocked Milosevic’s pretentions of being a conquering hero despite having suffered an obvious defeat.
At a time when many people did not believe anything could be done to confront the regime, Otpor deployed its members to carry out hundreds of small actions that conveyed a sense that resistance was possible. When asked about their formative influences, Otpor’s founders were fond of citing Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In the town of Nis, activists held a birthday celebration for Milosevic, offering the president gifts such as handcuffs and a one-way ticket to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. When authorities in the city of Novi Sad tried to surround their postwar reconstruction efforts with official pomp—even though the new bridge the government constructed over the Danube River amounted to little more than a temporary pontoon—activists responded by ceremoniously building their own toy bridge over a pond in one of the city’s central parks. The stunt left authorities with two bad options: look cartoonishly repressive by arresting people for playing around with a Styrofoam prop, or let Otpor continue to mock the regime.17
In another now-famous prank in Belgrade, a troupe of activists placed a steel barrel emblazoned with Milosevic’s image on a busy walkway in one of the city’s central pedestrian shopping centers. Next to it, they placed a baseball bat. Signs invited onlookers to either drop a coin into the barrel “for Milosevic’s retirement fund” or—if they did not have a coin “because of Milosevic’s economic policies”—to take a whack at the barrel. Within 15 minutes, a large crowd had formed of shoppers eager to take turns at bat. Police soon arrived on the scene. But finding no evidence of the activists who set the stage, they were not sure whom they should arrest. Eventually, they took the barrel itself into custody, much to the delight of the independent media.18
Such irreverent stunts allowed a growing number of new Otpor participants to undertake acts of defiance that, if they were caught, might typically earn them only a night in jail. None of the pranks secured Otpor much in the way of formal influence—and thus they would have been regarded as wasted efforts in the calculus of conventional politics. But they generated publicity that helped the activists win the sympathy of the public at large. Their aim was to disperse the atmosphere of fear and apathy that had prevailed since the uprising of 1996 sputtered out. Gradually, it was working.
By ridiculing the regime, Otpor chipped away at its legitimacy. Milosevic was the continual butt of their jokes: an autocrat to be ridiculed rather than feared. The group’s most famous slogans—such as “It’s spreading,” “He’s Finished,” or “It’s Time”—were not even explicit in naming their target. They did not need to be.
Such messaging was a departure from the appeals of the political parties, which were always written to bolster a selected candidate or advance a specific reform. Otpor’s methods would set them apart from the traditional parties in other ways as well. The parties could offer concrete benefits to their members: they could help secure patronage jobs or find some state funding for local projects. Yet the parties’ pull within the system, limited as it was, made them averse to taking risks. They might hold demonstrations, and they might contest Milosevic’s candidates in elections. But they were cautious about keeping their carefully scripted protests from escalating. They were aware that, if they got too confrontational, their leaders would be subject to arrest—and possibly worse. After all, these leaders were easy to find.
That was not the case with Otpor. Its founders had been burned on the idea of charismatic leadership. Accordingly, they decided that the movement would have no figureheads that would become media celebrities or that authorities could imprison or blackmail if they wanted to shut down the group. Certainly, Otpor had leaders—people who took on greater responsibility and set an example of commitment. But the group constantly rotated its official spokespeople, and it was careful to avoid developing a cult of personality around any individual.
