1. Post-Yugoslav Space: Ima neka tajna veza …

On 4 March 2024, CNN published an article with a declamatory title, stating that ‘France becomes world’s first country to enshrine abortion rights in constitution’ (Berlinger & Xu, 2024). Overnight, France also turned into the only country with such a constitutional provision. In the global overview of the constitutional framings of the right to abortion, written a year before, such a gross mistake was not made. ‘Guarantees of reproductive freedom can be found in the constitutions of Bolivia, Cuba, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe’ (Śledzińska-Simon, 2023, 400). Śledzińska-Simon signals, however, that these ‘most liberally framed constitutions’ result from the involvement of international experts in their drafting and mobilizations of women’s organizations on ground (ibid., 400–401). Apart from the implication that the rights landed on a foreign soil as an international import, with the help of the local NGOs—a favoured claim of anti-gender actors—something else also escaped the author: the fact that four out of seven Yugoslav successor states have a claim to the ‘most liberally framed constitutions’. There is a forgotten historical root to this fact, entirely unrelated to international expertise. The Constitution of the SFRY of 1974 stated that ‘it is the right of the human being to freely decide on the birth of children. This right can only be restricted for the protection of health’ (Ignjatović, 2024; Drezgić, 2010, 24). The same provision was included in the constitutions of the Yugoslav republics, some of which—upon proclamation of their independence—retained it in their new constitutions. In 1974, France still had a year to go before it decriminalized abortion.

With anti-gender mobilizations on the loose, the news from France is a very good one. But being mindful of history is no less important. Refusing such obliteration contributes to the de-Westernization of women’s human rights and helps preserve the recent history of the legal frames and practices originating in the Eastern (post-socialist) part of the world, heavily exposed to the erasures of its history. The symbolical meaning of this gesture is significant too: freedom and equality are not only constitutional givens but have been lived by people who framed their lives in accordance with them. Sometimes, they wanted more freedoms and a more substantial equality. This is where the story of Yugoslav feminism begins.

The feminist movement in Yugoslavia originates in the late 1970s. Some might contest this claim, not only because there are indications that initiatives which could be labelled as feminist had emerged as early as the 1960s (Bobičić, 2021; Jalušič, 2002), but also because defining what a feminist agency is can never be entirely straightforward (Haan, 2016). Indeed, certain activities undertaken by the socialist government after World War II closely resembled some aspects of the second wave feminist movement’s liberal agenda in the West. The socialist project incorporated—in contemporary terms— ‘gender equality politics’ aimed at equalizing the status of women in socialist society. The Constitution of 1946 proclaimed women equal to men in all spheres of state, economic, social, and political life. It guaranteed equal pay for equal work and protected the interests of mothers by provisioning maternity homes, nurseries, and kindergartens, and by ensuring prematernity and maternity leave with full pay.¹ In 1958, at the Seventh Congress of the League of Communists, the new legal reality of women was put into a broader perspective:

The problem of equality of women in Yugoslavia is neither political, nor one of women’s legal position in society; it remains chiefly an issue of economic backwardness, religious opinions and other retrograde prejudices, private-property relations, which still impact family life. Backward household and existing material problems of the family hamper woman from full participation in the economic and social life of the country (qt. in Petrić, 1980, 75).

In addition to abortion rights, the 1974 Constitution expanded the already existing women’s rights to further guarantee equal rights to work, health, and social protection, schooling, and access to higher education, proclaiming discrimination based on sex illegal. Marriage partners could assume either surname, retain their prenuptial property, as well as, in the case of divorce, the portion of the communal property each contributed through work, including household work.

There is a durable tendency to diminish the magnitude of the socialist emancipation of women—either because it was enabled from above (with a supposedly ulterior and exclusive motive of raising general productivity), or because it was not engendered by a home-grown feminist movement. In the aftermath of socialism, we were all too eager to reject everything socialist only for being socialist, shedding light on motives rather than on effects, in our quest for a ‘genuine’ feminism rather than on the many and various ways in which emancipation could be and was brought about. Hana Havelková’s criticism (1996) of the socialist process of modernization without feminism can be taken as exemplary. The Yugoslav case, however, complicates the discussion: the statement that in socialism there was no politicization of private life and the status of women in the family is simply incorrect.

