We spoke to Marija Ilić and Dimitrije Glukčević, students from Niš who are actively involved in the student protests, but who are also taking part in the Training of Trainers organised by the Centre for Nonviolent Action, about the student protests that have been ongoing in Serbia since November 2024 (my colleague Ivana Franović wrote about the protests in a separate article. Previously, both Marija and Dimitrije participated in some of our peacebuilding trainings, Marija in the Basic Training, and Dimitrije in the Mir-Paqe-Мир training.
We spoke with them the day after the large protest that was held in Belgrade on 28 June 2025, after which the police beat people in the streets, and attempted to raid the Faculty of Law.
Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?
Marija: I was born in 2001 in Paraćin, I am now studying for an MA degree in Communication Studies in Niš, at the Faculty of Philosophy. As for activism, I have been active since my second year of secondary school when together with a friend from school I set up the organisation “Eho”. We made videos of our professors answering the question: What makes intellectuals return to a small town after studying in bigger cities? Why didn’t they stay where they studied, in Belgrade, Niš, Kragujevac, Novi Sad, instead of returning to Paraćin? That was my first venture into activism at the local level. After that, I was in the student parliament, and then in Kreni – Promeni, that’s where I met Dimitrije. And then I started getting involved in youth policy and that turned into a job, first at Koms and now I work at the National Coalition for Decentralisation. That whole time, I’ve been going to protests. I hope that the first quarter of my life I’ll spend protesting and the rest in freedom. That’s my wish for the future.
Dimitrije: I am Dimitrije Glukčević, also from Niš, I study here at the Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics, I’m in the second year of the MA programme in mathematics. It was Marija, actually, who introduced me to the Centre for Nonviolent Action. She told me to apply to the Mir-Paqe-Мир Training. I was doing something else at the time, but I ended up applying at the last minute and I’m really glad I did.
Did the experience of working in a group on sensitive and difficult topics from the trainings you attended help you in any way when it comes to organising student protests?
Marija: We were just talking about this yesterday, Dimitrije and me, about how much that experience meant to us and how we would recommend the training to others, because we think it would mean a lot for them and it would empower them. We were familiar with the plenum process, which is practiced at faculty blockades, and we knew how to present arguments and how important that is.
When it comes to the ideology of the protests, the students are not a homogenous group, there are many differences among you, just like in society, but you are focused on one goal: having your demands met?
Marija: Students are, just like everyone else, part of the general population of Serbia, which needs work, we still don’t know if we’ll be carrying that šešeljevsko-vojvodska flag, I don’t know what the black flag is called, and it seems like student protests are full of nationalist right-wing symbols, but that does not mean it is the actual ideology of the students. If we’re trying to make people somehow politically literate or to break down the stigma of anti-politics, then it seems to me we shouldn’t be treating them like children one moment, doing things to appease them, and then splashing them with cold water the next.
Dimitrije: I wouldn’t agree, because I think the flags that appear do not reflect the real picture, or the actual structure of the masses, because I think those flags are carried by those who are more extreme, while most people aren’t actually like that. I think we are all over the place, and that is actually one of the main problems we have. Conflicts mostly arise, not out of a lack of understanding, but because of some essential ideas that we take as our starting points.
Problems in what sense? In deciding on actions, activities, next steps?
Dimitrije: Maybe in the way we want to achieve certain goals, these can be actions, activities, long-term plans, or anything like that. We have trouble communicating properly, but that can all be overcome in some way. These ideological differences I mentioned, that is what we’ve never been able to resolve, and I don’t think there’s a way to do that, because we’re very heterogeneous. We have a common goal, but the ways in which we want to achieve that common goal are completely different.
The student protests have been going on for seven months and in all that time, despite all the government’s efforts, with all the negative things that have been happening, the threats, beatings, arrests, smear campaigns, black-listing, name-calling, threats to families, with everything that was happening in these seven months, the student protests have remained united, strong and there hasn’t been any instance of disunity visible to the public. Watching from the sidelines, we see the heterogeneity, but in a good sense: we’re all different, but we have one goal and one idea. How do you explain that?
