Research Results and analysis of undue influence on the increase of violence in Serbian society

12 Jan Research Results and analysis of undue influence on the increase of violence in Serbian society

The research has shown that aggression and violence are so dominant in Serbian society that they have penetrated into all its pores. That is why it is so difficult to identify and map all of their “sources”, which in this paper are collectively labelled as “the culture of violence”. The broadest framework for maintaining the “culture of violence” is identified – both in the literature and research – in the terrifying consequences of the wars of the nineties, in the traumatic experiences that Serbian society was exposed to, but even more so in the disastrous refusal of the majority of society to face the trauma. Moreover, that trauma, which takes the form of a social anomaly, is “fed” by the glorification of war crimes, and by the maintenance and active promotion of a distorted value system that once served as a cultural support for wars and still serves as the main tool for the radical negation of the crimes committed. A break with this dominant cultural framework and the undue political influences on the increase in violence has never occurred.

Owning to the active instrumentalization of young people over many years by the state authorities, the focus in this paper was placed on only one manifestation of the culture of violence, namely stencils, graffiti and murals, as a relatively new form of expression and promotion of aggression. Other examples, however, such as traditional, analogue media, a strictly controlled educational system, kidnapped institutions, cannot be ignored. The political elite uses this type of media (urban spaces) as just one of the legitimizing formulas of their rule, because spreading fear and avoiding political responsibility through this becomes the rule and not the exception, which opens up the possibility of a long-term grip on power and democratic regression.

We conclude that in Serbia there is a direct and undue influence of the state and the media on the maintenance of a specific and widespread “culture of violence” and that
narratives dominated by aggressive vocabulary contribute to its maintenance, which is also due to the absence of a strategy to combat violence, and that the increase in violence and aggression in society, among other things, leads to an increase in femicide. In Serbia and beyond, from the wars of the 1990s onwards, violence in all its forms
became and remained the ultima ratio and as such maintained a high degree of credibility among the elected political elites, the media close to them and, indirectly, among a significant part of the population. We believe that the continuation of politics through violence cannot be a response to the general obsolescence of political practices and the impossibility of real political, economic and social transition.

The full research is available HERE

The research was conducted within the project ‘Why Do You Say Love When You Mean War?’ supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgrade through the MATRA program.