The ‘state feminists’ openly rejected feminism because they saw feminist demands as too narrow. For example, Vida Tomšič, a prominent politician who held high political office in the government of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia and was also the president of the Women’s Anti-Fascist Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ Yugoslavia), explained: ‘What we are talking about here is not ‘legal equality’, but a new position of man and woman in work, family, and society, a new status and behaviour of the members of each sex, new moral, ethical values’ (Tomšič, 1978, 167). However, despite their dismissal of feminism, they were largely responsible for furthering ‘gender equality politics’ (Bonfiglioli, 2016; Dobos, 1983). In addition, they discussed the ‘double burden’ issue, the randomness of emancipatory actions, the double standards among male comrades, ‘or the absence of extensive societal moves towards the eradication of “inherited” divisions’ (Zaharijević, 2017, 271). When in the late 1970s a new generation of ‘liberationists’ emerged—addressing the politicization of the private in a ‘properly’ feminist way, bidding for a feminist socialist self-management—they initially collaborated with the older generation of the ‘emancipationists’, appearing at the same conferences and writing for the same publications (Zaharijević, 2017). In Yugoslav socialism, emancipation had different faces.

Historical analyses of the feminist movement in Yugoslavia highlight several pivotal events that played key roles in the shaping of the movement. As early as 1976, a section titled ‘Contemporary Feminism’ was featured at a sociological conference in Portorož (Slovenia). This event saw the participation of academic feminists from throughout Yugoslavia and marked the first public discussion on feminism under socialism. Feminist issues began to be further explored within the Croatian Sociological Society. In 1979, the section Žena i društvo (Woman and Society) was established in Zagreb (Croatia). Several years later, the section with the same name was established in Belgrade.² However, the most transformative event for Yugoslav feminism was the conference Drug-ca žena (Comrade-ss Woman: The Woman’s Question—New Approach?), held in 1978 in Belgrade.

The English brochure prepared for the meeting elucidates how Yugoslavs understood themselves, as well as how they positioned themselves towards their foreign guests from various corners of Europe. The document entitled ‘The Need for a New Approach to the Women Question’³ introduces a stark contrast between ‘present-day industrial capitalism’ and ‘socialist societies in which many things have been achieved’. While capitalist societies saw ‘the new process of women raising their self-consciousness, more radical than ever, inside the heterogeneous woman’s movement’, socialist societies are faced with ‘a series of open questions concerning the position of women, the family, marriage, social relations between the sexes and their still present inequality’. As if reiterating the statement from 1958, the document states that the relations between the sexes are ‘under the pressure of bourgeois morality, patriarchal tradition, religion and various social taboos and (new and old) habits’ to conclude that such an anachronism is not in accord ‘with the progressive tendencies of a self-managing society’. The translated texts accompanying the brochure—translated both to Serbo-Croatian, and from Serbo-Croatian into English—also speak about the two-way exchange expected from the meeting: the foreign guests would speak about what had changed in the social position of women after the rise of the women’s movement, while Yugoslav hosts would reflect on the ‘real position of women in socialism’, linking the existing emancipation with the potentials for liberation.

Throughout the 1980s, Yugoslav feminists focused on the realm of the private and the patriarchal structures that governed it, identifying sexism in practices distinctly separated from the workings of the state. They challenged these as the manifestations of patriarchy that was as present in socialism as it was in Western capitalism. Such a critique could have had significant societal effects—if history had not taken another turn. This is proven in a seemingly different area of the private life, that of Yugoslav queer people. In 1977, the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Vojvodina (the northern autonomous province of Serbia) decriminalized homosexuality at a time when no organized LGBTQ movement existed. This action was part of socialist modernization practices, aimed at distancing from the old bourgeois-moralistic and religious residues in the criminal codes of Yugoslav republics. Homosexuality was decriminalized as a private practice, where the state had no right to intervene, as long as it was consensual and non-violent (Takács et al., 2017).

