Banners for the Age, Actions for the Young: Gen Z’s Reflection of Political Memory and Intergenerational Mobilization in the 2025 Serbian Student Protests

The paper examines student protests in Serbia in 2024/25 through the lenses of student banners and the messages used to communicate with civic allies who do not participate in university blockades. The research question is how a relatively small and hermetic student blockade, a reaction to the tragedy in Novi Sad and violence against students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, grew into the most significant protest movement in Serbia after 2015. The authors start from the theoretical perspective that students in blockades exhibit Generation Z communication patterns and that a communication gap exists between digital natives and digital immigrants (over 30 years of age). The empirical part of the paper draws on an archive of photographs of student banners. The research aims to identify the ideological content communicated by the banners across generations, making the 2025 protests one of the most successful examples of mass mobilization in Serbia against state capture and corruption in a hybrid-regime political context.