The most important social upheaval in the post-socialist Balkans started in Bosnia and Herzegovina in February 2014. It was preceded in June 2013 by massive demonstrations whose initial aim was to put pressure on politicians to resolve the issue of citizens’ registration numbers, and then evolved into general anti-elite protests across communities and all sub-state units. On February 5, 2014 workers from several privatized and destroyed factories united in the streets of Tuzla to demand their unpaid salaries and pensions. Soon, they were joined by students and otfwalher citizens from major Bosnian and Herzegovinian cities.

The emergence and nature of these protests invites us to rethink the categories used to explain the social, political and economic situation in the Balkans, and elsewhere in post-socialist Eastern Europe. It also compels us to understand the nature not only of state institutions, their weakness or failure, but the nature of the post-socialist regime that has been (almost) cemented over the last two decades but susceptible to crack under the weight of its own contradictions and products such as, for instance, rampant poverty. Despite twenty years of supposed democratization efforts by the international community in Bosnia, the recent protests stand out as the major grassroots or democratization event since the 1992-1995 war, after which hardly anything will be the same.

Following the international scholars’ interests in the most recent protest in Bosnia and Herzegovina and drawing parallels between the motifs of the unrests in different Western Balkans countries, most notably direct democracy and activist citizenship, our goal is to build a research platform connecting Canadian and Western Balkans scholars, artists, poets, writers, activists and the like to participate in information sharing on the protests and plenums seen as responses to the systemic corruption and Europeanization challenges as well the perceived crisis of neoliberalism.