John Peeplefox

Regime attack on higher education

How Seselj's Law 2.0 is being prepared

The President of the Conference of Universities of Serbia and Rector of the University of Belgrade, Vladan Đokić, was faced with the act of practically defending the university by himself against 19 other members of the Working Group, for whom there are justified doubts that they will defend the party's interest, not the academic interest, even though there are people among them who know the difference very well. We cannot know what will be found in the new Law, although there is already a lot of speculation about it. It remains to be seen whether the Government will appoint rectors and deans, how renegade faculties will be punished under the tutelage of performance indicators and whether vouchers will be distributed.

Niš, two together

Student protest and SNS counter rally with hoods

On the same day in the same city, only half a kilometer away, those who rule and those who resist gathered. A folk singer sang to some of them, the image and occasion of those who invited him, while the others remained silent for 16 minutes. Some were eating free burgers and attacking journalists, while others were banging pots and pans. On May 17, Nis was a city divided into two realities, loyalty to the regime and civil disobedience

Bosnia and Herzegovina

He seems to be running away from them, they want to arrest him

Security and police agencies are supposedly arresting Milorad Dodik, and they are begging God to run away from them as much as possible. Similarly, some politicians in Banja Luka and Sarajevo are calling for Dodik's flight out of the country. In the meantime, the president of Republika Srpska flies freely, travels, crosses borders where no one stops him and threatens to respond with fire to the attempted arrest by the armed special forces guarding him, because it is their "constitutional obligation".

Organ transplantation

What does Serbia lack for an efficient system?

What are the problems of the local legal framework when it comes to the transplantation process? What would the changes in the law bring? Why are the citizens of Serbia in the most unfavorable position in the region when it comes to going abroad for transplants? What can we learn from the more than successful examples of Croatia and Spain

Inner voice

May = Mozart

Imagine that you wrote 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 22 operas, countless works of chamber and church music, concertos for violin, horn, clarinet, trumpet, flute, flute and harp, oboe, bassoon... And all this takes place in poverty, between tours, teaching, fights with censors and a stormy private life, of which marriage and parenthood are only one part. And it all happened in only thirty-five years

Interview: Vladan Joler, artist and professor

Unraveling the planetary communication system

In the frenzy of political events and dramas in Serbia, ten days ago, a spectacular multi-level event brought together academia, politics, architecture, Europe, Novi Sad, micropolitics and a top artistic event. The news that Vladan Joler, artist, professor at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad and founder of the "Share" foundation, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture resonated as if it were some kind of collective victory, or at least the promise of a good outcome.

Concerts

Music in the blood

Guitar Art Festival – Rosenberg Trio+2, Kolar's Endowment; Branko Bako Jovanović, National Theatre, Belgrade, 14/16. May 2025

In memoriam: Arsenije Arsa Jovanović (1932–2025)

A sound that remembers the ocean - the universe

Biennale in Venice

Unraveling - a film played from end to beginning

According to the choice of the global architecture website ArchiDaily, the Serbian pavilion was chosen among the five best at the Biennale of Architecture in Venice, and within that selection, our pavilion was listed in first place

History teaches us

Mr. King, you are not in charge!

When King Petar Ovlaš, in a private conversation, told Ljuba Stojanović that he expected Stepa Stepanović in the new government, the latter explained to him that even the ruler's wish expressed in this way contradicts the principles of the parliamentary monarchy. Because of this, the king had to apologize to him in the Assembly

Agreement on the meter

Relativity of one kilogram

Exactly 150 years ago, the meter and the kilogram were accepted as official units of measurement. The question is whether the kilogram today is the same as it was 150 years ago - but for now we have no reliable method to find out

Kiza's garage

Aleksandra Mirić, CSR consultant at Lidl Serbia KD

For our health and the health of the Earth

By 2050, our planet will be inhabited by 10 billion people. Scientists from the EAT - Lancet Commission team of the "The Lancet" editorial office, which has been dealing with current topics in the field of medicine for 200 years, came to important findings after several years of research and announced that the "Planetary Health Diet" is the only possible way for our Earth to manage to continue supporting nutrition for about 10 billion people until the year 2050, without being threatened

REM, second Public Call

Either we're all together or we're whitewashing for nothing

All the members of this body have never been changed. The election of Council members has never taken place in such a heated socio-political atmosphere. Brussels has never been so interested in the course and outcome of this process. Hence so much nervousness, passion and established illegalities for which no one has yet been held accountable

