Contention

This issue of Contention brings together four contributions that explore political action through different lenses and disciplinary approaches. The first two articles continue the special issue edited by Zorica Siročić in volume 13.2, “Creative Contention: Creativity in/of Social Movements.” As discussed in Siročić’s (2025) editorial, these contributions develop the special issue's focus on the inventive, affective, and socially transformative dimensions of contentious action.

This article offers a critical perspective on postmodern society, where consumer culture and contemporary capitalism dominate. Considering the muscular body as an artistic and analytical framework, it examines works by Cassils, Martial Cherrier, Lea Rasovszky, and Isa Fontbona. It also questions the boundaries of art, the creative agency within social structures, and the artist's capacity to incite social critique. Drawing on the social constructivist thought of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler; sociological perspectives on art; and a critical view based on the philosophical and sociological work of Byung-Chul Han and Jean Baudrillard, it explores the interaction between artistic expression, identity formation, and social norms. Ultimately, this analysis aims to highlight how art not only reflects but also resists and reconfigures dominant cultural narratives, fostering a space for critical reflection and transformative discourse.

This article conceptualizes grassroots sociocultural centers as democratic innovations, highlighting the (everyday) care and efforts that activists invest in creating new democratic spaces. It argues that these centers function as sites where activist citizenship is continuously made and remade through participation, interaction, and cultural expression. Drawing on democratic theory, feminist critical contributions, and theorizations of creativity and citizenship, it analyzes three cases from Southeast Europe—Magacin (Belgrade), Termokiss (Prishtina), and Jadro (Skopje)—examining how they use alternative knowledge and organizational practices to contest sociopolitical contexts and cultivate social connections and shared meanings. By identifying the plurality of meanings of democracy and innovation exercised in these centers, the article proposes a care- and affect-centered perspective on democratic innovations and recognizes these spaces as political actors shaping new participatory forms and contributing to the ongoing reimagining of democratic publics.

This research examines how individuals’ beliefs that criminal groups such as the Mafia act as community avengers are associated with the legitimization of criminal systems. Results from our study (N = 414) demonstrated that perceiving the Mafia as an efficient protector was linked with a tendency to romanticize this criminal organization and justify its connivance practices, which facilitates its activities. Furthermore, this belief was associated with individuals’ endorsement of masculine honor, while individuals’ appraisals of state justice were unrelated to their views of the Mafia. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the Mafia's ability to establish alternative systems of governance, challenging the state's monopoly on force, and underline the importance of understanding these dynamics in the global context.

Self-immolation is often interpreted as an extreme act of desperation. Scholars have long debated whether self-immolation may be categorized as violent or nonviolent protest; some point to cultural epistemologies and/or power relations in analyses of resistance. Binarist discourses on violence and protest obscure the multifaceted nature of repression, further normalizing structural and invisibilized violence. Drawing on critiques of the violence/nonviolence binary and theories of resistance, I argue that self-immolation is most accurately understood as an act of anti-violent protest, asserting the humanity and dignity of an oppressed community against the violence of the sovereign through necroresistance. The deep suffering caused by pre-existing dehumanization is made visible in this ultimate act of resistance that serves to dramatize otherwise invisible forms of systemic violence, making the theorization of self-immolation as anti-violent necroresistance vital to understanding protest.