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 how and why the nationalist ideas of a populist fringe were eventually adopted, promoted, and legitimized by people who initially came into the streets to articulate socio-economic grievances and demand political reforms to better the socialist self-management. By analyzing publicly available textual corpora (e.g., newspapers, memoirs, police records) and rendering it through the "dynamics of contention" approach, this paper explores political opportunities, resource mobilization, and framing strategies during the Antibureaucratic Revolution and in its aftermath, that is – from August 1988 until December 1990. Specifically, this paper illuminates three aspects of the ABR: (1) the material and discursive conditions that made public dissent possible, (2) the waves of mass protests against the "corrupt, alienated, and inefficient party-state leadership", and (3) the mechanisms of the elite–mass interactions that eventually gave the counter-elites sufficient legitimacy to overthrow the old nomenklatura and "return power to the people". As such, the paper aims to understand why and how civil society turns "uncivil" during tectonic shifts in the nexus of polity–economy–society. 
