ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the decline in students' political power within contemporary Serbian society through a comparative analysis of the student revolts at the University of Belgrade in the 1990s and 2000s. The first major student protest at the University of Belgrade started in the spring of 1991, after the parliament passed a new bill, which restricted student activism. After the democratic revolution in 2000, the majority of citizens considered ideological issues to have been solved and, so, the political focus shifted to social issues and institutional reforms. The new political agenda only expanded to universities in 2005, when Serbia started to implement the Bologna process, with the goal of aligning the Serbian educational system with that of the majority of the other European states. A new law on higher education was introduced in 2005, in order to start this implementation. It became the trigger to reawaken student activism at the University of Belgrade.
