Dear friends,
You have before you the 28th Annual Report of the Centre for Nonviolent Action.
In the past year, the socio-political landscape was coloured and enriched by mass student and citizen protests in Serbia. The “break” in society they caused opened up “the gates to a different world” and bolstered courage and readiness to fight for it. For many citizens, this “awakening” revitalised dormant practices of social solidarity, support, resistance and love, and pointed to the power we hold within ourselves both as individuals and especially as a community. In this year’s Report you can read an interview with two students, Marija Ilić and Dimitrije Glukčević, who are also participants in our Training of Trainers.
We have also published a special article “The Student Uprising in Serbia: The Power of Nonviolence” about the emergence and evolution of the student rebellion, as well as the power of nonviolent action demonstrated by students and citizens in their struggle.
In the past year, the Centre for Nonviolent Action organised two peace education activities. The 46th Basic Training in Peacebuilding was held in Ulcinj, Montenegro from 18 to 28 October 2024. And once again, after a whole decade, the Training of Trainers was organised in four phases from April to October. As our most demanding programme, this training brought together 22 activists from the whole region.
At the beginning of this year, we published the book We Come in Peace: War Veterans in Peacebuilding, and we promoted it in Goražde with an accompanying photography exhibition by Nenad Vukosavljević. Our associates in peacebuilding, war veterans, spoke at the promotion, but we also met and got to know many wonderful people.
We have been working on marking unmarked sites of suffering for ten years now, and we had our twentieth action this year when we marked several detention facilities and sites of suffering in the areas of Zvornik, Lukavac, Prnjavor and Teslić. At the same time, the action to mark unmarked sites of suffering in Croatia was started by activists of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights. They marked Pavilion 22 at the Zagreb Fairgrounds and the Ribnjak site in Marino selo in the Lipik region.
We also published the sixth Biber Short Story Collection, following the contest where 490 stories were entered. We promoted the Biber contest and the short story collections at the Slovo Gorčina Culture Festival in Stolac at the end of July.
The contexts in which we work were described this year for our annual report by some longstanding, but also some new associates of the Centre for Nonviolent Action.
We answered calls for cooperation, we visited Kigali in Africa, as well as several invitations from our partner organisations in Germany.
We also include two interviews in which we spoke about the work of CNA for Valter.portal and for Prometej.ba about the book We Come in Peace: War Veterans in Peacebuilding.
You can read about all this in our Annual Report and in more detail on our websites.
We welcome your comments, insights and any feedback you can send us.
CNA Team
October 2025