Call for Participation on the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2026 

Skopje, 24–27 September

Open Call for Programme Participation and Moderation. We want to collectively open a space for discussion rooted in real struggles, lived experiences, and ongoing organising. This is an open call to take part in a series of discussions built around the themes of the BAB26 call, areas that we see as crucial for collective reflection, analysis, and action across the Balkans today. https://bab2026.espivblogs.net/2026/05/29/programme-call/

To invite comrades, collectives, publishers and initiatives to the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2026, taking place in Skopje between the 24-27th September, is an occasion that fills us with excitement and inspiration.

We are excited and motivated to invite comrades, collectives, publishers and initiatives from the Balkans and beyond to Skopje for the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2026, taking place from 24 to 27 September. With tenacity and care, we take on the responsibility of hosting this moving gathering of resistance, solidarity and self-organization. We look forward to welcoming you to share four days of encounters, discussions, disagreements, learning, organizing, and collective struggle.

After fifteen years, the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair returns to Skopje, where it was last held in 2011. It returns to a completely changed city, a transformed region and a radically altered global context. What remains unchanged is the need to meet, organize, exchange, and resist together. The return of BAB to Skopje is not a nostalgic gesture, but a political necessity: to reconnect old and new struggles, to strengthen regional and international ties, and to confront the realities of the present with collective force. A new movement of anarchy is once again being mobilized in this city shaped by contradictions, devastation and survival. New collectives, informal groups and initiatives are emerging, reconnecting with past struggles while opening new fronts of resistance. Skopje is once again becoming a terrain of confrontation with the state, capital and all forms of domination.

Wars are no longer exceptional events – they are becoming the everyday condition of the world. Imperialism is no longer hidden behind diplomatic masks, but openly reshaping borders, lives, and futures. New technologies are developed behind closed doors of private ownership, while their consequences are imposed on all of us: artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, algorithmic control of labor, education, health, war and entertainment. We are excluded from the data, the decisions, and the infrastructures, yet forced to bear their burden – increasingly as targets of militarization and social control.

At the same time, a new wave of reactionary politics is rolling back decades of struggle. Anti-gender movements attack women, queer and trans people with renewed violence. Patriarchal, nationalist and religious forces are mobilizing fear and resentment, shaping new generations with old hierarchies. The economic machine of capitalism continues its endless destruction, breaking new records each year in ecological collapse, exploitation, displacement and social misery.

These crises are not separate. They form one interconnected landscape of domination. They are the logical outcome of state power, capitalist accumulation, technological control and social hierarchy.

In the Balkans, these global processes take on particularly brutal and visible forms. The region continues to be treated as a semi-peripheral laboratory for austerity, privatization, corruption and extraction. Rivers are being dammed, forests sold off, mountains turned into mines, and cities reshaped for speculative profit while entire communities are left without water, clean air or secure livelihoods. Ecological destruction advances hand in hand with unemployment, forced migration and the dismantling of what remains of social infrastructure.

At the same time, new and recycled populist regimes, nationalist projects and authoritarian governments are consolidating their power through fear, militarization, misogyny, racism and historical revisionism. The borders of the Balkans remain zones of detention, pushbacks and death for people on the move, while local populations are disciplined through debt, precarity and permanent crisis. Yet across the region, struggles continue: against hydropower plants, extractionism of water and land, evictions, police violence, gendered oppression, fascist organizing, border regimes and workplace exploitation. These struggles are often isolated – and this is precisely why we need spaces like the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair to connect, to coordinate, and to resist together.

Against this grim reality, we are faced with a shared task: to respond revolutionarily and radically. To rethink our strategies, rebuild our networks, and sharpen our practices of resistance. To find the cracks in the system and act there, together.

The Balkan Anarchist Bookfair has existed for more than a decade as a space for precisely this: not only for books, but for encounters, debates, disagreements, learning, organizing, care, frustration and renewed strength. It is a moving gathering that refuses to be fixed in one place, reflecting the realities of our region and the need for constant recomposition of struggles.

