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Volunteer Project Pakrac and its afterlives

Paul Stubbs

July 2013

I am honoured and humbled to have been asked to speak at this event. I came to Croatia as a

volunteer with Suncokret in May 1993 and visited Pakrac on many occasions as part of an

action research project in 1995 and 1996. I worked with Goran on the first Miramida in Pakrac.

And I was proud to be a founding board member of the Centre for Peace Studies. Since 2003,

from the relatively privileged position of a permanent job (if such a thing exists) in the Institute

of Economics, I have tried to write more, and more faithfully and consistently, if sometimes

controversially, about different waves of activism in Croatia and the wider Yugoslav and post-

Yugoslav space. In this sense, I think that when Goran describes me in the programme as

sociologistZagreb, as usual, he gets it spot on.

I really would not know where to start in answering a really important question: Did VPP

change Pakrac? I leave that for others, therefore. But, I do want to argue that VPP changed me,

and many friends, colleagues, fellow travellers, often in quite profound ways. I want to go

further and suggest that it had an impact on associational activism in Croatia and the rest of the

post-Yugoslav space. It even had an impact, perhaps more uneven and less tangible, on the

understandings of peacebuilding practice amongst key international organizations, including

those within the UN system. And last but not least, I would argue that it has had an impact on

sociological knowledge in and about the region. My own work, of course, has always tried to

address this - often at the risk of being accused of being too theoretical, too academic, too

remote from practice, too elitist. At the same time, the work of friends, notably Bojan Bili and

Vesna Jankovi, have begun to make a real difference to how the anti-war activities of the 1990s,

including VPP, are viewed as social and political phenomena.

So, let me take each of these four dimensions the personal/biographical; post-Yu activism;

international peacebuilding; and post-Yu sociology in turn. I learnt early on being in and

around people from ARK and VPP, the importance of I not as ego, but as the possibility of

individuals making a difference. To quote Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of

thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

As I look around this room, and remember others from whom I learnt and with whom I

collaborated, the amount of energy, innovation, courage, gathered together in one place at one

time back then was extraordinary. We did not always agree, but the differences were used assparks to create new transformative possibilities. It is not at all surprising that we have gone in

different ways, almost like an exploding star, but each of us carried that energy with us and I

suspect we infected others with the same disease the disease of daring to speak truth to

power. I learnt in and around ARK, VPP, and CMS the true meaning of the idea that the

personal is political, that peace begins within us, and that every interaction is a chance to make

real the idea that your enemy is just a friend you have not met yet. I cannot name names the

list would be too long. But you know who you are and I will never forget the gifts you gave me.

When I reflect on the impacts of VPP on associational activism in the Croatian and post-

Yugoslav space, I am perhaps a little more ambivalent. We have seen nothing like VPP since:

everything has become more formal, more rational, more logically framed, more professionalin the worst sense of the word. Less spontaneous, less anarchic, less risky, less courageous. I

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have called this, along with others, projectisation and NGOisation. Its an attitude, I think, as

well as a set of structures. Its not even about money. Its about trying things that most

supposedly sane people would call impossible. Its about not spending endless meetings

discussing the ideal organizational structure. Its about endlessly experimenting. What I have

described as third wave activism, a loose mixture of different movements and activisms, often

with a more overt leftist sensibility than VPP, have refound some of that spontaneity, I wouldsay, and I love them for it even if they have never heard of, or would simply locate VPP in a

prehistoric hippy age.

Since one of my closest friends is meant to speak later on the simple topic of how Pakrac

Peace-building spread throughout the world!, I will not say much about the international

dimension. But I do think that the Pakrac-Gornji Vakuf-Travnik connection was an important

one. It actually helped the UN understand Boutros Boutros Ghallis idea of peace -building. I

would say as well that VPPs model of a genuine partnership between so-called locals and so-

called foreigners did have an influence, albeit at the margins, and did revalue the importance of

local expertise, local knowledge and local activists in leadership positions. A literature certainly

emerged on peace-building and on the harm which overpaid and underskilled foreigners canhave.

In terms of sociology, and I realize few of you here care about this, Bojan Bili and I have just

written a text where we speak of the triple marginalisation of post-Yugoslav anti-war activism,

including VPP: marginalized in the story of the wars; marginalised in the literature on social

movements in Central and Eastern Europe; and marginalised in the global literature on political

contention. This is a ridiculous situation since, as Vesna Jankovi has recently written, VPP was

one of the first ever examples of a new kind of transnational activism, a kind of routed

cosmopolitianism which is now increasingly discussed in the literature. When we add to this

the pioneering use of Computer-mediated communication which was ZaMir, then it is really

important that this story be told. And, of course, having the space to tell that story, in differentways, is important. One of the audiences should be a global sociological community. At times, I

was frustrated that VPP attracted the interest of some of the most famous sociologists from

elsewhere but Croatian sociologists largely ignored it. More people need to know of the vast

experience gathered in this room. As Vesna Jankovi concluded: this was a laboratory of

activism which gave birth to new models of grassroots activism. There are no models there for

future activism. But there are lessons to be learnt about both the processes and forms of

interaction which VPP pioneered. I do not apologise for telling your stories and merging them

with mine. And I am glad that some of you are telling your stories now, in your own ways, and

continuing to make a difference. Thank you.