A key element of the political parties was clearly defined hierarchy, with a strong membership base existing to back up top leaders’ standing as recognized powerbrokers. In contrast, Otpor created a structure that could allow for local teams of activists to act independently. As it grew, write Nenadic and Belcevic, “Otpor created branches throughout the country and made national calls for coordinated action. Every branch, however, was autonomous and could plan how to carry its own actions to fit local circumstances.”19
Otpor’s appeal was as much cultural as political. With movement activists shut out of the state-dominated mainstream media (except when being denounced as traitors), an alternative rock station called Radio B92 became the leading broadcaster of the resistance. Some of Otpor’s largest rallies doubled as rock concerts, with musicians reading pamphlets from the stage between songs.20
The audience for these events—the natural fan base of internationally famous acts such as Rage Against the Machine and local favorites such as the Belgrade thrash metal band Eyesburn—skewed young. Yet, although youth would remain at the core of Otpor’s supporters, the founders worked hard to reach beyond. “We realized that if we want to win, we need to step out of the university bubble and work with ordinary people,” says Marovic. “We needed a truly broad-based push to defeat Milosevic.”21
At the same time that they wanted to transcend the limited range of past student protests, the Otpor organizers did not see the political parties as having a viable strategy for broad outreach. Like other structure-based groups, the parties were skilled at building up committees of local leaders that could sustain the organization for long periods of time. Some parties had considerable geographical scope. But each was dependent on a narrow constituency for its core support, be it elderly religious conservatives, liberal intellectuals, or some faction of ethnic nationalists. The parties did not reach the great majority of the Serbian population, people who were turned off by the political system as a whole. Their rallies and marches had a predictable flavor, with top operatives taking the podium and loyalists each turning out a small number of followers in order to produce the necessary audience. No one outside of the party would ever show up.
Because they were seeking to maximize their own power, the political parties were always guarding their turf. “They had no common goals and no common sense,” remarked Milja Jovanovic, one of Otpor’s leaders. Each of the political parties had ambitions to rule, and this meant that they were perpetually arguing among themselves. “One thing they all had in common was that they all wanted to be in charge,” Marovic argues. “So they spent a lot of energy fighting each other. A lot of energy was wasted that way.”22
Otpor had no interest in becoming another feuding party, and it was not concerned with jockeying to place its own members into political office. Therefore, it was willing to work with people from a wide range of ideological backgrounds. “We knew that defeating Milosevic and securing free and fair elections was something we could all agree on,” says Marovic. “So we agreed to put our other differences aside until Milosevic was gone.” Years later, sociologist Vladimir Ilic conducted a survey of more than six hundred Otpor participants. One respondent described the movement’s ideological diversity as a liberating force. Otpor, he explained, “gave you the sort of freedom the political party denies by its very definition, and this is probably why many party members joined in its activities.”23
When spontaneous outbursts of resistance occurred in rural areas or small towns, Otpor activists worked diligently to magnify these local eruptions. For the political parties, such flashes of discontent were a distraction because they raised tangential issues and did not advance a predetermined agenda. “Traditional organizations and political parties were very strict about the initiative coming from the top,” Marovic says. But Otpor valued it when local citizens took initiative, seeing it as an opportunity to expand their outreach to a new section of the public.24
By placing local grievances—whether they involved a lack of electricity or problems with a corrupt local official—in the context of a broader fight, Otpor won the commitment of small-town activists, who were acting outside any formal organization. “The beauty of having a resistance movement involved in all this,” Marovic explains, “was that everyone started connecting these local problems with the overall problem, which was the Milosevic regime.”25
“It’s spreading,” Otpor’s defiant slogan, was proving prescient.
Since the early 2000s, decentralized organizational structures have attracted great interest, not only in social movements but also in the worlds of business, technology, and political campaigning. Otpor activists were ahead of their time. Their networks were designed to give the greatest amount of autonomy possible to the greatest number of participants. But contrary to the assumption that decentralization means that anything goes, the opposite is arguably true: movements without centralized hierarchies often require even stronger guidelines and more explicit operating procedures if they are to be effective.
On the surface, many things about Otpor’s viral protests resembled the student movements of the past, which also used a combination of creative pranks and larger demonstrations. The difference was that Otpor sought to create something at once more diffuse—reaching across the country—and more purposeful, with all localized actions contributing to a unified strategy. As Nenadic and Belcevic write, “While Otpor presented the illusion of fluid organization and ad hoc decisions, in practice it was well organized but decentralized.” Without any internal bureaucracy or centralized authority, Otpor succeeded in creating a cohesive movement identity among tens of thousands of Serbians. Two key tools it used to achieve this were frontloading and mass training.26
“Frontloading” was a means of creating well-defined norms and practices for the movement without the direct, heavy-handed oversight typical of the hierarchical political parties.
