From confronting the police to scavenging and cooking for a neighborhood Food Not Bombs giveaway, Jelena, Fistra, and Dado are constantly participating in new engagements with activism. Read More
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, academics at Belgrade and Zagreb Universities began to take up anarchist ideas for discussion. Yet it wasn’t until the mid to late 1980s, as a result of loosening party control and the subsequent rise of new social movements in Croatia, that anarchist ideas escaped strictly academic and theoretical circles to influence new forms of engagement with activism, namely direktna akcija (direct action).
Anthropologist David Graeber suggests direct action is a rejection of a politics which appeals to government to modify their behavior, in favor of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative.
This idea of direct action, a politics of practice, focuses not on an eventual utopian telos or on a moment of revolution but on a process of riddling the contemporary world with alternative practices.
Forms of engagement such as Critical Mass (a loosely knit movement of slow-moving traffic-obscuring bicycle riders seeking safer city streets), NoBorder Camps (part of global series of protest camps at the borders, detention centers, airports, and even information hubs of the migration regime of the developed West), and Indymedia (open publishing platform on the web encouraging radical journalism projects) are examples of experiments in this tradition of direct action.
The night before the Thessaloniki Summit protests begin, Jelena, Dado, and Fistra meet with their affinity group to discuss tactics, including the benefits and risks of rioting.
