Juraj Anzulovic

PhD student in Anthropology,

CUNY Graduate Center

anzulovicj@hotmail.com

 

The Fight for Flower Square: Protest, Symbolism, and Violence in Urban Zagreb

 

This conference paper discusses the acts of public demonstration and civil disobedience taken by an urban social movement to prevent plans to change Flower Square within Zagreb’s central district. Public displays of discontent started in the spring of 2009 with a large public demonstration and ended in the summer of 2010 with the violent removal of protesters by police. The paper shall concentrate on explicating how this conflict over public space can be used to demonstrate the development of new forms of authoritarian governance and political subjectivity. Specifically, the paper will attempt to analyze the process of interaction and negotiation between the two leading protest organizations and various state institutions as well as their interplay and spatial positioning during organized protests.

 

My curiosity clusters around the intersection between anthropological theories of value, space, violence and embodiment, and how these theories can help us to better understand the contemporary political transformations occurring within urban environments in South Eastern Europe. Before entrance into the PhD at CUNY I attended the London School of Economics where I achieved a MS in the Anthropology and Development program. Currently, I am an Adjunct Lecture in the Urban Studies Department in Queens College, CUNY.

 

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