In most Eastern Europe’s post-socialist countries, LGBTQ movements began to take shape only after the political changes of the 1990s (Kuhar & Takács, 2007). Yugoslavia stands out as an exception—the origins of its gay and lesbian movement date back to the early 1980s. In 1984, the first gay organization, Magnus, was established in Ljubljana. This organization was deeply connected with the new social movements emerging in Slovenia at the time, including the feminist movement, which by then had started to address issues of sexual orientation too. While lesbians were involved in both movements, they established their own organization, LL, in 1988, followed by Zagreb based Lila inicijativa (Lavander initiative) a year later. This was a strategic move to focus on specific issues that were either marginalized or deemed irrelevant within the male-dominated gay movement and the predominantly heterosexual feminist movement. Another instance of public engagement was the first regular radio broadcast dealing with gay issues in 1985 in Zagreb, named ‘Frigidna utičnica’ (Frigid Socket). However, since gay and lesbian activism did not fully emerge until the late 1980s or early 1990s, these movements were not as closely connected as the feminist movement was. This does not diminish the significance of the Slovenian gay and lesbian movement in the eighties for the rest of Yugoslavia. On the contrary, Ljubljana’s first gay disco, the pioneering venue of its kind, attracted visitors from across the country, as well as from Italy and Austria, underscoring its importance as a cultural and social hub for the LGBTQ community.

The gay and lesbian movement in the 1980s shifted the discourse on homosexuality from a psychiatric to a cultural and political context. For example, in 1986, Magnus issued a public declaration calling for amendments to the Yugoslav Constitution to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. Despite not achieving their demands, these political interventions garnered media and public attention. Amidst the fraying political cohesion of Yugoslavia, homophobia was instrumentalized within emerging nationalist discourses, which construed the tolerance of homosexuality as a deviation from the ‘Yugoslav idea’. A significant event in 1987 marked the first major scandal involving homosexuality in Yugoslavia, sparked by the scheduling of the annual Magnus gay culture festival to commence on 25 May. This date coincided with the birthday of the late Yugoslav president, Tito, a coincidence that the Yugoslav government considered a provocation. The media sensationalized the coverage of this incident, falsely reporting that a ‘world congress of homosexuals’ would be organized in Ljubljana, purportedly posing a health threat to the healthy segment of the Yugoslav population. Fears that Yugoslavia might be perceived as a ‘haven for gays’ prompted the Bosnian weekly magazine As to suggest that every heterosexual Yugoslav should wear a badge reading ‘Topla braća? Hvala, ne!’ (Nancy boys? No, thanks!) (Kuhar, 2003).

Feminist and queer bonds began to grow at the time when the Yugoslav ‘official bond’ started to dissolve. As the tensions between Yugoslav republics and autonomous provinces rose, the idea that all Yugoslavs live as brothers in unity rapidly devolved into what seemed like a hollow slogan. Ethno-national distinctions, previously eclipsed by the official bonds of brotherhood and unity, blossomed, and nationalisms of all stripes emerged as a viable alternative. Instead of unity, the ideological emphasis was now on the ethno-national differences magnified by nationalist propaganda, transforming the yesterday’s brotherly neighbours into today’s deadly foes.

By the end of the 1980s, what merely a decade ago seemed incomprehensible—socialism falling apart, Yugoslavia dissolving, spawning unimaginable violence on vast portions of its territory—was just around the corner. In the country that was feared to become a haven for gays, a new type of masculinity began to be fostered, a militarized one—the one that will sweep the stage in the 1990s. The feminist issue of rape was reappropriated for nationalist purposes, followed by the fearmongering discussions on (Serbian) depopulation and (Albanian) overpopulation in Kosovo as a form of demographic warfare (Papić, 2006). Simultaneously with the debates on the need for a more substantial, more feminist emancipation of Yugoslav women, in another, increasingly dominant register, women were seen as the birth-givers to the endangered nations. The re-traditionalization that would follow the Fall of the Wall in entire Eastern Europe had a very specific outlook in what became of Yugoslavia: in the mind-frame of the new nationalist propagandists, women were to serve the nation solely as the mothers of the future warriors, or worse, as the ‘tool of genocide’, the wombs carrying the offsprings of the enemy (Allen, 1996; Stiglmayer, 1994).

