U kandžama izneverenih očekivanja
In the Grip of Betrayed Expectations

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the position of young people in Serbia today, as can be inferred from the evidence collected in the study «Politics and everyday life – three years later». Starting from the typology she developed in her 2002 analysis of young people's interviews (when four basic ways of self-positioning within the social context were identified: «B92 generation», «provincials», «fundamentalists», and «guests»), the author traces the changes that have intervened over the past three years in the attitudes of these same respondents concerning politics, personal engagement, views of the future and of their own selves. The fact that the expectations, awakened by the events of 5 October 2000, have been betrayed, has brought strong disappointment, and it is the context in which young people in Serbia once again are losing faith that they will ever find their place in their own society. Against the background of a basic tension in relation to politics – between excessive interest and disgust – there basic strategies of young people in 2005 are formed. «Withdrawal», as the most common strategy, indicates a return of the young to their narrow personal, private, imaginary world, after a short exit into reality and active participation in creating the conditions of their own social existence. The increasingly frequent strategy of «aggression and imposition of one's own worldview» points to the rising radicalization of the young generation. Finally, it is only the «planning strategy», espoused by just a handful of respondents, that retains traces of faith in future improvement of social conditions.

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