Negotiating Civic Solidarity: Bosniak Students at the State University of Novi Pazar in Serbia’s Student Protests
This paper examines how Bosniak students at the State University of Novi Pazar (DUNP) understand and explain their participation in Serbia’s 2024/2025 student protests. Based on one month of qualitative fieldwork conducted in Novi Pazar, including 31 semi-structured interviews with Bosniak Muslim students active in the movement, the article argues that their participation cannot be understood solely through the general frameworks of student mobilization, anti-corruption protest, or democratic dissatisfaction. Rather, it must be analyzed in relation to Bosniaks’ minority position in Serbia, the peripheral status of Sandžak, Islamic self-identification, and the collective memory of the 1990s wars. The findings show that DUNP students do not enter the protest space as passive minority actors or representatives of a narrow ethno-national agenda. Instead, they articulate a form of civic engagement that combines demands for accountable institutions and democratic renewal with a critique of nationalism, institutional discrimination, and historical revisionism. The article argues that students understand their participation as a corrective intervention within the student movement, through which they seek to raise the question of a more inclusive social contract in Serbia.
Ivan Ejub Kostić
Ivan Ejub Kostić is Co-coordinator of the Research Group for Religious Studies and Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His research focuses on Islamic studies, political theology, Muslim political thought, social movements, minority politics, and the relationship between religion, nationalism, and political community. He is the author of Between Faith and the Nation: The Young Muslim Movement 1939–1990 (Izmeđe vere i nacije: pokret Mladi muslimani 1939-1990) and co-editor of the Wiley Blackwell Companion on Muslim Liberation Theologies (2026). His recent work examines Muslim communities in Europe, liberation theology, and post-socialist intellectual history.