How Nobody Beat Somebody: On the Organizationality of Serbia’s Leaderless Students Movement

They have no leader, no party chairman, and not even an official spokesperson. Since protests erupted in response to the deadly collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, Serbia’s student movement has repeatedly been described as “leaderless”. Decisions are made in plenums, student assemblies at individual university faculties, complemented by working groups and coordination between universities. Public statements are issued collectively, and those speaking to the media regularly change.

Yet, movements rejecting charismatic leaders and personality cults are nothing new. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street similarly emphasized horizontal decision-making through general assemblies, refused to appoint leaders and mobilized around the collective identity of the “99%.” While this way of organizing succeeded in changing political discourse, the various Occupy movements that adopted consensus decision-making and decentralized autonomy struggled to translate its mobilization into enduring political institutions.

Turning protest mobilization into electoral success

The Serbian case is different. What started as a student protest movement gradually developed into a nationwide political organization, capable not only of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people but also of contesting elections. On 25 October 2026, its Student List – Students Win defeated Aleksandar Vučić’s political camp, winning just over 52% of the vote and a projected parliamentary majority. Remarkably, the movement accomplished this without abandoning its commitment to leaderlessness. An old political saying insists that “you can’t beat somebody with nobody.” Serbia’s students have just demonstrated that this is not necessarily true.

This is especially remarkable given that electoral politics is inherently person-centered. In Serbia, parliamentary elections use ranked, closed candidate lists, making individual candidates unavoidable. The students responded with several unusual organizational arrangements. Although their list includes 250 candidates, none are students themselves: candidacy was reserved for supporters from outside the student movement. Nominations came from student assemblies, while places on the national list were distributed among university cities according to student numbers. And unlike Vučić’s electoral list, the Student List deliberately omitted any politician’s name from its title. Consequently, Ilija Srdanović, the cardiologist heading the ranked list, rejected the designation of movement leader.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the movement’s commitment to collective authority came in September 2026. Vladan Đokić, the rector of the University of Belgrade and a prominent supporter of the movement, was widely expected to lead its electoral list. Instead, 43 out of 85 participating student assemblies voted to exclude him. The decision followed collectively adopted rules allowing assemblies to challenge candidates and remove them by majority vote. Not even a potentially prominent electoral figure could bypass these procedures.

Organizationality without individual leadership

From an organization theory perspective, this is an intriguing case. In a recent paper with Dennis Schoeneborn and David Seidl, I argue that organization should be understood neither exclusively as a formal entity with hierarchical structures nor so broadly as to encompass virtually every process of organizing. Instead, we propose the concept of organizationality: organization as a gradual quality of social collectives, depending on the extent to which they are attributed collective actorhood. This perspective directs attention to communicative practices that attribute agency to a collective rather than to particular individuals, thereby strengthening its status as an actor in its own right.

The Serbian movement illustrates the potential political importance of such attribution practices. By consistently avoiding identifiable leaders, political agency remained attached to the collective rather than individual activists. The public was invited to support “the students,” not a charismatic representative. This became particularly visible during the election campaign. A study by Serbia’s SHARE Foundation documents how the movement’s campaign largely spread through collective social media accounts, local assemblies, volunteers and supporters rather than individual candidates. Even the electoral victory was primarily described as a victory of the students. From an organizationality perspective, each such attribution further strengthened the movement’s status as a collective political actor.

A second potential advantage concerns the movement’s powerful opponent. Vučić’s political dominance has long rested partly on the personalization of politics, supported by a media environment in which opponents have frequently faced intimidation and smear campaigns. Leaderlessness complicated this strategy by denying the government a single person whose reputation could stand in for the movement as a whole. This did not prevent personal attacks. Indeed, Vučić suggested that former opposition politicians were secretly controlling the Student List, while government-aligned media targeted lead candidate Srdanović with allegations ranging from political disloyalty to supposed property ownership abroad. The latter claim was debunked by independent fact-checkers. But although individual candidates could be attacked, none was indispensable to the movement’s identity. The attacks ultimately failed to prevent its electoral victory. Leaderlessness offered no immunity from repression or defamation, but may have made the collective more resilient to both.

The Serbian example suggests that leaderlessness can be potentially powerful strategy even for electoral context. At the same time, it seems to be an organizational accomplishment requiring elaborate decision-making procedures, strict rules and the deliberate distribution of visibility. An organizationality lens helps explain why these practices matter beyond internal governance: they direct the attribution of agency, legitimacy and responsibility toward the collective itself. Whether the students can preserve this collective actorhood once their candidates assume parliamentary office remains an open question. After all, elected MPs cannot simply be recalled by the plenums. The movement’s extraordinary achievement may therefore also constitute its next organizational challenge: how to exercise political power without allowing that power to become permanently personalized.