A new handbook is out, telling the stories of 11 activists from 7 countries across the Western Balkans who saw injustice and refused to stay silent.
From a feminist cinema built on a military island in Croatia, to student blockades that shook Serbia after a canopy collapse killed sixteen people, to a woman in Bosnia who fought until the law recognized children born of wartime sexual violence, “Resistance” documents a decade of guerrilla activism across the region: illegal, improvised, and effective.
Eleven activists. Seven countries. One shared refusal to look away.
Inside the handbook, you’ll meet:
🇭🇷 Marta Baradić (Croatia) — founder of Kino Katarina, a feminist open-air cinema that started with a stolen generator on an abandoned military island and grew into a decade of guerrilla screenings.
🇧🇦 Ajna Jusić (Bosnia and Herzegovina) — born from wartime sexual violence, she founded Forgotten Children of War and fought until Bosnian law recognized the existence of children like her.
🇷🇸 Siniša Cvetić (Serbia) — a student activist behind the university blockades that followed a canopy collapse that killed sixteen people, organized without formal leadership through anarchist plenums.
🇷🇸 Tijana Đuknić (Serbia) — cultural activist behind Mirëdita, Dobar Dan!, a festival connecting Serbian and Kosovar communities that was banned on its opening day after death threats.
🇲🇪 Katarina Stanišić (Montenegro) — co-founder of DKC Pomorandža, an independent cultural space built from an abandoned building and the will of people with nothing else in common.
🇦🇱 Doriana Musaj (Albania) — architect and activist who fought the demolition of Tirana’s National Theatre, and later saw a new generation of students take up the same fight.
🇦🇱 Sidorela Vatnikaj (Albania) — student activist in the faculty occupations demanding a university that treats students as human beings.
🇽🇰 Dibran Hoxha (Kosovo) — part of ORCA, the group that has thrown mud at the University of Pristina’s rectorate and exposed academic fraud with a 492-page dossier.
🇲🇰 Arianit Xhaferi (North Macedonia) — organizer of eco-guerrilla actions in Tetovo, including a concert held at the city dump and coffins carried through the streets to count pollution deaths.
🇲🇰 Sara Milenkovska (North Macedonia) — founder of Spodeli Avtorka, which has donated over 5,000 books by women authors to libraries across Macedonia, including a women’s prison ward.
🇲🇰 Ramadan Ramadani (North Macedonia) — civic activist from the Colorful Revolution, where paint bombs were thrown at a regime’s monuments until a government fell.
Resistance: A Guerrilla Tour of the Region is authored and edited by Ardit Ramadani, with design and layout by Vigan Demiri. Published by FECH, Forum for Educational Change, with the support of Open Society Foundations Western Balkans, as part of the Beyond Activism project.