| In contemporary Belgrade, ordinary people attempt to live under extraordinary conditions. Meanwhile, an authoritarian regime endeavors to remain in power by limiting the strategies and resources available to them. This study examines official attempts to narrow the range of alternatives and ground-level efforts to keep options open in four fields of everyday life: politics, public information, popular music, and economics. The research aims to offer a realistic and holistic picture of everyday life in authoritarian regimes, supplementing conventional political and strategic analyses by taking into account how ordinary people actually live.;In the political field, monopolistic control of political institutions weakened and undermined potential political opposition, compelling people to seek alternatives to the regime in other fields. In the field of public information, control of media enabled the regime to promote nationalist client armies and discredit political opponents while suppressing inconvenient information, while independent journalists worked to maintain non-regime sources of information despite official pressure. In the field of popular music, the neo-folk and rock-and-roll subcultures became objects of regime strategy and emblems of political and cultural orientation. In the field of economics, hyperinflation, shortages, and poverty constrained people's ability to engage in social activity and communication. The analysis emphasizes how the limiting factors of war and sanctions enhanced the regime's ability to limit the options people had available, and explores the strategies and techniques people adopted to live their own lives in an environment which discouraged it.;The dissertation is intended to explain the emergence and persistence of nationalist-authoritarian regimes in the Balkans, avoiding the cultural essentialism of "ethnic" conflict and the political reductionism of the "resurgence of Communism." Detailed examination of the everyday life of Belgrade reveals a society deeply divided between older, rural, people who fear change and support the regime, and younger, urban people whose increasing alienation leads them to seek their alternatives in private life, or in other countries. |
