This article was written in the lead-up to the recent YDSA National Convention in Chicago to motivate the passage of “Resolution 9: For a Strategic Sanctuary Campaign on All Fronts.” The resolution has since passed and two R&R members, Kaeden B and Tomás J, were elected as at-large members of the YDSA National Coordinating Committee on a party-building, class-struggle, mass politics platform.

A Concession, Not a Surrender

On June 27, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić announced he would resign “within weeks.” This was in response to the largest protest wave since the movement which overthrew the dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000. No date was set. No election was actually called. The same weekend, Vučić was already hinting he would return as the prime minister, a job he held from 2014 to 2017.

Despite frequent derision as an anti-democratic strongman, the Serbian president holds very limited legal power under Serbia’s parliamentary constitution. Vučić’s real power runs through the vast patronage machine of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which he formally led from 2012 to 2023 and still dominates, and which has controlled parliament for the last decade. Serbian analysts read the move as another tactical maneuver to relieve public pressure without touching SNS’s actual grip on the state. The protesters weren’t fooled. The next morning in Kraljevo they said as much, doubting Vučić’s resignation would amount to real change, and have since taken to the streets in even greater numbers.

It’s worth asking why they weren’t fooled. In May 2026, the month before his announcement, Vučić traveled to Beijing. Along with some great interview clips, he received China’s Friendship Medal and signed a memorandum joining China’s Global Security Initiative, an explicit alternative to NATO and the EU security frameworks, alongside new deals for Chinese air defense systems and combat drones. Serbia has long played the great powers against each other. In this century, they’ve been dependent on Russia for energy and their claims on Kosovo, the EU for trade (especially by exporting lithium), and now simultaneously deepening security ties with China and the USA. Managing the great powers, the “four pillars”, is one of the SNS’s most durable sources of legitimacy.

This all means that the nation’s President can announce he’s resigning while all of that, the one-party patronage machine, the security deals, the great-power hedging which maintains their exports and energy, stays exactly in place. That’s the concession Serbian students have won, a real political victory, but nowhere near enough.

This is the same trap every YDSA sanctuary campus is at risk of falling into, and it’s the reason our caucus Reform & Revolution is backing Resolution 9: For a Strategic Sanctuary Campaign on All Fronts. A university administration can announce a commission, a statement of values supporting immigrants, promise you personally that they’ll “look into it,” and lose nothing that actually matters, the same way Vučić can announce his resignation and SNS loses nothing that actually matters. The lesson is, don’t let your target symbolically concede, keep fighting for the substance of your program.

How Grief Became a Program

The protests didn’t start as a fight over Vučić at all. On November 1, 2024, a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station collapsed onto the platform below, killing sixteen people waiting for their train. The canopy had been “renovated” twice in two years under a Chinese-Hungarian infrastructure consortium funded by Belt and Road contracts. Later investigation revealed the records for these renovations were incomplete, contradictory, and in places missing entirely, even after months of digging. It was a perfect symbol for the decade of SNS rule defined by corruption in public contracting. The slogan that emerged,  “We are all under the canopy,” was less about the train station, more a rejection of the cronyism of Serbia’s government.

The early protests were characterized by mourning. Silent vigils, disorganized demonstrations at Novi Sad city hall and at universities, a culture war waged in the media, a few cabinet resignations, and virulent right-wing attacks on protesters. By December, classes were suspended at most university campuses and a number of high schools as physical blockades took hold for days and weeks on end. By January the nation had become severely polarized, with the protests spreading to every city and campus and right-wing violence intensifying, often backed physically by Serbian police and rhetorically by SNS politicians.

The state’s response to scrutiny followed a familiar global pattern. When a mysterious blast of sound sent hundreds of protesters into a panicked stampede at a March 2025 rally, breaking one protestor’s leg and sending hundreds more to seek medical treatment, Serbia’s police and army fiercely denied possessing an acoustic weapon. Confronted with photos of the devices, the California -made Genasys 450 XLR and LRAD 100X sonic weapons, officials admitted purchasing them but insisted they were never used, calling them “loudspeakers” available on eBay. Serbian rights groups have since taken the matter to the European Court of Human Rights with over 4,000 testimonies. It’s the same instinct as the resignation announcement a year later, to offer a technically defensible non-answer, and hope the public moves on before anyone can check.

