ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the 2014 Social Uprising, triggered by a workers’ rally in the former industrial hub of Tuzla. What began as a demonstration in response to the closing of factories in the area and to reclaim months of unpaid wages, rapidly turned into the largest and most violent unrest in the post-war history of the country. The Social Uprising manifested no ethnic character in its content and spread almost state-wide – although predominantly all over the Federation of BiH. The chapter explores in-depth the context of Tuzla, where the protest broke out; it unearths the actors of the protests and their organizational structure, focusing in particular on the citizens’ assemblies known as plena, constituted in the aftermath of the initial riots. Next, the chapter investigates the factors allowing a workers’ rally to spark mass protests in a number of BiH cities and to broaden the social base of protesters to diverse groups: the role of resources, the discursive frames devised for the protests, which insisted on socio-economic justice, and the change of action repertoire from an initially violent and disruptive to a peaceful one, also as a consequence of the moral outrage provoked by the use of violence against the demonstrators.