At the first conference of the Network of Yugoslav Feminists in 1987 in Ljubljana, amid the evident disintegration of Yugoslavia and the sharp rise of nationalist rhetoric, feminists declared their commitment to ‘sisterhood’ and a refusal to be ensnared by ‘male concerns for territorial rights and geographical boundaries’ (Batinic, 2001, 6). How they imagined those ‘male concerns’ would be put into practice is almost impossible to tell. Was anyone prepared for a war that would move from one place to the other, for the disfigurement of several generations of people who used to live together harmoniously, and of future generations that still bear the brunt of the unresolved ‘territorial rights’ issue, based on a continual augmentation of historical grievances? The future that was soon to happen proved that they would remain committed to sisterhood at the moment when brotherhood and unity was no more.

With the looming wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which followed the ten-day military conflict in Slovenia, feminist actors found themselves in a new political situation. They ceased to be Yugoslav ‘benevolent dissidents’ and became ‘disloyal citizens’ instead (Zaharijević, 2015, 94; on the ‘dissident stars’ or the ‘Witches from Rio’ case see Drakulić, 2001). When the war erupted, feminism took on a peacekeeping role especially within the Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian movements, which adopted a clear anti-war stance, while Slovenian feminists played a vital role in helping thousands of refugees fleeing the war in Bosnia, providing support and shelter in the newly established Slovenian state. In areas heavily affected by war, feminists concentrated on anti-war protests and organizing humanitarian aid for war victims. Notably, in Croatia, in the Anti-War Campaign initiated in 1991 feminists played a crucial role, while in Serbia, the Women in Black organized their first vigil in the fall of 1991, remaining the most consistent opponents of war and violence in Serbia (Zaharijević, 2025). The Montenegrin group Anima grew out of the ‘Protest for reason and peace’ that took place in Kotor in early 1991 (Dabižinović, 2017; Petričević, 2015). In Macedonia, the Macedonian Union of Women’s Organizations also concentrated on peace and charity causes (Cvetkovic, 2019, 111). In Bosnia, a ‘feminism out of necessity’ emerged, focusing on providing psychosocial support to war victims (Andrić-Ružičić, 1997). During this period, feminism was characterized by its consciously political, anti-nationalist,⁴ and anti-militarist stance, maintaining connections despite the war, but also despite the tensions within the movements themselves, particularly regarding wartime rape (Miškovska-Kajevska, 2017). The advent of new technologies, like the ‘ZaMir’ (ForPeace) mailing list, proved instrumental for maintaining communication between feminist groups across the now already post-Yugoslav space, facilitating a sustained exchange of information and cooperation, especially among urban centres like Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, which were eventually joined by women’s initiatives undertaken in Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Jalušič, 2002).

In the parts of former Yugoslavia where the war’s impact was less direct, feminist movements were exposed to the immediate effects of the dismantling of the legacies of socialism. In 1991, while supporting peace efforts, the Slovenian feminist movement had to face one of the first attempt to reintroduce traditional gender roles. The feminists sought to safeguard abortion right as the constitutional right in the newly established Slovenian constitution, succeeding in this endeavour through a close collaboration with the country’s liberal political factions. Understood as a medical and social issue in socialism, in its aftermath abortion turned into ‘a forum of political competition in which much broader issues were at stake, like anti-communist morality, nationhood and demographic trends’ (Drezgić, 2004, 115). The Yugoslav standard for the protection of women’s reproductive rights was not maintained across the post-Yugoslav landscape (cf. Vučković-Juroš and Gergorić, and Petričević in this volume). The rehabilitation of the influence of the churches is of crucial importance in this debate. Under socialism, religion had been confined to the private sphere and played no role in the countries’ political affairs. However, in the 1990s, it sought and largely managed to reclaim a position of a ‘public intellectual’, offering judgments on moral and other political community issues (Kerševan, 1996; Zrinščak, 2005). In spaces directly affected by wars, the churches had an even stronger role, that of the divine saviour of the soul and the body of nation, in the name of which they openly justified violence. Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam began to function as the (newly found) markers of ethnic identity. In the post-war period, the churches, though at a different pace and with a differing scope, gradually penetrated social life, education, and media and claimed authority in the sphere of family and gender roles.