Marija: We had one crisis. First, the value that really brought us together was solidarity, and not just altruist solidarity, but also preventive solidarity in the sense that when the canopy collapsed on those people, that could have been any of us. Some people protested, they gave their opinion, they said something loudly, then they started getting beaten. I think we are there for each other precisely because we are different. We actually had a crisis of solidarity when that thing happened in Novi Sad right before 15 March, when the students were arrested. That was our weak point, a weak moment. We grew up in anti-politics. Now, when they arrest someone, we don’t care anymore if they are members of a political party, an NGO or anyone else. And in this attitude towards political parties and the non-governmental sector, you can see how for 13 years all of us under this government have been listening to different narratives about people being “foreign agents, domestic traitors”…
Our friend is the youngest councillor in the Niš City Assembly, and being a councillor gives her even greater responsibility. When people are deciding on issues about my life, I don’t want that to be a dirty game, I want them to be the kind of people like my friend. But then in the plenums we repeatedly had a no confidence vote for people who had been involved in politics before the student blockades, which I find problematic. Students don’t have an exclusive right to fight for justice, and we finally realised that after 15 March.
Dimitrije: What has kind of kept up the blockades these seven months are the demands that brought us together. Now, why, do I say “kind of”, well, because even after seven months we still haven’t synchronised those demands between all the universities in the country. Almost every university has its own version of the demands, which just goes to show how we’re actually unable to agree. Even though it may look good from the sidelines,, and I’m sure someone has even noticed that our demands are not all the same, thankfully that isn’t being held against us. As for the values that we keep mentioning, they sound good and they look good on paper, but what I have experienced is that when those values are put to the test, as in when we’re meant to show solidarity, then nothing happens.
It’s easy to have solidarity when we’ve seen that every time someone gets arrested, we go out into the streets and nothing happens, but when there’s a difficulty or an obstacle, why don’t we show solidarity then? The fact that we had the demands to lead us, that was great in a sense because we all knew to stick to that. But when the demands are no longer the primary thing that brings us together, I think that’s when things went sideways.
Something I had learned from earlier involvement in activism was that, actually, if there are more than two demands, no one even knows what the demands are anymore. For example, calling an election is really a much simpler demand, but it is completely the opposite of what we were talking about and demanding before.
How did your personal involvement in the protests begin? What was the moment when you got involved?
Marija: On 1 November, I was going from Niš to Belgrade, I had a workshop at FKM.
Dimitrije: I think I was at a café across the street from the faculty in Niš when I found out. Someone had seen the news. We didn’t understand how serious it was back then. By the end of that day, I understood…
Marija: It was interesting, I was supposed to be doing the workshop at FKM with a friend from Subotica who was supposed to arrive by train. It was also personal, because when the canopy collapsed, one of the victims was from my town, Anja Radonjić. In Niš, a blockade of the Rectorate had been announced for 4 December, and I was there from that moment on, because my faculty, the Faculty of Philosophy, was the first to join the blockade.
Dimitrije: The first thing that comes to mind is a scene from the Rectorate when the rector wanted to say, “So, what am I supposed to do now, talk to all of you?” and we all shouted “Yes!” and went to the amphitheatre. For me, the blockade began before the fourth. Time is very relative for me and I have the feeling that it’s been years. For months, I had been talking with friends from the journalism programme about how students should generally become more engaged, because there had been other protests before about things that are important to us and it was always about a dozen students coming out to protest and then nothing. We were talking about how to get other students involved, what we could do, and I remember that in that period, from 1 November to 4 December, I was very involved in actions related to free textbooks. It was a very active period for me and I remember we were preparing for a serious guerrilla action and I get a call from a friend who tells me she had been thinking about this for a while and she can’t believe nothing was being done in Niš. That FDU was blockaded, that there were other faculties in Belgrade that were blockaded, but we in Niš were silent, and how is that possible, where are the students of Niš, what is going on… We should do something… And then we started planning the protests and there were three or four of us who knew we would be showing up at the Rectorate and we invited practically everyone we thought would show up, would definitely be there. That morning when the Rectorate was meant to be blockaded, I remember, I got on my bicycle to rush off and get some canvas to paint on a red handprint, I buy the paints, and then a friend calls asking me to get her heart medication, so I go back to the pharmacy and then rush to their apartment…… So, I’m trying the paint the handprint on the canvas at their place, on the floor of a student room that is literally two by two meters. We were planning to paint it there, let it dry, but we didn’t have time. I jump in a taxi, I get to the Rectorate, we just draped that canvas down at the quay, just quickly daubed it with paint, and I rush into the Rectorate… in the taxi we were talking about how no one would show up, how we’d all get arrested, and about “who would bring them cigarettes when they get hauled off to prison”.