In 2026, the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair will take place in Skopje, from 24 to 27 September.

Skopje is a city of layered histories of struggle, revolt, repression and survival. A city where cultures meet and clash, where urban space is constantly contested, where new generations are once again forming groups of resistance under increasingly harsh conditions. From workers’ struggles to antifascist organizing, from feminist and queer resistance to ecological and neighborhood fights – Skopje is not only a site of crisis, but also of potential.

We invite anarchist collectives, publishers, infoshops, autonomous initiatives, informal groups and individuals from the Balkans and beyond to come together in Skopje to share experiences, analyses, tools and practices. We invite you to bring your books, zines, texts, posters, discussions, workshops, films, skill-shares and proposals. We invite you to bring your struggles, your doubts, your questions and your anger – as well as your energies and desires for another world.

The Balkan Anarchist Bookfair is not an event of spectators and speakers, but a common space we build together. It is a place to meet comrades from different contexts, to learn from each other’s defeats and victories, to argue, to disagree, to support each other materially and politically. It is a place to strengthen translocal and internationalist ties against borders, states and capital.

In a time of war, authoritarianism, patriarchal backlash, ecological devastation and technological domination, we insist on organizing without rulers and without bosses. We insist on solidarity instead of competition, self-organization instead of representation, direct action instead of delegation.

Further details on participation, the political framework, logistics and deadlines for contributions will follow in the coming months. We ask you to translate this call in your own languages, share it with us, put it on your platforms and share it on your communication channels. 

PROGRAMME CALL
Open Call for Programme Participation and Moderation

We want to collectively open a space for discussion rooted in real struggles, lived experiences, and ongoing organising.

This is an open call to take part in a series of discussions built around the themes of the BAB26 call, areas that we see as crucial for collective reflection, analysis, and action across the Balkans today.

We are looking for contributions grounded in concrete, on-the-ground experiences: organising efforts, points of resistance, practices of care, and forms of solidarity. The aim is to go beyond what we are against, and to deepen the praxis of what we are building and, through that, to strengthen connections between comrades, initiatives, and groups.

We invite you to think about where your experience, analysis, or ongoing work fits within these themes. Where are you already involved? What struggles are you part of? What can be shared, questioned, or developed together?

If you want to contribute to a session, write to us with:

The session where you want to give your contribution (from the list below)
A short outline of your proposed contribution

The sessions are currently concepts, the programme will change based on the contributions and concepts that we will receive from comrades that want to take part.

We are also looking for comrades to take on the role of moderators/facilitators to guide discussions and ensure they remain focused, participatory, and grounded. This will be preceded by an online coordination call for facilitators/moderators, open to everyone interested in taking on this role.

This is an invitation to shape the discussions together, as subjects of a shared process of thinking, organising, and building.

Get in touch via email: bab2026@riseup.net

Programme Themes & Sessions

1. Internationalism, Organising & Utopias

[on building movements, collectives and organising struggles, where do we fail and where do we prevail, what does the BAB mean]

We want to open up questions of how we organise across borders while remaining grounded in the specific realities of the Balkans. We want to go beyond abstract internationalism and focus on the infrastructures, relationships, and practices that sustain movements over time. What does it mean to build collectively across fragmented territories, languages, and political contexts? Where do our organising efforts break down, and where do they persist? What are our concrete experiences of building collectives, sustaining struggles, and creating forms of life that prefigure what we are fighting for?

Session: Building Autonomous Spaces & Protecting Them

Autonomous spaces remain one of the few material bases for organising outside state and market control. This session will focus on the concrete realities of creating, maintaining, and defending spaces in the Balkans. (squats to social centres). We want to hear about legal pressures, eviction threats, self-financing, internal dynamics, and relations with the surrounding community. Rather than romanticising these spaces, we also want to discuss their contradictions and limits, while insisting on their necessity as infrastructures for collective life, organising, and resistance.