When teenage photographer Nenad Seguljev wanted to help challenge Milosevic, he went to a local opposition party office and offered to dive in. But he quickly found that for a freshly minted activist to dream up and execute a protest from there was virtually unthinkable. “You needed 100 approvals to do something,” Seguljev told author Tina Rosenberg. The response from party higher-ups to his schemes for direct action was always some form of delay: “We’ll see, we’ll see,” they said.27
In the movement, he found a very different culture. “Everything [party leaders] forbade me to do was allowed in Otpor,” he said. “Every action I could design or think of, I did.”
For Otpor’s members, autonomy was the rule. Activists could form their own chapters in their schools or communities; they could call a rally, coat their town square with resistance posters, or stage their own guerilla theater production. The possibilities seemed endless.
The reason Otpor leaders could give people freedom, and still be confident that they would take action that was consistent with the goals and messaging of the larger effort, was that they had “frontloaded” the guiding tenets of the movement. The founders had intentionally created a sort of DNA that was replicated as Otpor chapters spread. They established this DNA in many ways: they had a clear strategy, a brand, and a vision of what they wanted to accomplish. They had a distinct set of tactics that people could pick up and use, as well as well-defined boundaries within which local teams expressed their independence.
From the start, Otpor had a single goal: taking down the Milosevic regime. And it had a plan for bringing this about: small acts of defiance were a first step toward building the movement and breaking down public apathy, but these were to be followed by a more specific formula for changing the political system. In short, activists would compel the regime to call elections; they would create massive turnout around a united opposition candidate; they would join other nongovernmental organizations in carefully monitoring election results so they could document their victory; and they would use mass noncompliance—leading up to a general strike—if and when Milosevic refused to step down.
Otpor reached out to other groups with this frontloaded strategy already in place. “We didn’t try to build the coalition by bringing everybody to the table and then . . . trying to come up with the common strategy and the common goal, because that would have been a disaster,” says Marovic. The group’s founders had attended roundtables that attempted such discussions before, only to see them dissolve in acrimony. Their approach instead was to take the most basic demand that everyone could agree on and to build from there.28
Initially, other civil society groups told Otpor their formula for ousting the regime was crazy. However, as they saw volunteers flock to lend their support, the insane vision starting looking less absurd. In time, it began to seem almost plausible.
The replication of a core DNA is something that happens naturally in mass movements. As protests spread, participants pick up common beliefs, slogans, and practices. But absent conscious deliberation about what the norms of a movement should be, negative habits get passed on along with positive ones. Often, the same tactic that worked at the launch of a movement gets replicated again and again, long after it has lost its novelty in the media and its ability to catch opponents off guard. In this way, an innovative citizen’s blockade at a trade summit (the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, for example) devolves into an endless series of summit protests, easily contained by the police.
The Serbians were aware of this risk. Because they frontloaded their movement with an overarching strategy, they were not dependent on a single tactic. In November 1999, Otpor held one of its first major rallies in Belgrade. Police descended and violently dispersed the crowd. Amid the clash, fleeing protesters chanted, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!” vowing a return the next day. But organizers opted for a different tack. Daily rallies had been the hallmark of the protests in 1996, and the Otpor leaders had learned their lesson. “If we do it every day, people will get exhausted after a short while,” Marovic told author Matthew Collin. “It’s better to show up in a different way than to always give [authorities] the same thing so they know how to deal with you.”29 As it built up to an electoral push that would be backed by mass noncompliance, Otpor avoided centralizing around mass marches in Belgrade; instead, participants kept their actions varied and unexpected.