Re-traditionalization, a common feature in the processes of the gendered implementation of post-socialist capitalism, symbolically and materially undermined the previously gained levels of emancipation in entire Eastern Europe. In the 1990s, the full application of the post-socialist transformation had a slower pace in almost all the parts of the partitioned Yugoslav space—due to the wars. The wars, however, accelerated the pace of re-traditionalization, shaping it in a distinct way. The tradition to be retrieved was not only an imaginary pre-socialist one. In the war-affected parts of post-Yugoslav space, its contours were shaped by an emphatically militarized patriarchy.

For that reason, the nationalist re-traditionalization of the 1990s cannot be separated from the enormous war-produced impoverishment and the colossal symbolic reordering of gender relations, which left a deep mark on the feminist and queer activist directions in the decades to come. This type of re-traditionalization must also be taken into consideration when we attempt to understand contemporary ultra-conservative campaigns. Although anti-gender mobilizations cannot be simplistically equated with the nationalist reimagining of the heteronormative gender order consisting solely of our warriors and mothers birthing our nation, they are carved on that background. The different levels of exposure to the wars and the ultimate success (or failure) of the nationalist politics that supported the war machinery shape contemporary conservative politics in the successor states of Yugoslavia. The profoundly homophobic, antifeminist sentiments forged during the wars of the 1990s give us little reason to speak of a backlash (Paternotte, 2020; Popov-Momčinović & Ždralović, 2024).

The antifeminist homophobia was not only a specifically gendered phenomenon. Feminists and queer activists were seen as ‘traitors’ and ‘foreign infiltrators’ much before anti-gender mobilizations began to be articulated. Their foreignness was ascribed to their antinationalism, as much as to their disobedience and/or queerness, that failed to fit into the neat war-produced gendered order. Lepa Mlađenović recalls this, describing the establishment of Arcadia in 1991, the first lesbian and gay NGO in Serbia:

Dejan Nebrigić and I, on the one hand, grew up on the socialist morality of brotherhood and unity and, on the other, we had to invent what it means to be a lesbian and to be gay man in the 1990s during the criminal regime… We were excited to exist and to meet. And since we lived in Serbia, the most important thing for us was to survive, because same-sex love called into question the ideology of the patriarchal family and was therefore considered a greater crime than the war crimes of nationalism. (qtd. in Kalem, 2023)

Emerging in the 1990s, feminist and LGBTQ groups were unavoidably related to anti-war efforts. The first act of Arcadia was an open letter condemning Serbian militarism. The first Croatian gay and lesbian group LIGMA (Lesbian and Gay Action), established in 1992, collaborated closely with the Croatian Anti-War Campaign, publishing its first texts on queer issues in their anti-war newspaper (Jurčić, 2012). Many of the draft-dodgers joined feminist groups, demanding not only the wars to stop but also advocating for a different kind of masculinity, a different kind of gender regime to the one that nationalist brotherhoods created. By being disloyal to the cause of their warring nation, they were proclaimed renegades, betrayers, collaborators with the enemy. In the 1990s, the enemy was not an abstract entity encapsulated by the far away centre of power (be it ‘the West’, ‘Brussels’, or ‘Europe’). The enemies were all around us, just across the border of what yesterday was our common home. If we take that post-Yugoslav feminism and queer activism guided itself by Žarana Papić’s ‘principle’ (Papić, 2012; Red Embroidery, 2017)—to always cross borders—the nationalists were right. Post-Yugoslav feminist and queer activists were betraying both the patriarchal gender order and the nation that aimed to forcibly prescribe it.

