Fragments of a Transition to Nothing : Feminist Perspectives on Post-Socialism in Serbia

Sammanfattning: This thesis represents an attempt to challenge power hierarchies infusing white Western European academic and political fields. It constitutes a project, built on decolonial critique of privileges of research, that aims at attending to local and marginalised feminist perspectives in order to reach a deeper understanding for a complex and ambivalent Serbian post-socialist reality. A critical scrutiny of previous research conducted within the field of Comparative Politics and post-socialist feminist critique of academic knowledge, has led to the identification of problematic results of unequal distributions of power within politics and the academia. Moreover, through a historical overview of the geopolitical context and the feminist legacy of the region, the importance of contextualisation and the necessity of an epistemological and ontological shift within knowledge production has further been emphasised. Lastly, with a combining approach of qualitative interviews and autoethnography, lived experiences of postsocialism and its intersections with feminism have been sought and analysed. By highlighting women’s activism in democratisation processes and the severe socio-political problems facing contemporary Serbia, these experiences problematize the hegemonic Western projections of a post-socialist transition as an elite project towards ‘progress’ and Europeanisation.