With the movement’s plan progressing, the regime started catching on to the idea that the irreverent troublemaking popping up throughout the country might become more than a mere annoyance. It started intensifying its response. Notwithstanding Otpor’s use of humor, resistance could involve serious repercussions. After the organization’s first national day of action, in early 2000, sixty-seven activists in thirteen cities were rounded up and interrogated. Overall, between 1998 and 2000, there were more than fifteen hundred arrests of Otpor members. One leader, Srdja Popovic, was pulled off the streets by security forces, questioned, and threatened on several occasions. Once, an officer placed a gun in the activist’s mouth and told him that he wished they were in Iraq, where no one would blink if a rabble-rouser were shot. The regime sent the message in other ways as well. Popovic’s mother, a prominent journalist who had been editor in chief of TV news at Radio Television Serbia, the state broadcasting service, found herself facing a series of demotions as her son’s activism intensified. Nor was Popovic an isolated case. For his part, Ivan Marovic was kidnapped three times by members of the secret police, who once threatened, “We have a wonderful dentist here, a real master who’s going to pull out all your teeth.”30
One of the most notorious attacks on local Otpor members was carried out by Milosevic’s son, Marko. The younger Milosevic was a playboy known throughout the town of Pozarevac for his bleach-blond hair, expensive cars, and swaggering machismo. Marko maintained a virtual fiefdom in the area. He ran a string of semisuccessful businesses, including a cell phone shop, a café, and a well-known nightclub, Madona. He was also active in the black market, selling cigarettes and gasoline through the country’s illicit trade networks. Needless to say, since Marko’s rule over Pozarevac was premised entirely on his father’s presidency, he was no fan of Otpor. When a clandestine chapter cropped up in town, Marko went to great lengths to hunt down its leaders.
After luring one suspect into his nightclub, Marko’s friends beat the activist with batons and pistol butts. Marko himself pulled out a chainsaw and lifted it close to his victim’s head. “You will not be the last one or the first one that I have cut up and thrown in the Morava river,” he said by way of a threat. In another incident, Marko’s gang savagely beat three Otpor members, leaving their noses broken and faces covered in blood. Marko arrived later in his BMW, yelling “Kill the scum!” as he waved a gun in the air. Adding another layer of injustice to the brutality, the activists were then hauled off to jail, and one of them was charged with attempted murder.31
In their attempts to beat down resistance, however, regime loyalists were pursuing a losing strategy. “What they failed to realize is that the detained activists became hero figures in their environments and were particularly looked up to by their peers,” writes Ilic. “Their reputation as victims of police repression encouraged ever larger numbers of young people to join the ranks.” State violence resulted in public revulsion. After the attacks in Pozarevac, Otpor posters with headshots of the bloodied activists started appearing widely: “This is the face of Serbia,” they read.32
“We fed on the repression of the regime,” one Otpor member told the Serbian print weekly Vreme. “In all towns and cities where they arrested our people the movement accelerated its growth. Immediately afterwards we were approached by new people, sometimes even pensioners, prepared to continue with resistance.”33
The influx of new participants presented a challenge for Otpor: How would it immerse large numbers of people in its organizational culture and have them understand the guidelines that allowed its decentralized teams to be effective?
The organization’s answer was mass training.
Mass protest movements commonly fail to absorb the momentum created during periods of peak mobilization. When demonstrations are in the headlines and the buzz surrounding a movement is high, new people come out in droves, inspired and energized by the surge in activity. But when things cool down, these participants can fall away just as easily. Often, those seeking to reenergize the campaign of resistance later have no means of reactivating their new supporters. Their mobilizations end up caught in a very short boom-and-bust cycle.
During the civil rights movement, one main tool used by the SCLC to address this challenge was the nightly mass meeting. Evening assemblies in packed churches in places like Birmingham and Selma were filled with hours of sermons, freedom songs, and tactical briefings. These gave practical instructions to participants, and they established much of the unifying identity for the movement. They helped to turn a single protest into an escalating campaign that could build pressure over the course of weeks or months.