And then – the Rectorate was full, the amphitheatre was full and there were people in front. When we got there, I was overjoyed. Was this really happening? We realised it was possible to also blockade some faculties and we voted on blockading the Faculty of Philosophy. It’s interesting that we didn’t really know what blockading the Rectorate meant, because we were thinking, ok, so we go in , but what if there’s just five of us, what do we do there, how long do we stay?
How many times in these almost seven months have there been moments that you thought weren’t possible? Did you ever think you’d be going from Niš to Belgrade on foot?
Dimitrije: I was hoping for things like this, I must admit. In the early days of the blockades I jokingly said that we could walk to Belgrade, because I know they did that in the 1990s, but I really didn’t think it would come true, especially not that so many people would actually go on these walks. There were so many incredible moments, but then, of course, there is the question of the turning point when something incredible becomes probable and possible, because every protest and every walk and everything else, at some point you have to start planning it and so you know it will happen. I’m not an optimist by nature, but when it came to all the things we were organising, I was really optimistic, I was convinced we would succeed every time, You could just feel the enthusiasm in the air.
From an activist perspective, these are activities that require both physical and mental strength, they’re exhausting on every level, but they get people involved and the people from all those towns and villages, the magnificent welcomes in Belgrade and Kragujevac, it was all emotionally very powerful. How did you cope with all those emotions, which are all completely different? Fear is always present, because that’s the country we live in, how do you overcome your fear?
Marija: There were ups and downs, and we were really tired. Just before 15 February, ahead of the protest in Kragujevac, we were talking about how we felt deflated, we had been at plenums up to then, making decisions about what to do next, and then I walked from Jagodina to Kragujevac, and that was important for me. To see people welcome you like liberators, that’s not entirely true, they just see in you that you care about what they invested their lives in. Especially the older people, they invested their whole lives in this country and now they see that someone still cares about it, someone is walking here, someone wanted to pass through here, these young people want something, they have the will for something. Many had thought we were apathetic, apolitical, just looking at our phones and not caring about anything else, all of us just dreaming of going to America, moving there, or Canada, Germany… That has changed a lot. When it comes to fear: I run away. When it’s about talking, I think I could say anything, but when it comes to physical dangers, then I’m a coward.
I don’t think anyone would have the right to call you a coward, you have tremendous courage.
Dimitrije: I think I generally have a high threshold for fear, in the sense that where other people wouldn’t dare set foot, I go in headfirst. And my previous activism that I did was tied in with that a lot. And then these blockades gave me space where I could develop that part of myself and that means a lot to me. When I go to a protest and I’m just part of the crowd that’s there and walking around, I don’t feel good. It’s not quite the same experience as when I’m actively involved, in the sense that there’s also fear there and other emotions, happiness, joy, you can feel the energy, the crowd… I’m often using the megaphone and that interaction with the crowd means a lot to me. I usually don’t think about fear.
When we talk about things that symbolised change, what I saw was on 13 February, because the protest in Kragujevac was on the 14th, but on 13 February when students from Novi Pazar arrived in Kragujevac that evening, when there were shouts of “Kragujevac is the capital again” together with students from Kragujevac, with their DUNP flag, at that moment I felt one of the biggest changes I’d seen in this country, and that was that suddenly we all became – us, and that suddenly that part of Serbia was also joining the big river of change. How did you experience this? All the differences that were there, for example on 31 October last year, many have been overcome since.