Session: Decolonisation in the Context of the Balkans

With this session, we want to engage with decolonisation as a necessary but contested framework in the Balkans. We want to examine how colonial and Eurocentric narratives shape both dominant discourse and radical spaces, often positioning the region as peripheral, backward, or in need of intervention. We want to focus on reclaiming local histories, practices, and identities as sites of resistance, while critically engaging with internal hierarchies and contradictions. We want to articulate a Balkan anarchist decolonial perspective that is grounded in the region’s specific conditions without reproducing external frameworks.

2. Ecological Destruction, Extractivism & Territorial Struggles

[on mining, green capitalism, privatisation processes, blockades]

Ecological struggles in the Balkans are inseparable from questions of land, survival, and political economy. We want to bring discussions on extractivism, privatisation, and so-called green transitions as processes that restructure territories and displace communities. We want to centre resistance practices, blockades, local organising, and defence of land, while connecting them to broader regional and global dynamics.

Session: BLOCKADES: A Method of Defence

Blockades are increasing across the Balkans as a direct and tangible way of defending land, resources, and communities. This session invites comrades involved in blockades, against extraction, infrastructure projects, evictions, or state violence to share concrete experiences. What makes a blockade effective? How are blockades organised, sustained, and defended? What are their limits/what do they achieve, and do they fail? We want to move beyond symbolism and look at blockades as a strategy: how they interrupt flows of capital and power, how they build collective strength on the ground, and how they can connect across struggles.

Session: Ecology, Energy & Extractivism in the Balkans

Across the region, extractive projects like mining, hydropower, energy corridors, etc., are reshaping landscapes and displacing communities. How do we move from shared analysis to coordinated action? We invite initiatives and collectives to reflect on their struggles and explore concrete ways of linking them: sharing resources, building regional solidarities, and developing common strategies against extractivism and energy regimes imposed from above.
Session: THE BALKAN EATS EUROPE’S GARBAGE – Transitions to What or What Kind of Transitions/ Greening in the name of?

“Green transition” is increasingly used to justify new forms of exploitation. As states under the pretence and driven by limited commitments to align with the neoliberal european integration, continue to serve up the Balkans as a dumping ground for waste, for harmful industries, for outsourced “solutions.” This session questions the dominant narrative of transition. What kind of future is being built, and for whom? We want to critically engage with state policies, the neoliberal european integration, and the language of sustainability, while opening space to imagine and articulate transitions rooted in local needs, autonomy, and ecological justice.
Session: Access to Food & Food Safety

The Balkans produce and export vast amounts of food, yet access to nutritious, safe, and locally produced food remains limited. Instead, markets are flooded with imported and low-quality food. This contradiction reflects a broader system shaped by debt, export-oriented economies, and external control. This session looks at food not just as a commodity, but as a question of power and survival. How do we reclaim access to food? What practices already exist, from small-scale production to collective distribution? And how can these be strengthened and connected?

Session: Most of Our Production is Not Centred Around Human Needs.

This session aims to discuss how much of the individual responsibility and so-called lifestyle changes matter while leaving systems of production untouched. At the same time, most production remains organised around profit, not human or ecological needs. This session holds that tension. How do we relate to ecological ways of living without reproducing guilt-driven or depoliticised narratives? What does it mean to take responsibility collectively? We invite reflections on everyday practices, limits, and contradictions, and on how individual and collective approaches can meet in ways that challenge, rather than accommodate, the existing system.

3. Technology & the Age of Surveillance

We want to look at the technologies we rely on daily, such as platforms, devices, infrastructures, and the conditions under which they are produced. Decisions about them are made elsewhere, while their consequences are lived here. How do we claim these systems, is there a possibility to build our own, or should we refuse them? Through these sessions, we want to discuss the growing dominance of capitalist technology in everyday life and the ways it is tied to surveillance, extraction, and power. We want to ground this discussion in the realities of the Balkans, where these systems are imposed upon us.

