Perspectives on Protest in Russia and the Balkan Peninsula

This chapter explores perspectives of ordinary people from Greece, Russia, Serbia, and Slovenia on the individual’s right to protest against war and in favor of peace, as well as different kinds of personal agency displayed in qualitative responses to a scenario in which police are described as beating peaceful protesters. Adopting Bronfenbrenner’s ecological approach, we first overview these countries’ recent history of conflict within and around their borders and their protests experiences as parts of the macrosystems in which views concerning the right to protest were shaped. Then, we examine patterns of responses to the right protest and to the police beating scenario using coding manuals informed by Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement and his notion of agency. We also investigate several contextual factors from the different ecological levels to see if they contributed to differences in perspectives. Greeks, Russians, Serbians, and Slovenians provided responses that their great majority supported the right to protest and expressed prosocial agency in the view of aggression. Implications and limitations of the study are also discussed.