Otpor, which was trying to sustain momentum for a much longer time, took the process of absorption even further. The group established an extensive series of mass trainings, a program of initiation that allowed them to quickly engage new supporters, to turn casual participants into committed members of the movement, and to continually upgrade the skills of their activists. The mass trainings became a key means through which Otpor could quickly disseminate the common operating procedures that were used throughout its decentralized structure.
The many pranks that activists pulled in the early days did not merely entertain observers and supply the press with ready photo ops. They also provided opportunities to recruit. At each of them, Otpor members would engage passers-by interested in the action and invite them to trainings. These were not the type of nonviolence trainings typically seen in the United States: short, two- or three-hour affairs intended to prepare people for a single demonstration. Instead, they were courses of ten hours or more, designed to empower participants to operate in their own autonomous, local chapters. The movement was a big tent, ideologically speaking. Yet, by the time new participants made it through the initiation, they had internalized the movement’s DNA.
A typical training stretched over the course of a week, in Monday-through-Friday evening sessions. Discussions started in an office or classroom often continued at a bar later the same night. (A New York Times correspondent called Otpor “part political movement, part social club.”) At the end of the week of training, new recruits were asked to plan and execute an action themselves, putting the skills they had just learned to immediate use. Only then were they officially considered members of the movement.34
The number of people in a given session might be small—seven or eight participants was typical—but, when repeated hundreds of times, the trainings integrated extraordinary numbers. In a very short amount of time, people could go from being total outsiders to becoming team leaders in their towns. And the training process was exponential. New chapters were outfitted with manuals and toolkits enabling them to host their own trainings. By the time Otpor had twenty thousand members, so many trainings were under way in so many different localities that the obvious locations for gatherings—community centers and youth clubs—were constantly booked. More difficult than finding qualified leaders for the sessions was securing the physical space needed to train.35
In February 2000, Otpor held a congress that, for the first time, brought together more than a thousand members from some seventy chapters around the country. At its peak, later in the year, Otpor would claim more than sixty thousand members. When conducting a survey of these members, Vladimir Ilic marveled at “the amount of spare time activists spend in the organization’s activities,” noting that “an overwhelming majority of them set aside several hours each day.”36
This dedication translated into genuine clout. By the spring, Otpor was channeling much of the energy it had built throughout Serbia into the next phase of its strategy: uniting the country’s opposition parties behind a single contender who could successfully challenge Milosevic at the polls. Otpor was quickly becoming more popular than any political party, which granted the movement considerable sway over the perpetually bickering politicians. Although none of the party leaders could afford to publicly break with Otpor, the movement activists did not need to express loyalty to any individual politician. Instead, Otpor maintained its position that only a unified front could prevail against the regime. In early 2000, eighteen of the parties began forming a coalition that would ultimately be called the Democratic Opposition of Serbia. As Otpor pushed them to support a unity candidate, it sweetened the proposition with the promise that the movement could deliver five hundred thousand votes to whichever candidate the opposition settled on. But it also backed the challenge with a threat: activists pledged that a hundred thousand people would show up on the doorstep of any leader who went back on commitments to the coalition. After much internal debate, the parties ultimately decided on constitutional lawyer Vojislav Kostunica as their candidate.
That summer, Milosevic announced early presidential elections, to be held on September 24. At that point, the opposition parties began to mobilize in earnest, along with a broad network of civil society groups. Otpor joined with them in an effort to spur voter turnout—a drive united under the slogan, “It’s Time.”
Otpor also launched a more pointed campaign of its own, called “He’s Finished!” This two-word declaration began surreptitiously appearing in graffiti throughout the country and on bold, black-and-white stickers that activists placed everywhere: street signs, bus terminals, and even Milosevic’s own propaganda posters.
