Anti-politics as ‘culture of rejection’: the case of Serbia

Abstract

In this article, Fiket, Pudar Draško and Uroševic situate the notion of ‘anti-politics’ within a broader theory of ‘cultures of rejection’, redefining it as a specific culture of rejection in the political sphere. They describe the lack of participation of Serbian citizens in political life, their lack of trust in political actors, institutions, democratic procedures and, in the end, in democracy itself. They show how political elites constantly demonstrate the impotence of institutions through various examples of ‘institutional silence’, which leads to the further rejection of political engagement. The authors’ aim was to show that rejection of politics is a concept that offers an adequate theoretical framework for our empirical analyses and deeper understanding of the social phenomena reflected in the withdrawal from political life. They present the data from their qualitative research, based on interviews with the retail and logistics workers in Serbia as well as an ethnographic study of digital spaces that those workers often visit, where politics and culture meet in the discursive practices of everyday life.