Dimitrije: When I met people from different parts of Serbia, it really felt like we’d known each other for years, and that we’re all a team. We have the feeling that the people involved in the blockades, especially the people that are the most active, that walk, come to meetings, where there’s the most interaction… Among us there’s no: we’re from Pazar, we’re from Niš, we’re from Belgrade, we are all just one big community and I think that’s what motivates me the most, because I feel we can build that kind of society, where we can all be equal, where the solidarity we like talking about so much is really respected, fostered, lived.
Marija: When we were doing the protest in Niš, because the Faculty of Philosophy was providing accommodation for the DUNP students, we were looking for a place for iftar, because it was the month of Ramadan. And then when we walked over there, because that was during lent, they prepared lent-friendly mantije for us. The people I talked with see this as an opportunity to stay in their country, because this country belongs to us: people from DUNP, Niš, Paraćin, Kragujevac, Novi Sad.
Dimitrije: For me, the human component in all the people who become active is the most striking. I don’t think anyone is thinking about things like, going abroad or something, we are all just together. It’s more of a feeling, something in the air, not something that’s discussed. And it’s really special, because I hadn’t felt it before, especially not with so many people.
It’s very emotional to be thinking about making a society that’s good to live in, for me that’s the height of policy and the height of getting people involved, and people also feel it. Who did you feel most supported by, and who didn’t support you or who did their best to get in your way?
Marija: I grew up in a family that was never involved in activism or politics, I’m the one who got my family into politics. And my family supports me, most of all my mum, but not all of my extended family. I also have the support of friends, colleagues, people at the blockades. We were lucky with our dean, but she was also lucky because she’s at the end of her last possible mandate.
Dimitrije: Honestly, it’s not that my parents don’t support me, but they’ve always said: “Why are you doing this, what do you need this for.” Because I’ve been doing activism in general, they’ve always had this attitude of simply, I’m a maths student, from a completely different field, I’m into physics, programming, all these natural and technical sciences, so what am I doing going to protests, and do I really have to be in the front row, why do I need to be blockading, there’s other students… But, when the blockades started, I had a routine where I would be at the blockades for two days, I’d sleep a little at the faculty, then I’d go home to take a shower, get my things, and then I’d be back at the faculty. I didn’t need anyone’s support, except for the people at the blockades, and I think that’s what meant the most to us. We were all living in one home that we shared.
And what about other citizens, in what sense do other citizens provide you with support and in what sense is that support not what you need?
Marija: I woke up one morning and started thinking about what kind of country I wanted to live in. This is the story of the assemblies, when we started talking about it, it seemed like we had all progressed so much since the plenums and the blockades began. I can’t count how many times I would have an opinion about something, I would come to the plenum, hear some arguments and then see myself raising my hand for something I thought I would never vote for. That’s the impossible stuff. For me, that kind of support was the most important, that people got more involved in the assemblies, so you’d find out that this country is theirs, if only the local community, and then onwards.
Dimitrije: The IT people gave us a lot of support, that has to be mentioned.
At the time when we’re completing our Annual Report, there’s no end to the protests in sight. In the meantime, the students have issued a demand for snap elections that the government is refusing to call. During the summer, there were bloody clashes in the streets of various cities in Serbia, the repression is stronger, the government is using all the force it has (mostly unlawfully), so I want to ask you what you’d like to say at the end of this interview?
Marija: I really think we have changed, all of us. Maybe the change isn’t momentary, but we should really think about if in 20 to 30 years these students will be the ones making decisions in politics. Maybe that will be our golden age. Not golden in terms of money, but a golden age of democracy. I hope all of this will make me want to stay here. I really see a lot of hope in everything that has happened.
Dimitrije: Currently, I’m really living my twenties in their full glory and I think that at these faculties where we all exist collectively with other people of similar attitudes, we are literally making the country we want to live in a reality.
Interviewed by Katarina Milićević