As the elections neared, the government dubbed Otpor an “illegal terrorist organization.” Police stormed its offices, carting off computers and file cabinets. The regime also moved to shut down independent radio stations and antiregime outlets such as Studio B television. During one month of peak activity, there was an average of more than seven arrests of activists per day. As Nenadic and Belcevic write, “Almost every protest ended with police intervention.”37
Once again, official repression failed to stamp out resistance. As the regime detained more and more young people, with less and less evidence that the arrestees had done anything wrong other than voicing their views, it undermined authorities’ claims that those being rounded up were traitorous subversives who harbored a hatred for the nation. This was doubly true when the young people were being targeted for wearing shirts that read “Otpor—Because I Love Serbia.”
The raiding of Otpor’s Belgrade headquarters also provided an occasion for another of the group’s famous stunts. Shortly after the police visit, organizers announced they would be restocking their offices with membership files, and they invited the public to come witness their act of resilience. At the appointed time, in front of press photographers and hundreds of spectators, Otpor members began unloading what appeared to be heavy boxes of paperwork. The volunteer movers made a show of straining under the weight of their cargo. Predictably, regime forces quickly moved in to confiscate the materials. To their dismay and public embarrassment, the police officers learned that the file boxes were completely empty. Onlookers cheered the smirking activists as they were taken into custody, and the heavy-handed policing generated a new round of recruits for Otpor’s trainings.38
When Election Day finally came on September 24, 2000, the country saw record turnout, especially among youth. A remarkable 86 percent of voters under thirty cast ballots. And the overwhelming majority of them voted to oust the country’s incumbent rulers. The opposition, which had organized ten thousand election monitors to watch the voting, quickly announced the results of its exit polls. They showed that Kostunica had clearly passed the 50 percent threshold required to win the presidency outright. Milosevic, in comparison, had earned approximately 35 percent of the vote.39
The mandate was clear. Yet, as expected, the regime did not cede power easily. Its first ploy was to stall for time, arguing that a run-off election was needed. Otpor and other groups were ready, and they commenced their planned campaign of mass noncooperation.
The day after the election, the opposition handed Milosevic a deadline to concede: October 5 at three o’clock. After that time, citizen convoys from provinces across Serbia would enter Belgrade and immobilize the city. Otpor organizers further called for nationwide demonstrations on September 27. Two hundred thousand people poured into Belgrade’s Republic Square chanting Gotov Je!, “He’s finished!” Thousands more rallied in smaller cities throughout the country.40
Next, opposition leaders put out a call to their supporters, instructing them, in the words of the New York Times, to “perform any act of civil disobedience they have at their disposal.” Having already participated in droves in the prelude to the elections, Serbians took the call seriously. Forty miles south of Belgrade, seventy-five hundred workers at the Kolubara coal mines, a major power source for the capital city, went on strike on September 29. Copper miners in Majdanpek soon joined them. In various localities, state TV workers interrupted regular programming, demanded fair coverage for the opposition, or called for the firing of regime-friendly editors.41
As October 5 neared, the country readied itself for a decisive showdown. The key question was whether the military and the police would open fire on demonstrators, using violence to prevent crowds from removing Milosevic from power. Otpor had long anticipated this possibility—and endeavored to head it off. Throughout their two years of escalating dissent, the activists consistently worked to cultivate sympathy from within the security forces, sending care packages of food and cigarettes to soldiers and commiserating with individual police officers about poor pay and working conditions. The activists’ goal was to make sure that, when presented with a hard choice, the army and the police would side with the opposition rather than the regime.
As the sun rose on October 5, long lines of cars, buses, and trucks filled the highways as citizens from throughout the country descended on Belgrade. The police had erected roadblocks to prevent the convoys from entering, and officers had been given orders to shoot. They did not carry out these orders, however. Seeing themselves clearly outnumbered, police abandoned their posts, and demonstrators pushed the blockades from the roads. Indeed, the image of a large, yellow bulldozer, driven by civilians, plowing through regime barricades would become a defining symbol of the revolution. In total, more than five hundred thousand people amassed in Belgrade’s city center. When tear gas failed to disperse the crowd, some members of the riot police began fleeing. Others, seeing that the tide had turned, happily joined the demonstrations.
