Promises and Limits of One Attempt to 'Queer Socialism'

Montenegro in Transition, 2003

CEU Political Science Journal, 2007

Abstract Throughout centuries, state and nation building in Montenegro have been marked with constant identity shifts, defining the role and the position of the republic (ie sometimes a state/entity) amongst its Balkans neighbors/counterparts. After 1997, the political scene in ...

The Ambiguous Nation. Case Studies from Southeastern Europe in the 20th Century, 2013

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2021

I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love and kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non-autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking through its conditions and constraints from multiple perspectives and in a way that my interlocutors saw as respectful of others. Linking anthropological discussions of freedom with a focus on ordinary ethics, I offer an understanding of freedom as a relational category practised through an open and shared deliberation and imaginative identification, which echoes Polanyi’s notion of social freedom. Gay men who pursued love and sexual fulfilment as well as stringent family expectations did not enact freedom as always-already individualised subjects who made autonomous choices; they came into being as particular socio-moral persons by deliberating either collectively, through an actual conversation, or by engaging in imaginative identification with others. By placing both relationality and deliberation at the heart of freedom, this article contributes to anthropological discussions about this concept.

This paper examines the relationship between citizenship, participation, cultural and socio-economic rights of minorities in Montenegro by focusing on the divergence between policies and their implementation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it combines insights from law with ones from social and political studies. The paper is divided into three sequential analytical sections. The first section focuses on the definition of minorities in Montenegro, examining the relation between the status of minority and citizenship. The second section relates the previously analyzed concepts of citizenship and minority to representation and participation. It seeks to examine electoral legislation within the framework of 'authentic representation' of minorities, enshrined in the 2007 Constitution of Montenegro. The final section assesses minority access to cultural (group) and socio-economic (individual) rights. The section brings forward the argument that, despite the existing legal guarantees, many of these rights are too complex to realize in practice, particularly those related to language and education in one's own language.

Th is paper examines the process of post-communist political transition of Montenegro from the 1989 introduction of multipartism to the 2006 referendum on its independence. Similar to Central/Eastern European (CEE) states, Montenegro has, at certain point, recognized membership in the European Union as the top political priority. However, while the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and other CEE countries had an 'open way' toward the EU subsequent to the collapse of communism, Montenegro -for more than a decade being a part of the internationally isolated federation with Serbiahas gone a long and diffi cult path. Owing to its divergent transition course, the extent to which EU leverage has aff ected the democratization of Montenegro substantially diff ers from that in Central/Eastern European states. In other words, whereas democratic transition of these countries went hand in hand with their European integration, democratization of Montenegro preceded its Europeanization.

The article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as “elitist” and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state’s involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging “populist” politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleuša's participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches

This chapter analyzes constitutional politics in Montenegro since the enactment of the first post-socialist constitution in 1992, its legal status within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, its development through the atypical state union of Serbia and Montenegro, and the intense process of change accompanying the proclamation of independence in 2006, the passing of the new constitution in 2007, and the constitutional amendments in 2013. Constitutional politics in Montenegro in the years until independence is characterized by a strong dependence on and dominance of Serbia and defects in its democratic development. Through the process of independence, the external influences of the Venice Commission and the EU became, and still are, the driving force behind constitutional development. Keywords Constitutional law Constitutional politics European Union Montenegro Post-Socialism Yugoslavia

LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space On the Rainbow Way to Europe

In this chapter, we present the chronology and dynamic of LGBT activism in Montenegro, suggesting that it has been firmly intertwined with the “Europeanisation” of the country. Making "homosexuality" appear inseparable from "Europe" , is potentially problematic: it positions non-heterosexual practices and people as not quite legitimate parts of the Montenegrin polity. We argue that the real challenge for improving the position of LGBT people is to destabilise this conceptual link and to make homosexuality a legitimately Montenegrin political issue. As long as public officials and state institutions engage with LGBT concerns because the EU requests it of them and because it is presumably a European "thing to do" — rather than because of people who live in Montenegro and experience various forms of oppression on the basis of their sexuality and gender— non-heterosexual sexual practices will not be perceived as constitutive of the political and social life of Montenegro.

The two decades of Montenegro's transition that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia were marked by the transformation of ambitions of the ruling political elites, which pushed the republic that once sought to be a member in a federal state towards independence. The shift in the agendas of the political elites also caused the change in the meaning of the notions of 'Montenegrin' and 'Serb'. Hence, this paper looks at cleavages that emerged during Montenegro's divide over statehood and identity. It asserts that elite competition in unconsolidated states prompts the emergence of ethno-cultural cleavages, which are necessary for the establishment of identity of political elites and of their followers. The study first identifies the critical junctures for the emergence of functional and structural cleavages in Montenegro and associates these cleavages with the changing political context. It proceeds with the analysis of ethno-cultural cleavages, in arguing that these emerged from the politicisation of historical narratives. The study concludes by arguing that different types of cleavages supported the division over statehood and identity, and that due to the malleable identity in Montenegro, political reinforcement of overlapping cleavages was essential in order to cement ethno-cultural identities to the two camps.