REVIEW

Reading Isin in the streets of Serbia

Jelena Vasiljević, University of Belgrade and Igor Štiks, University of Ljubljana

There are two aspects that have always been particularly compelling when theorising citizenship. One is the enormous complexity of relationships and connections that this concept creates with other ideas about social and political organisation and living: citizenship prompts reflections on polity, state, community, rights, struggles, legality, and institutions. It invites us to explore legal frameworks, economic and political conditions, social narratives, media discourses, and cultural practices—so much so that it is not surprising that some scholars warn about “overstretching” its use (Heisler 2005). In defence of casting the net wide when exploring citizenship, we will quote another work by Isin: “If we are to develop a fluid and dynamic conception of citizenship that is historically rounded and geographically responsive, we cannot articulate the question as ‘what is citizenship?’ Rather, the challenge is to ask ‘what is called citizenship?’ that evokes all the interests and forces that are invested in making and interpreting it in one way or another” (Isin 2009, p. 368–369).

Another aspect, most directly linked to “interpreting it in one way or another”, is that we resort to citizenship when we give accounts of controlling, ordering, and pacifying citizens—through borders, passports, taxes, controlled access to entitlements—just as we do when we describe entirely opposite movements: dissent and resistance, mobilisation against power, often referencing the tradition of thinking about citizenship as “the right to have rights” and, as Isin would put it, as “the right to claim rights.”  Belonging to a cohort of scholars using citizenship as a lens to describe complex socio-political transformations after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and in today’s region of the so-called Western Balkans, we have indeed utilised citizenship in both these ways. Interventions in citizenship were an indispensable part of creating new post-Yugoslav states, new “borders and orders,” and in legally and discursively legitimising administrative and political practices, as well as “norms, values and behaviour … appropriate for those claiming membership” (de Koning et al. 2015, 121). For this top-down approach, notions like citizenship regimes (Shaw and Štiks 2012) and citizenship agendas (de Koning et al. 2015) have been particularly instructive. Complementary to this, when analysing a wave of popular protests in the region, many of which sought a different imagining of communities and the role of citizens within them, Engin Isin’s ideas about activist and performative citizenship—describing how subjects become claim-making citizens through “creative breaks” in citizenship scripts (Isin 2009, p. 381)—inspired a range of insightful studies (Fagan and Circar 2018; Baća 2020; Štiks 2020; Baća and Vasiljević 2025).

Engin Isin’s latest book delves into these captivating aspects of citizenship: its intricate connection with other ideas and its dual nature, which encompasses both the potential for domination and for emancipation. Citizenship is an impressive and concise theory of citizenship as the principal institution governing and organising peoples yet enabling the creation of political subjectivity capable of undermining and overturning the very principles of governance and organisation. Isin forcefully cements citizenship as indispensable for thinking not only about statuses, rights, and belonging, as we are conventionally accustomed to, but also necessarily in relation to social struggles, emancipation, and revolution.

Just as our previous engagement with theories of citizenship has mostly been in relation to the turbulent region in which we live, so was the experience of reading this book inevitably linked to a spectacular, unprecedented popular uprising led by the student movement in Serbia. Not only is this, now more than eight months long protest movement, of such political force and emotional investment that all our critical reflection must incorporate it in one way or another; but even more so, it was revelatory to participate in it and to gain more understanding of it—with the help of Isin’s theorisation—as a movement that makes the fractures of citizenship open and sensible, thus creating possibilities for revolutionary subjectivity.

We do not have space here to provide extensive background on what began as a student protest and evolved into unprecedented social unrest (the lack of coverage in international media is part of its peculiar story and certainly reflects issues of citizenship and sovereignty in new geopolitical contexts, but that would require a different account; useful information can be found here and here). However, it is enough to say that the sudden and forceful eruption of a series of events, directly resulting from students protesting, occupying their faculties, and self-organising through so-called plenums, represents an Arendtian “scandal of politics,” as described precisely in Isin’s book. Specifically, by self-organising and formulating their demands, the students act on behalf of those excluded, as if they are part of the whole. With their demands that citizenship should be whole, they exposed the fractures within the citizenship apparatus in Serbia.

Let us clarify this by outlining how Isin’s theory of citizenship can help us understand the dynamics of citizenship struggles in captured states like Serbia. Defining citizenship as an apparatus of government, Isin aims to encompass the totality of what citizenship does: it assembles, partitions, individuates, and aggregates “peoples.” But from this, both struggles for domination and emancipation proceed. We, as citizens, are disposed to be obedient and submissive, but also subversive and revolutionary: “the apparatus produces these subjectivities as potentialities” (p. 32) … just as “domination and emancipation are modalities of power that embody and implicate each other” (p. 36).

Apparatuses produce assemblages whose logic of domination is most effective when imperceptible to us, when taken as a naturalised state of order. But as assemblages, they are “put together” through social and political “stitches.” What Engin Isin terms fractures of citizenship implies revealing what holds citizenship together as an assemblage and as an apparatus. Fractures make citizenship sensible as an apparatus that divides and classifies. This also opens space for change.

Partitioning is one of the first steps in installing the citizenship apparatus. Partitioning into citizens and noncitizens is probably the first instantiation of how laws of citizenship partition peoples, as Isin claims. Further, “citizens become partitioned into taxpaying (or not), employed (or not), lawful (or not), healthy (or not)” (p. 56) and so on, where citizens experience their citizenship differently, alone, and thus the citizenship apparatus is never exposed to citizens “in their relations with each other and with the polities to which they belong” (p. 49). In authoritarian regimes with captured institutions, citizens are also partitioned into loyal (or not), members of the clientelist network (or not), ruling party members and their proteges (or not).

The student demands, issued after the tragic collapse of the railway station canopy in the city of Novi Sad, were surprisingly modest and minimal—even more so knowing the levels of political abuse and neglect of any accountability in the country—yet they lit the fire of popular dissent as no other protest wave has done before (and there were so many in the past that had a chance to do that!). It was only through these minimal claims that a demand for a fundamental transformation of the meaning of the apparatus could be issued, and the space opened for wider interventions and transformations. The students—and this quickly evolved into so many of us—speak as a whole, exposing how the apparatus partitions, and how estranging the institutions from us estranges the whole of citizenship. This is precisely how we can explain the radicality and enormous mobilisational capacity of their very modest and all-but-radical demands.

However, another important insight is also worth noting, like every mass popular movement, this one reveals the power of ideas and narratives in shaping citizenship practices (and enactments). Their, some would argue, very mainstream and “strictly liberal” call for institutions to “do their job” and function beyond the grip of the ruling regime, coupled with original and creative ways of enacting their rights and constituting themselves as citizen subjects through the use of the “plenums” or general assemblies, interpellated so many of us—not only to join them but to join the whole of society, now discovered to have been fractured. “Liberal” demands gained such a mobilisation force only through the vehicle of direct democracy, coming from the leftist tradition (and socialist memory, no doubt). But the movement was also open to conservative-nationalist influences in terms of symbols, rhetoric, and emotions. In this regard, it demonstrates that political subjectivities, although born through performance (“the sources of the right to become political subjects are performative and not given”, p. 89), still remain conditioned by history and geography, by sediments of the past apparatuses of citizenship. 

As each event challenges our theoretical assumptions and previous scholarship, so did the protests in Serbia in 2024-25. Every event brings both inspiration and frustration. Many citizenship theories provide a tool to analyse and understand “new trajectories” and their creators but can never fully grasp them. When the dust finally settles, we turn to books and articles to make sense of our experiences. Isin’s volume, unlike many others, will be the one we surely revisit time and again for new, fruitful reflections and polemics.