Neoliberal instrumentalism and the fight against it: the “We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own” movement

Abstract

The article focuses on the new anti-neoliberal social movements in post-Socialist Serbia, most notably the Belgrade movement “We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own”. It does this by proposing an analytical framework for analysing the way they deploy their critique of what the authors term “neoliberal instrumentalism”, a discourse of justification that legitimises the curtailing of democracy in the name of economic efficiency. The article also addresses Igor Štiks’s “disaggregation thesis” and suggests that, rather than being a “failure”, the disaggregation of the movements such as “We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own” at the initial stage of their development can be an advantage for mobilising specific segments of the population.