In January, with the backing of 60 percent of the public and the public sector and education unions, protesters began to consolidate around four demands that have driven the movement since:

1. Publication of all documents relating to the Novi Sad railway station renovation
2. Filing criminal charges against those who attacked protesters
3. Dismissal of charges against all arrested and detained students, activists, and citizens
4. A 20 percent increase in the university system budget

None of that required agreeing on an entire theory of Serbian politics. They name a specific document, specific set of assailants, specific set of political prisoners, and a specific budget line. That’s the difference between a demand that a target – whether an Eastern European strongman or a public university president – can be forced to answer, and a demand they can wait out. You cannot “process” a request to publish specific documents the way you can process a call for “change.” You either publish them or you visibly refuse to, and either way, the state has moved onto the students’ terrain instead of its own.

R9 is built exactly on this logic. Rather than asking universities to affirm a “sanctuary campus” as a value (something outlawed in many Republican states), it names Palantir, Flock Safety, Elbit Systems, Oracle, OpenAI, and demands their contracts be cut. It names 287(g) agreements and demands they be revoked. It names a ban on ICE and DHS recruitment. Every one of those is as checkable as the renovation documents.

Democracy from Below

The blockades weren’t just walkouts and statements read to a crowd. Once students occupied their departments, they opened up plenums, these are public assemblies open to any student, deliberating on the movement’s next moves. No student union or student government bureaucracy filtered the agenda. No self-appointed spokespeople negotiated on anyone’s behalf. Instead the students who occupied the building governed it through daily, sometimes hours-long meetings.

This wasn’t invented from nothing, Serbian universities have a long history of plenums, drawing on socialist Yugoslavia’s own tradition of workplace self-management. The protesters are in effect reviving this form now, against a government that has spent a decade hollowing out every remaining democratic institution in the country (such as by owning or influencing over 90 percent of media).

Over time, the plenums did far more than deliberate. Working groups split off to handle finances, communications, security, and relationships with unions and sympathetic faculty. Over the course of 2025 these national structures matured enough that a decision voted on in Belgrade could be echoed, debated, and adapted in Novi Sad or Niš the same day. Occupied university buildings stopped being where students used to attend lectures and became something closer to a distributed institution, a place to deliberate, organize, and escalate as a collective.

That fusion of real bottom-up legitimacy fused to a real capacity for disruption is the easiest part of this movement to admire and hardest to copy. It’s also the exact gap in a lot of American campus organizing, which too often treats democracy and action as contradictory priorities rather than the same muscle. YDSA has begun to bridge this gap with its cohort structure, where chapters with similar campaigns targeting 287(g) agreements or the same corporations share research and pressure tactics. R9 continues and formalizes these practices piloted last year, fusing our organizing capacity across the country so that university administration cannot pick off our chapter’s demands one-by-one the way Vučić is betting he can wait out this symbolic resignation.

Political Character of the Serbian Protest Movement

The movement itself never resolved what it actually was, and mostly refused to try. From the first plenums, students deliberately kept the protests non-partisan, framing themselves as representing “all Serbians” rather than any single political current. This makes sense given decades of the Vučić regime’s successfully discrediting opposition parties as corrupt or foreign-controlled, and it’s one that let the movement pull in liberals, conservatives, socialists, populists, and the apolitical under one roof. That same universalist framing is also why the movement was never going to be socialist, or anything else with a class program: it was built, on purpose, to be a vessel broad enough that almost no one in Serbian society could say it wasn’t theirs.

The movement’s own universalist “we represent all  Serbians” framing has meant it can’t exclude those to the right of the SNS government too. Journalist Vincent Bevins, reporting from inside the protests for the London Review of Books, documented far-right speakers at a Kosovo commemoration rally within the movement’s orbit. Orthodox nationalist speakers, motivated by grievances separate from corruption and education, have been able to ride the movement’s credibility into their own influence. The movement’s organizers seem uneasy about this, without a clean answer.

