Representation and its limits: 2020 protests against curfew

Abstract

The paper deals with the ways in which representatives (both Serbian government officials and opposition politicians) described the protest against the curfew in 2020 and its participants. From the perspective of the ?constructivist? turn in scholarship on representation, the paper branches into two main lines of enquiry: 1) what did the representatives say about the protests and the protesters; 2) how did they (re)define the represented and their relationship towards them. The representatives recontextualise the protests: translate the incidents and the lack of well-articulated demands into a narrative about violent demonstrations and unrepresentable protesters. Consequently, they ignore and delegitimise possible systemic reasons for discontent, desubjectivise a significant number of protesters and, in turn, exclude them from the process of representation.