Session: How the Balkans are Surveilled

Surveillance in the Balkans is not just cameras or data collection, but it is embedded in political dependency, border regimes, and digital infrastructures largely shaped from outside the region. States adopt surveillance technologies through deals with foreign companies and institutions, often justified through security, migration control, or “modernisation,” with little public accountability. At the same time, people are tracked through welfare systems, workplaces, and digital platforms, creating layers of control that are unevenly distributed but widely felt. This is not a distant or abstract process. It affects movements, access to resources, and the ability to organise. At the same time, the discourse around surveillance tends to paralise organising efforts in endless discussions for precaution and fear. Yet, practices of resistance already exist, hence through this discussion, the question is not only how surveillance operates, but how we can build alternatives in our organising and in our society.

Session: Technology of Everyday Life

The technologies that structure daily life are produced through global systems of extraction and labour exploitation. From mining materials to assembling devices to managing data, this production chain is distant, opaque, and organised around profit. As these technologies become essential for communication and access to services, opting out becomes increasingly difficult. This creates a contradiction: we rely on systems we do not shape. The issue is not simply overuse, but a lack of collective control. We want to discuss how alternative forms can emerge.

Session: AI Transition to What and for Whom

The expansion of AI is often framed as inevitable progress, but it is built on material infrastructures that are resource-intensive and profit-driven. Data centres require vast cooling systems, consuming water and energy at large scales but also reshape human thinking, living and behaviour. This transition deepens existing inequalities and ecological pressures. Combatting it does not mean rejecting technology entirely, but confronting how it is developed and imposed. This includes exposing its material costs, resisting its integration into systems of control, and building alternatives that prioritise collective needs over optimisation and profit. What is the AI transition in the Balkans, how can we fight the extraction, how can we connect the struggles?

Session: Technology-Medicine Complex

Technology plays a crucial role in medicine. At the same time, as such technologies enter broader markets, they become standardised and absorbed into everyday life, leading to widespread dependence that extends beyond their original purpose. This creates a tension. On the one hand, technology can expand possibilities and reduce barriers in building our autonomy. On the other hand, it can enforce isolation through self-diagnosing, replace collective forms of care, and shift responsibility onto individuals. The response cannot be to limit access, but to rethink how these technologies are used. The aim of the discussion is not just access and definition to tools, but conditions that make their use meaningful, supported, and collectively sustained.

4. Understanding Capital & the Depolitization of Everyday Life

[on political economy, debt, structural adjustment, erosion of public services]

Across the Balkans, state produced austerity is a long-term condition that shapes how people live, work, and relate to one another. Debt, structural adjustment, and integration into global markets have systematically eroded public services, weakened labour protections, and shifted the burden of survival onto individuals and informal networks. At the same time, these processes are framed as technical or inevitable, removing them from political debate and everyday contestation. These sessions focus on making these dynamics visible again as political. How does capital organise daily life, what we can afford, how we access care, how we imagine the future? How does debt function not only as an economic mechanism but as a form of discipline? And how do we resist the fragmentation and isolation that austerity produces, while building forms of collective support that do not simply compensate for state withdrawal but challenge it?

Session: SAP in the Balkans – The Expense of Life

Structural adjustment programmes and ongoing economic “reforms” have reshaped the Balkans around privatisation, deregulation, and fiscal discipline. The result is a steady increase in the cost of living, housing, energy, and food, while wages remain low and insecure. Debt becomes a normalised condition at every level: states and households are all bound into cycles of repayment that force society into capitalisation at the cost of life. Flash reports and shared testimonies can help map how these pressures are felt across different contexts, making visible patterns that are often individualised. At the same time, mutual aid continues to emerge as a response, informal, often fragile, but essential. The question is how these practices can move from emergency support toward more sustained, organised forms that confront the conditions producing the crisis.

