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This article examines a recent wave of student-led protests in Serbia and describes how direct democratic practices—participatory plenums—have emerged as adaptive responses to political constraints in a hybrid regime. Sparked by a tragic infrastructural failure that caused the death of 16 people in Novi Sad in November 2024, the mobilization quickly spread across major university centers, combining blockades of higher-education institutions with decentralized tactics and calls for local engagement. Through the analytical lens of direct democracy, and guided by theories of deliberation, affects, and contingency, the article examines how students strategically navigate a landscape shaped by state capture, deepening autocratization, media domination, and limited channels for political agency. Based on interviews conducted at two university units in Belgrade and Novi Sad, the study illustrates how plenums function less as ideological commitments and more as pragmatic strategies for circumventing repression, facilitating collective deliberation, and maintaining agency. Although students recognize the challenges and limited scalability of these models, they emphasize the plenum’s ability to rebuild trust and serve as an effective public voice in a hostile environment. The article highlights the potential of direct democracy and flexible organizational forms for collective mobilization, challenging entrenched power dynamics in constrained political conditions.
Draško et al. (Wed,) studied this question.