Go to the “Topics & inputs” BAB2025 webpage: https://bab2025.espivblogs.net/topics-inputs/
Dear comrades,
We address this call on the occasion of the 17th Balkan Anarchist Bookfair (BAB) that will take place this year in the city of Thessaloniki (15-18 May). It is an annual meeting of various groups from the Balkan geography, mainly but not only, and although it started as a book festival, it has never been about books. Its purpose was and is to serve as a tool to strengthen groups, collectives, relationships, and networks at local and pan-Balkan levels. It is a meeting that we perceive as a place where we exchange ideas, analyses, and practices on organization models and experiences of struggle that have emerged through our participation in social movements. Through it, we attempt to formulate substantive proposals for future steps to address important issues of our time collectively and with a perspective of organization and struggle. We want this meeting to help us manage the challenges that our movements and societies face in the context of political, economic, and social capitalist reality.
Giving the necessary attention and importance to the hosting of such a meeting in the city of Thessaloniki, several groups, collectives, and solidaritians of the city are in the process of meeting and discussing so that this year’s BAB will be a milestone of essential co-construction and interaction between the people who frame it. Although, due to the international context, this year’s event will have a mainly anti-war character, space is given to developing various themes around anti-authoritarian action and proposals for the local movements and networks to meet and interact. One such theme is that of “Anarcho-queer feminism in the Balkans: meeting for struggles against patriarchy, femicides, and gender oppression”, which we aim to make a key theme of this year’s event, picking up the thread from the similar work done in previous BAB meetings.
We perceive patriarchy as an integral part of the state and capital but one that retains its relative autonomy as another grid of power in our lives. In recent years, and particularly after the #Metoo movement in Greece, we have seen gender issues emerge into the public sphere and claim visibility as gender violence – from femicide to assaults and murders of queer subjects and those who do not conform to their gender – seems to be rapidly increasing. At the same time, our reproductive rights continue to be constantly targeted by state policy and religious rhetoric (see. the 2018 “Let Me Live” campaign and 2019 establishment of the Day of the Unborn Child by the Holy Synod). As nationalisms rise and we observe the rise of social and institutional conservatization, we see our bodies either being degraded into the nation’s reproduction machines under the pretext of “demographic decline” to provide young soldiers ready to die for the motherland or subjected to violent imposition procedures by male bodies in wartime. In such a condition, the need to collectivize our struggles and demands on a pan-Balkan level transcends the specificities of each locality and calls us to join forces to meet and exchange concerns, experiences of struggle, forms, and ways of organizing.
So, we invite you to participate in this year’s BAB event on anarcho-queer feminism in the Balkans. What we would like is to present a framework from groups in the Balkans on events, movements, struggles, and ultimately, an anti-authoritarian/anti-authoritarian/autonomous proposal/approach on gender issues that reflects the reality we are experiencing today. At this point, we would like to stress that we are mainly interested in an equal presentation of views, not only groups. We do not want a repetition by different speakers of the same opinion, with variations (but also not of the obvious things that supposedly unite us). But we also don’t want polemics on the points where we disagree. We want everyone’s views to be owned by everyone clearly and inclusively.
Regarding the composition of the panel of speakers, we have already sent a call to some groups in Greece and are waiting for a reply. We would certainly like to emphasize the experiences of more groups from the rest of the Balkans so that there can be an exchange and an update on the experiences in other Balkan countries. We suggest that all contributions should be summarized, while detailed texts of the contributions by geography should be sent and translated into English by the end of March 2025 so that they can be uploaded in time in a special area on the BAB website and their content can be known to all. We suggest this so that during the BAB, there is more time for discussion after the initial contributions since there will be several speakers.
Go to the “Topics & inputs” BAB2025 webpage: https://bab2025.espivblogs.net/topics-inputs/