Session: Building Mutual Care

Austerity and crisis do not affect everyone equally. More vulnerable people, such as women, queer, trans, and people with disabilities, often face intensified precarity, violence, and exclusion, especially as states are becoming more hostile. In this context, grassroots mutual aid becomes not only a means of survival but a necessary form of resistance. This session aims to reflect on building forms of “liberated support”. What does it mean to organise care collectively, in ways that are autonomous and politically grounded? What resources, material, emotional, logistical, are needed, and how can they be sustained? At the same time, we want to address the limits and pressures of this work: burnout, scarcity. The aim is to strengthen practices that both support lives now and contribute to longer-term collective power.

Session: Now Is the Time to Self-Organise

Many of the “pet projects” founded and funded by the west donors which are aimed at enclosing and depoliticising struggles, are losing relevance and power due to the crack in the “international development complex”. The existing system of ngos, built on dependency, competition, and the adaptation of struggles to fit funding criteria rather than collective needs, is beginning to crack. This creates an opening to return struggles to the people and shift toward grassroots organizing in the Balkans. As these conditions change, a key question emerges: what does it mean to organise without serving the interests of international landlords? Self-organisation is a political necessity that can reorient movements toward autonomy. This requires rethinking resources, how they are generated, shared, and sustained, through collective contributions, solidarity networks, and alternative economies. At the same time, this is not a romantic return to scarcity. It means confronting real material limits while building infrastructures that can endure without western influence. The challenge is to move from dependency toward forms of organisation that are rooted, resilient, and capable of shaping their own direction.

5. War, Borders, Fascism & Authoritarianism

[increasing militarization, necrocapitalism, repression, endless wars]

Across the Balkans and beyond, increasing militarisation, repression, and the expansion of borders are reshaping everyday life. These processes are tied to broader dynamics of necrocapitalism, where profit and political control are built on the management of life and death, through war, displacement, and exclusion. Authoritarian tendencies are not isolated; they are reinforced through alliances between states, security infrastructures, and capitalist interests, producing a condition of ongoing, normalised crisis. These sessions focus on how these dynamics are experienced and resisted. How do war, borders, and repression structure movement, labour, and survival? What forms of organising emerge in response, and where do they encounter limits? At the same time, how do we confront the growth of fascist tendencies without isolating these struggles from broader political and economic conditions?

Session: International Solidarity – Challenges of Organising Across Struggles

International solidarity remains necessary, but difficult to sustain in practice. Efforts to connect struggles, from Sudan to Palestine and across the Balkans, often face fragmentation, distance, and uneven access to resources and information. Solidarity risks becoming symbolic rather than material, especially when connections are not grounded in ongoing relationships and shared organising. This session asks how solidarity can move beyond statements and moments of mobilisation. What are the concrete challenges in building and maintaining these connections? How do we navigate differences across contexts while still acting together? The focus is on developing forms of solidarity that are sustained, accountable, and capable of responding to changing conditions.

Session: Migrant Camps, Border Regimes & Labour on the Periphery

The Balkans remain a key site in Europe’s border regime, shaped by asymmetric agreements that externalise migration control. Migrant camps, pushbacks, and increasing militarisation, particularly in border zones, are part of a system designed to contain and manage movement. At the same time, states are increasingly importing workforces, creating new forms of economic migration bound to precarious labour conditions & further intensifying generalised precarity. These dynamics are interconnected. Borders do not only exclude; they also regulate labour, producing a workforce that is controlled, disposable, and unevenly protected. This session looks at how these systems operate across the periphery and into Europe. It also opens space to connect with comrades across the region, sharing experiences and building links that challenge both border violence and labour exploitation.

Session: Rise of Fascism

We continuously witness a very visible growth of grassroots & state fascism, often organised through informal groups, cultural spaces, new official policies and transnational influences. These formations draw strength from broader political conditions, economic insecurity, nationalism, and normalised violence, while also receiving ideological or material support from strong geopolitical actors. This session focuses on understanding how these groups operate and how they embed themselves locally. It also addresses the challenges of responding to them: how to build safety without retreating from public space, how to organise collectively without escalating isolation or fear, and how to situate anti-fascist action within wider struggles rather than treating it as separate.