After the military conflicts in Kosovo and the allied NATO bombing of Serbia, the conflict moved to today’s North Macedonia, ending in August 2001. The military re-composition of Yugoslavia was complete, both in terms of territories and the constant movement of refugees. Montenegro and Serbia parted ways peacefully in 2006. Kosovo proclaimed independence in 2008, which Serbia has not recognized to this day. Post-Yugoslavia, now comprising of seven states, entered the post-socialist, post-conflict, and post-partition transition to democracy, which for most of the countries translated into transition to peace.

Joining the EU in 2004, Slovenia was the first post-Yugoslav state to become a member of the supranational political and economic union which all other new states would strive to join. To this moment, only Croatia managed to achieve this goal, in 2013. For both Slovenia and Croatia, this was a welcomed move away from the ‘Balkans’ and towards ‘Central Europe’, and a sign of the definitive break with their socialist past. ‘The return to Europe’, a goal shared by different, liberal and nationalist political fractions in Slovenia and Croatia, aligned them with former Eastern Europe more than with their former ‘brothers’, whose non-European status became specifically underscored by the new collective name under which the rest of post-Yugoslav countries (plus Albania) would become known—the Western Balkans. ‘The return to Europe’ in the Western Balkans proved thorny, ambivalent, featuring too many significant political and social actors who were overtly against the ‘West’. Nationalism, especially in Serbia and the regions where Serbian Orthodox Church had a strong presence, would become articulated as prominently anti-Western and, with time, specifically anti-European. Almost entirely absent in Slovenia and Croatia, this anti-Westernism has had a central position in recent anti-gender mobilizations, as the crucible of traditional values, often informed by the Russian progressive detachment from the ‘collective West’.

The 2000s saw the rise of civic society in entire post-Yugoslav space as an integral part of the democratization/Europeanization process. As is clear from previous pages, certain forms of civic society existed ‘before the wars which began in 1991 and 1992 and before [they were] imported from Western Europe and the United States by representatives of the new humanitarian order’ (Stubbs, 2007, 219). If feminism and queer activism in the war-infested 1990s were a warped post-socialist off-spring of its socialist progenitor, the 2000s gave rise to very different modes of organizing, mainly within NGOs structures. The 2000s civic society was expected to serve many purposes at the same time: to produce a new democratic counterculture, channel peacebuilding on the background of nation-building, offer services to the impoverished states, and provide know-how in policy making. Notably, their existence—as well as, at a point, their agendas—depended almost exclusively on foreign finances. Thus, even if feminist (or more broadly, women’s) groups were doing work for the state—work that the state was unwilling or incapable of doing—they appeared as remote enough to be seen as ‘internal outsiders’, remunerated by their Western donors, and under the influence of always potentially ‘foreign’, and thus dangerous ideas. The endless, zig-zagging waltz between post-Yugoslav states and the EU thrived on the existence of such ‘internal outsiders’, especially when they were pronouncedly antinationalist. Much before Soros became the demonic figure of anti-gender mobilizations, feminist and queer organizations were termed ‘Sorosoids’—that being the ultimate insult in the new states on their way to becoming European.