Serbia’s organized left is very small and fragmented, and didn’t agree on how to treat any of this. Some of the country’s Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist formations stayed on the sidelines, arguing the movement “lacks a class character,” that a protest movement backed by neoliberal opposition figures and establishment unions, without a socialist program, wasn’t a fight worth joining. Reporting and analysis from our own tradition’s international network, the CWI, has treated that abstention as a real failure. They wrote that a left that only shows up if a movement arrives pre-packaged with the right politics abandons the actual task of the left, which is to offer direction inside movements while consciousness is still forming, not after.

Two other forces on the Serbian left took a different approach. The Green–Left Front (ZLF), Serbia’s largest party to the left of SNS, backed the protests’ demands from its position in the opposition and has consistently allied with them at public rallies. The Party of the Radical Left (PRL), a smaller socialist group with no parliamentary seats but real credibility inside the movement, took the more instructive approach for YDSA. It didn’t claim to have organized the blockades, defended the plenum’s self-organization, and pushed back on the state’s claims. PRL also warned – more than once – that a premature turn toward electoral politics would trade the plenums’ direct democracy for a seat at the negotiating table, the same seat every co-opted Balkan opposition party has taken before.

It’s tempting, observing from the outside, to resolve that ambiguity by picking a side. To decide the movement is, or decide it’s compromised beyond use, and stop thinking about it either way. PRL’s approach shows why both are mistakes. A movement doesn’t have to already be socialist for socialists to have real, unfinished work to do inside it, arguing for its best instincts against its worst ones without ever pretending to speak for the majority. That’s the same relationship socialists have to the growing anti-ICE sentiments of the US population, “anti-ICE” is a movement we didn’t start and don’t control.

Why R9 Is the Right Answer

A concession that doesn’t touch the actual machinery of power isn’t unique to Vučić. It’s exactly what university administrations offer every time “sanctuary campus” moves through sympathetic statements and committee hearings rather than policy, while every actual point of contact between the university and ICE stays. That’s the gap our own 2025-2026 Sanctuary Campus Campaigns have run into in many cases. Real chapter capacity has been built, often membership doubled or tripled, but broad demands let administrations offer performative wins instead of material ones, and the campaign’s energy slowly fizzled away.

R9 exists to close that gap for the 2026-2027 school year, and closes it the way Novi Sad’s students did, by naming the specific things that have to change. It asks universities to:

• Terminate any 287(g) agreement between campus police and ICE
• Bar ICE agents from campus without a judicial warrant
• Prohibit ICE and DHS recruitment on university grounds
• Cut contracts and procurement ties with the corporations building the deportation and surveillance infrastructure ICE runs on: Palantir, Flock Safety, Elbit, Oracle, and OpenAI
• Sever investment, research, and recruitment pipelines into the military and police

Every one of those is concrete. A university either has a 287(g) agreement, or it doesn’t. It either has a contract with OpenAI and Palantir, or it doesn’t. Just like the canopy documents, there’s no room for a university to “process” a way out of the answer, it either cuts the tie, visibly refuses to. Either way, the fight moves onto favorable terrain the administration doesn’t control.

None of this happens through moral pressure alone. Serbia’s students didn’t win what they’ve won that way either. It took blockades that shut down normal university operations, strikes across the education system and major sectors, plenums that gave the blockades democratic legitimacy and staying power, and coordination across dozens of campuses so that no single administration or city government could simply wait out one isolated group of students. That coordination is exactly what R9’s organizing cohorts are built to provide nationally, on a realistic timeline, rather than 128 separate chapters running 128 separate campaigns.

Serbian students haven’t won yet. Vučić is still in power, still hedging between Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing, and the plenums know it, which is why they’re still in the streets instead of declaring victory and going home. A parliamentary poll in June found that, while SNS still leads with 47 percent of decided voters, that the newly founded Student List is now Serbia’s clear second-largest political force, trailing SNS by only sixteen points. Although Vučić’s governing coalition has majority support combined with their ally the Socialist Party of Serbia, the fact the student protesters have unified Serbia’s opposition is a serious achievement, won by years of organizing.

Power is not granted. It has to be organized, demand by demand, campus by campus, workplace by workplace, until the people who run these institutions have no room left to wait us out. YDSA delegates should adopt R9, and every chapter should be ready to join a Strategic Campaign Committee cohort next semester, to struggle for freedom as one united force as the brave students in Serbia are doing.