Some minor skirmishes occurred on October 5, some offices within Parliament were burned, and the downtown police station was ransacked. But the mass bloodshed that observers had feared did not take place. That evening, a triumphant Kostunica stood on the balcony of Belgrade’s city hall and addressed the crowd. The next day, Milosevic recognized his defeat. Within a year, he would be sent to The Hague to face trial as a war criminal.
By no means did Otpor overthrow Milosevic on its own. The political parties, civil society groups, and the trade unions all intervened at critical moments to propel the resistance forward. Yet Otpor played a vital role as an instigator and catalyst, sparking a much more rapid and broad-based rebellion than was likely to have occurred without it. By doing this, it upended the idea that the most well-established or best-resourced organizations are necessarily the best placed to force major change. Instead, it demonstrated that major groups, precisely because they are firmly established, can be slow to recognize opportunities for disruptive revolt. Sometimes, they must be prodded into action by scrappy upstarts mobilizing outside of the structure of any traditional dissident organization.
Otpor helped to bring about an amazing turn in Serbian life, and its accomplishments would have international reverberations. The group’s legacy, however, is not an uncomplicated one, and the aftermath of what has become known as the “Bulldozer Revolution” raises some difficult questions.
Although there have been positive changes in Serbia, Milosevic’s ouster was merely a first step toward addressing the country’s entrenched problems. As Serbian author and analyst Ivan Vejvoda wrote in 2009, “The institutional, economic, and social devastation left by the Milosevic regime has proven to be an immense challenge.” As a result, the progress of democracy in the country has been slow. And yet, there have been some significant alterations: a society that had been plagued by war has been able to begin addressing other issues. Citizens have regularly voted out unpopular governments, and authorities have respected the election results. “The atmosphere of fear that existed before is gone. There’s not even remotely the same level of repression as in the past era,” says Marovic. Vejvoda further argues, “Citizens in Serbia are alert and watchful of politicians’ actions. No one in Serbia, or in the Balkans for that matter, wishes a return to the catastrophe of the 1990s.”42
Otpor’s role in rebuilding the country’s democracy after the revolution would be limited, for several reasons. One involved controversy about outside financial support that activists had solicited during their fight against Milosevic. Without a doubt, Serbians themselves had provided the great bulk of the organization’s resources—through contributions of time, space for organizing meetings, small cash donations, free taxi rides, and countless other forms of assistance. However, it became public knowledge in the early 2000s that Otpor, along with the opposition parties and many other civil society groups, had also received funding from a variety of foreign governments and nonprofit groups. These included European states and US government-funded institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy. The funds helped Otpor purchase computers, cell phones, and fax machines and cover printing costs for stickers and posters.
Marovic defends the decision to seek outside help: “It was a tough choice, but important choices are never easy. These countries bombed us—talking to the representatives of their governments and heads of their foundations was not without discomfort,” he wrote. But Otpor saw taking grants from abroad as preferable to accepting funding from the organized crime syndicates or war profiteers who were backing other parties. “All money in the country was bloody,” Marovic contends. “Confronted by that reality, foreign support seemed the lesser evil.” He further notes that Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition’s candidate, was outspoken in his anti-American and anti–European Union views—hardly a puppet for foreign interests. Marovic himself went on to work with social movements in dozens of other countries, many of which were opposing US-backed regimes.43
Nevertheless, the wisdom of Otpor’s fund-raising decisions remains a matter of debate, both inside and outside Serbia. The issue was one factor that affected the group’s ability to transition into becoming a long-term opposition force.