Personal attitude

Serbia and the European Union - is there an end to the "matchmaking"

Putin nevertheless received Vučić. If the latter is to be believed, Serbia will have as much oil and gas as our hearts desire. And a cheap one. I am afraid, however, of the folk saying "He who does not pay on the bridge, pays on the bridge". And if the situation could be even worse, this behavior of Vučić could "burn" all bridges and bridges towards the EU. And then there is neither the opening of clusters, nor the first 110 million non-returnable euros from the Growth Plan, nor European investments

Personal attitude

BOS research: Talking, not advocating

Young people in Serbia, aware of their capabilities, knowledge and ingenuity in leading the fight for justice, shook the foundations of the system that anesthetized its citizens (their parents), narrowed the spaces for them to talk, divided them into "citizens" and students in the blockade and directly confronted them. But how did they manage to shake the foundations of the system? Precisely thanks to the attitude that their every action exudes: Is there anything we can't do?

Inner voice

When war is declared on the university

Seseljization and pinkoization threaten to destroy the culture, identity and future of the entire nation. The defense of the university is not enough, but it is a necessary condition for the preservation of all those values

Personal attitude

Mass indifference

We could see what kind of attitude the government has towards the days it itself declared as Days of Remembrance for the Victims of Mass Murders last Saturday when, as part of the nationalist, populist and kitsch manifestation Belgrade Family Days, citizens were invited to laugh, dance at concerts, enjoy themselves with majorettes, and children to practice shooting accuracy, all on the day when a child in the center of Belgrade killed children and a guard at a school

Joseph Nye (1937–2025)

The departure of the creator of the idea of ​​"soft power"

Professor Joseph Nye passed away at the exact time when the concept of soft power, which he coined not so far back in 1990, is going through the greatest trials and challenges since its inception. Nye physically left this world on May 6, just when America most needed his insightful, calm, and comprehensive view of increasingly chaotic and competitive interstate relations and the role this still-only remaining superpower should play in them.

Theater

Energy from the depths of darkness

Maga Jelena Kajgo, directed by Boris Todorović and performed by the National Theater of Užice, A broken jug Heinrich von Kleist, directed by Tanja Mandić Rigonat and performed by the National Theater of the Republic of Srpska from Banja Luka

Cinema and streaming

Recognition mechanisms

Big bang, animated film, directed by Peter Browngard;
Havoc, directed by Gareth Evans

Concert: Non-governmental organization, MTS hall, Belgrade, May 10, 2025.

Playful and gentle

One of the symbols of the soaring Belgrade that became the world long before the protest slogan of 1996/97, Bezistan - the covered passage/inner square between Terazi and Nikola Pašić Square (ex Marks & Engels), the "navel of Belgrade" and an important place of popular culture in the sixties of the last century - in the violence of the current government to move the center of the capital of Serbia "on the water" with its multi-story corruption, was left to collapse, less and less passable if it would not spoil the nostalgia. It is still, in Čavket's passage, leaning on the House of the Syndicate, and in the mts (without the union?) hall last weekend, the sextet "Non-governmental Organization" reminded the most of its former leader Vladimir Divljan (1958, Belgrade - 2015, Vienna) for two evenings.

Interview: Anthony Clifford Grayling

Why war is the solution to our problems

"If something useful can be taken from difficult periods of upheaval and conflict, it is the determination to be more mature, more thoughtful and to seek strategies and agreements that will ensure and preserve peace, because peace is the basis for almost all the good that human beings are capable of"

Garden, silence, homeland

Research: Youth and the nineties

Years that were banished from schools and the public

"Honestly, I don't know if we would be here today if the war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia hadn't happened in the 1990s," one of the students at the protests told "Vreme". "Everything is connected. Because since the nineties, you have hatred between different nations, war and the like. Now you have hatred and also a kind of war, but within the same people, the Serbian people. We are talking about the government and us."

Personal attitude

Universities and government - the last round

The defense of the university is really the defense of the state and national interests. We all recognize what students have achieved. Now is the time for students to recognize that it is a moment for unity and building mutual trust. The differences between us are insignificant compared to our difference from the holders of autocratic power

Inner voice

Therapeutic love

Two complete strangers engage in a dialogue that could lead to the highest degree of trust ever gained, a newfound sense of belonging, acceptance and support, and ultimately the cessation of the ailments that initially brought us to therapy. And during all those conversations, for some people the most intimate they will ever have, something emerges that is not friendship, not family, not in love, not cooperation, but may, for both participants, contain traces of all that