Stanford University Press After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia

What happens to student activism once mass protests have disappeared from view, and youth no longer embody the political frustrations and hopes of a nation? After the Revolution chronicles the lives of student activists as they confront the possibilities and disappointments of democracy in the shadow of the recent revolution in Serbia. Greenberg's narrative highlights the stories of young student activists as they seek to define their role and articulate a new form of legitimate political activity, post-socialism. When student activists in Serbia helped topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000, they unexpectedly found that the post-revolutionary period brought even greater problems. How do you actually live and practice democracy in the wake of war and the shadow of a recent revolution? How do young Serbians attempt to translate the energy and excitement generated by wide scale mobilization into the slow work of building democratic institutions? Greenberg navigates through the ranks of student organizations as they transition their activism from the streets back into the halls of the university. In exploring the everyday practices of student activists-their triumphs and frustrations- After the Revolution argues that disappointment is not a failure of democracy but a fundamental feature of how people live and practice it. This fascinating book develops a critical vocabulary for the social life of disappointment with the aim of helping citizens, scholars, and policymakers worldwide escape the trap of framing new democracies as doomed to failure. Review After the Revolution is an excellent, articulate book that presents a detailed and lively historical and ethnographic analysis of the forms of political engagement that followed the Serbian revolution . . . [I]ts trenchant, illuminating analysis of the everyday semiotic categories of time, space, and praxis underlying revolutionary and postrevolutionary politics will also have broad and lasting relevance to scholars and students in many disciplines and areas.--Paul Manning " Slavic Review" After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia offers rare insight from an anthropological perspective into life in Serbia following the end in 2000 of Slobodan Milosevic's rule for more than a decade . . . These . . . compelling glimpses into political life in higher educational institutions in Serbia are a testament to the anthropologist's ability to accumulate valuable knowledge through long-term participant-observation and proficiency in the local language.--Gerard A. Weber " Reviews and Critical Commentary (CritCom)" [ After the Revolution is] a very welcome and methodologically distinct repositioning in the field of transition studies. Students and scholars of democracy will therefore find [it] stimulating. [It is] equally exemplary for the comprehensive interrogation of the analytical preoccupation with democratic institutions and procedures to the detriment of citizen practice.--Dan Mercea " Perspectives on Politics" At a time when manifestos on the politics of hope abound, it is precisely through such historicization that Greenberg's book constitutes an important intervention beyond the study of Serbia, too . . . Greenberg's sophisticated book offers ethnographically informed food for thought on the politics of disappointment, and therefore of hope, today. This is political anthropology at its best.--Stef Jansen " Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute" Greenberg situates her insightful and well-written ethnography in the aftermath of Milosevic's toppling....By showing how neoliberal practices offered an appealing set of solutions to the social constraints in which activists found themselves, Greenberg's book overcomes one of the most common shortcomings of critical studies of neoliberalism....This nuanced attention to the local dynamics of neoliberal reform does not mean that After the Revolution