Authors

Bojan Baća¹;  ¹ University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Discussion

The so-called Antibureaucratic Revolution (ABR) is one of the pivotal moments in Montenegro's contemporary history, yet it remains severely understudied as compared to the other "refolutions" of 1989. What is unclear about it is why and how individual infrapolitical resistance developed into collective political uprising against the party-state nomenklatura within the timespan of six months, ultimately resulting in the downfall of the regime in the smallest (former) Yugoslav republic. By analyzing publicly available textual corpora – such as news media materials, published memoirs and testimonials, and declassified police records, among other sources – and rendering it through the "dynamics of contention" approach, this paper explores how small-scale and low-key everyday resistance to the authoritarian practices was eventually transformed into a nationwide populist movement against the authoritarian regime as such. In addition to providing a theoretical bridging of civil resistance studies, social movement studies, and civil society studies, this paper investigates the roles that socialist populism, on the one hand, and ethnonational radicalization, on the other hand, play in grassroots mobilization within the authoritarian setting. As such, the paper aims to understand why and how civil society turns "uncivil" during tectonic shifts in the nexus of polity–economy–society.