On the other hand, the new states—with their new civic societies—produced opportunities for feminist and queer activism to grow beyond the proverbial Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrade axis. Even the Drug-ca žena conference, the momentous event in the history of Yugoslav feminism, featured only women from these three centres, in addition to Nada Ler-Sofronić, a solitary figure from Bosnia and Herzegovina. As Eli Krasniqi (2021, 320) claims, ‘regardless of progressive leftist ideas, in this period Yugoslav feminism was centrist, that is, focused on the Yugoslav capitals such as Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade. Media information about the peripheries, Kosovo among them, was either scarce or largely biased’. And Kosovo is not an isolated case. The proliferation of women’s groups, activities and demands from the 2000s is clearly visible in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Popov-Momčinović, 2020), and North Macedonia, where ‘the biggest breakthrough occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is a time of enthusiasm, multitude and variety of women’s sector activities with access to resources and specialized multi-year programs for empowerment and leadership from the donor community’ (Kolozova & Savkovska, 2019, 14). In this period, the mandatory political quota system was introduced in each of the new states, domestic violence was successfully put on the political agenda, and gender equality began to be legally articulated through laws. Gender mainstreaming—seen as a comprehensive strategy of the (re-)institutionalization of gender equality, put into practice by the national mechanisms—was understood as not so much having to do with the post-socialist transition as with the reparation of the conflict-laden societies. The word gender began to appear in the public incomparably more often than ever before, leaving the ivory towers of feminist and queer jargon.

The second major form of sharing across borders was through feminist and queer festivals. With the Slovenian Mesto žensk (The city of women) and Rdeče Zore (Red dawns), set up already in the 1990s, the festivals would become the true space of trans-border encounter. They were mushrooming throughout the 2000s—from Queer Zagreb to Queer Belgrade, from FemFest and Vox Feminae (Zagreb) to PitchWise (Sarajevo) and Befem (Belgrade), with several important attempts at decentralization in Kutina, Niš, Tutin, Cerkno, and Banjaluka. At the start of the 2010s, Prvo pa žensko! (Firstborn Girl!) and Skopje Pride Festival began to be organized in Skopje, while FemArt started running in Prishtina. The new, post-partition form of building affective networks based on mutual exchange and learning presented itself as an alternative to the NGOization of feminist and queer politics, as the space for the development of the anarchist and leftist ideas, but also, as Zorica Siročić (2024) claims, as the space of belonging, play, reflection, and fun for the generation of millennial queer feminists.

Although the Women’s Court took place in 2015, this event in its essence encapsulates the previous two decades’ demands for peace, justice, truth, and reconciliation. Staged in Sarajevo, as the first European Women’s Court, it shed light on the different forms of violence against women during wars and in their aftermath. Thirty-six survivors of war witnessed on the violence they were exposed to, within thematically separate sections on war against civilians, the female body as a battlefield, militarist violence and women’s resistance to it, ethnic cleansing, and socio-economic wars against women (Zajović & Urošević, 2017). Gathering five hundred participants from the entire post-Yugoslav space and the world, the Women’s Court was ‘about public consciousness, ethics, and morality over human loss’ (Krasniqi, 2015). The feminists who stood fiercely against the war in the 1990s opposed its normalization and its growing relativization in the times of the ‘negative peace’.

Pride parades tell us something about the ‘secret bond’ among LGBTQ activists. Although the Belgrade and Ljubljana parades were not directly connected and occurred within a week of each other in the summer of 2001, the violent backlash at the Belgrade Pride Parade, disrupted by a huge number of hooligans and ultra-right groups, incited to protest by the representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church, had a significant public impact. The violence in Belgrade prompted Croatian lesbian activists who had been at the Belgrade parade, to suggest a parade in Zagreb the next year. However, Slovenia’s first Pride parade in 2001 and Croatia’s in 2002 went ahead relatively peacefully, with strong police protection in Croatia. Serbia did not hold another Pride Parade until 2010 because of the harsh response to its first attempt and the political challenges that led to the repeated bans. Meanwhile, parades in Ljubljana and especially Zagreb have grown in attendance, becoming annual events that celebrate diversity. Parades have also been organized in cities outside the capitals in Slovenia and Croatia, some facing violent counter-protests, such as the one in Split in 2011, where several thousands of anti-gay protesters hurled various objects at the marchers, including rocks and bottles and anything they could grab, even potted oleander plants. ‘The opponents were mostly young men, and they held their arms out in a fascist salute while chanting ‘Kill, kill, kill the gays!’– the same chant that had been used at Belgrade Pride in 2001’ (Moss, 2014, 222). The first pride parade in Montenegro was organized in 2013, during which 60 people were injured in clashes between the police and protesters. Kosovo held its first pride parade in 2017, while North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina organized theirs in 2019 (see specifically Ajanović in this volume).