6. Reproduction of patriarchy & Control of the Bodies

[anti-gender movements, natality policies, trad wife craze, liberalisation of feminism]

Across the Balkans, patriarchal control is being intensified through both conservative backlash and liberal adaptation. Anti-gender movements, natality policies, and the dissemination through new media of traditional roles work to discipline bodies and reinforce reproductive expectations. At the same time, parts of feminism are absorbed into institutional frameworks, often detached from material struggles and shaped by the priorities of the “development partners”. These processes are not opposed; they coexist, narrowing the space for autonomy while presenting themselves as either protection or progress. These sessions focus on how control over bodies is produced and maintained, and how it can be resisted. How are gender, reproduction, and family politicised today? Where do we see continuity with older forms of control, and where are new mechanisms emerging? The aim is to ground these questions in lived realities while opening space for collective responses that move beyond both reactionary and depoliticised frameworks.

Session: The Dismissal of the Children & the Elderly

Children and elderly people are often dismissed as passive, dependent, and without political agency, while decisions about their lives are made within families, institutions, and broader society. Elderly people are completely isolated from all aspects of society while children’s lives and education are controlled and imposed by the states. This reflects a form of structural domination where autonomy is systematically denied, and control is justified through protection or necessity. This session invites a shift in perspective: what does it mean to understand children and elderly through the lenses of opression? How can their autonomy be recognised and supported without abandoning care and responsibility? How is this supremacy reproduced in everyday practices, and how it can be challenged through more collective, respectful, and participatory forms of living.

Session: Mental & Physical Health in Capitalism

Mental and physical health are increasingly framed through individualised approaches that ignore broader social, economic, and historical conditions. Increasingly new media algorithms are forcing self-control of the body. These frameworks in the Balkans are frequently imposed by capitalism, carrying assumptions that do not reflect local realities while pathologising responses to crisis, poverty, and instability. To understand how distress is connected to structural conditions means reclaiming knowledge, practices, and forms of care that exist outside institutional systems. Let’s discuss how to reshape support towards collective, accessible approaches that do not isolate individuals from the conditions they live in. Let’s discuss how to shift individual isolation towards collective care, how we provide support to existing and significant challenges to mental and physical support to our comrades and our communities.

7. Independent Arts, Autonomous Culture and DIY Self-Organisation

Historically, art and culture have been at the forefront of revolutionary movements. In the Balkans current practices are often shaped by institutional frameworks, market demands, and funding structures that limit what can be expressed and how. At the same time, independent and DIY practices continue to create spaces outside these constraints, spaces where cultural production is directly tied to political struggle, everyday life, and collective imagination. These are not separate from organising, but part of how movements sustain themselves, communicate, and build alternative ways of living. These sessions wants to explore modes of culture as dispersed infrastructure: how autonomous artistic practices support resistance, create connections, and open possibilities that go beyond immediate political demands. What does it mean to produce culture without state mediation? How do we sustain these practices materially, and what contradictions do they carry?

Session: Art as an act of Resistance

Art does not exist outside of political and economic structures; instead, it reflects, reproduces, and can also challenge them. In the context of the Balkans, where dominant narratives are often imposed or controlled, artistic practices can disrupt what is considered normal, visible, or possible. This session looks at how art functions within broader struggles. Not as representation alone, but as a tool for intervention, for shaping perception, and for creating shared meanings. At the same time, it questions the limits of art: when does it risk being absorbed, neutralised, or disconnected from material change? The focus is on practices that remain grounded in collective realities while pushing against systemic constraints.

Call for Anarchist Illustrators (Exhibition)

We invite you to send us or bring your visual work from struggles, everyday life, and political imagination.

Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2026 Skopje

24–27 September 2026

Against war, capital, patriarchy and the state –

For solidarity, resistance and liberation.

bab2026@riseup.net
https://radar.squat.net/en/bab2026
https://bab2026.espivblogs.net/