Another factor was a lack of defining purpose following the revolution in 2000. Otpor participants had been united by a clear mission of overthrowing the regime. With this accomplished, the organization floundered. Although it stayed intact for a time as a watchdog group, its membership waned. In postrevolutionary Serbia, the strong institutional structures of the country’s political parties proved more durable than Otpor’s decentralized network—with the politicians showing themselves adept at negotiating for the spoils of power and patronage that came with the fall of Milosevic. Otpor could not compete at this type of insider positioning, even if it wanted to. By 2004, when it officially dissolved, the organization’s most prominent members had moved on, with some taking posts in nongovernmental organizations, some entering mainstream politics, and others returning to private life.
Otpor was unable to answer the question of how to institutionalize after a revolution. That quandary would be left to others. But the hybrid it created was a valuable one—and its power would quickly be recognized internationally. By the time Otpor disbanded, several of its most committed members had become sought-after trainers in nonviolent resistance. Otpor’s example was studied closely by the activists who went on to launch the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and by leaders in the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004. A slightly tweaked version of the Otpor fist appeared as an emblem of resistance in Georgia, and, in each country, elements of the Serbians’ hybrid were adapted and put to use.
In 2004, several of the Serbians founded the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. Additional trainers from the Philippines and South Africa joined its roster, prompting one publication to dub the group “a sort of People Power International.” As scholar Stephen Zunes has written, Otpor veterans have “disseminated the lessons learned from their successful nonviolent struggle through scores of trainings and workshops for pro-democracy activists and others around the world, including Egypt, Palestine, Western Sahara, West Papua, Eritrea, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Tonga, Burma and Zimbabwe as well as labor, anti-war, and immigration rights activists in the United States.”44
At the time when they started to organize Otpor, its founders were not familiar with the tradition of civil resistance that was becoming increasingly well established internationally. But when they were ultimately exposed to this lineage, they found that the guiding concepts and strategic principles of civil resistance had uncanny resonance with the dynamics that they were discovering for themselves on the ground. In spring 2000, while their rebellion was in full bloom, several of Otpor’s leaders attended a seminar led by Robert Helvey, a close associate of Gene Sharp. The participants were given several books, including Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy. Although the seminar did not significantly alter the course of Otpor’s work—the activists were already deep into their own experiments in nonviolent uprising—the participants felt that the material presented affirmed their instincts. “It was interesting to hear that there was this whole science behind what we were learning the hard way,” Srdja Popovic later told the Wall Street Journal. “We’d already been using nonviolent resistance for some time,” Marovic adds. “But to find what we were doing written in a book, with everything put in one place, was very valuable.”45
If the encounter with the field of civil resistance had only a minor impact on how the Serbian revolution unfolded, it would become more consequential as Otpor activists worked after the fact to systematize the knowledge they had gained—reviewing what they had done right and where they went wrong. Like King’s SCLC, Otpor demonstrated that mass uprising could be engineered. But the Serbians took things a step further by reflecting on their model and sharing their lessons with others. The importance of developing a hybrid would be a key contribution to emerge from their experience. “I have been in many countries after the failure of a mass protest,” says Marovic. “And that’s when activists have the revelation: They need both protest and organization.”46
Those who have led trainings around the world know that you cannot export revolution. Successful nonviolent revolt always depends on local expertise and creativity, with the organizers closest to a struggle developing hybrids of their own. But you can spread skills and expand knowledge of a craft—and this can have important consequences.
Otpor’s methods would become a prime example of the craft of momentum-driven organizing, a form of activism that uses strategic nonviolence to navigate a path between structure and mass protest. The practitioners of this craft diverge from traditional organizers and campaign consultants in the way they understand many of the key issues in political life: how advocates can capture public attention, what kind of grassroots support they need to succeed, and when they should declare victory.
But even before addressing any of those concerns, these experimenters in civil resistance take on the most basic question of all: How does social change really happen? Their answer is both challenging and counterintuitive. And it offers a new vision of how democratic participation, taken beyond mere voting and electoral campaigns, can alter some of society’s most deeply ingrained prejudices.