The parades have become a vivid demonstration of the ‘secret bond’. The ‘delegations’ from all over post-Yugoslav space attended them either to walk the streets freely when that was not possible in their own states, or to provide support to the new prides. This was not merely a matter of incidental ‘visits’, as is common when groups attend pride parades worldwide, but rather a deliberate and strongly antinationalist act of subversion, invoking a shared history and ‘a multitude of political, economic, linguistic, cultural, and also deeply personal ties that have resisted the forces of exclusion both during and after Yugoslavia’s dissolution’ (Bilić, 2016, 16).

In the 2000s, the period of accelerated transition into nation-building, being consciously post-Yugoslav and adamantly antinationalist, was at the core of the ‘secret bond’. Furthermore, being ‘pro-European’—which most often translated into being pro-human rights, desecrated by and through the wars—positioned post-Yugoslav feminists and queer activists as having a common goal, even if they were focused on their own local affairs. In the post-conflict zones, Europeanization was rarely understood as the post-socialist process of transition into capitalism, while European values were largely seen as something we lost due to the wars, not socialism.

Gender mainstreaming and demands for more inclusive policies towards the LGBTQ community, were, for better or for worse, often equated with European values, becoming not just the goal but also the tool that, at the outset of anti-gender mobilizations in the 2010s, would turn against its users. Pride parades, for example, began to function as the symbols of much broader ideological struggles. Thus, particularly in the states that are not EU members, foreign delegations and diplomats took active participation in Prides to demonstrate the European orientation of the respective country. Prides would become a litmus test for the commitment to the European values of diversity, human rights, and inclusion, the prerequisites for EU integration—at the time when EU scepticism surged after the 2008 economic crisis, along with the rise of populist and radical right-wing policies within the EU Parliament. As Bilić (2016, 11) puts it, the inclusion of LGBTQ rights in the Europeanization process ‘destabilizes the patriarchal gender regime, but it also alienates the struggle for non-heteronormative emancipation from the domestic political context and creates a sphere of privileged voices in which Western Embassies and their representatives play particularly important roles, in partnership with domestic liberal intellectuals and activists who become empowered to act as key translators and intermediaries.’ This would become particularly salient in cases when the states themselves began to perform a reverse ‘tactical Europeanization’, for which Serbia became notorious (Slootmaeckers, 2023; Zaharijević & Antonijević, 2024).

In the 2010s, something new began to unroll. Queer and feminist activists were catapulted from their largely invisible social margins to the centre of the political stage, as the excessively powerful ‘engineers of social reality’. It was, however, not their socialist, antinationalist or Queeroslav (Dioli, 2009) ‘secret bond’ that made them the biggest threat to the healthy, natural tissue of the nation(s). The ultra-conservative narrative came from elsewhere, borrowing its terms from France, the US, or Russia, and adapting itself to local circumstances.

The new discursive framings of old political contestations slowly but surely began to revolve around issues that only feminists and queer activists had been pursuing with vigour, so often without any echo in the public. These narratives do build on re-traditionalization, anti-socialism, deep-rooted homo/transphobia, and old nationalist grievances, but they also feature something new and very transnational. As Tanja Vučković Juroš (2023, 134) puts it for the case of Croatia,

this was not a divide between European, ‘Western’ Croatia and Balkanic, ‘Eastern’ Croatia. Nor was it any longer just a divide between right-wing and left-wing Croatia (previously manifested in the debates on the role of Ustasha and the Partisans in World War Two). Rather, and crucially, this divide between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ Croatia attached itself to the idea of a divide in ‘worldviews’ about sexuality and gender.

And this is where this collection of texts takes off. We want to understand it as an instance of the ‘secret bonding’ in the era of anti-gender mobilizations. The era in which, as the joke would have it, the conservatives from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina disagree on all major things but one: they are all equally respectful of the teachings of Jordan Peterson.