Jelena Petrović in conversation with Aleksandar Matković and Godofredo Enes Pereira

What Does the Name of War Stand for Today?

War today is not an exception—it is the ruling logic of the world. Concealed behind the language of democracy, freedom, and human rights, it underwrites the neoliberal global order. Contemporary war no longer needs to be declared—it is managed, normalized, and enacted through legal, institutional, and discursive regimes embedded in everyday life. Calibrated to uphold inequality, contemporary war is not waged to be won, but to permanently suppress resistance and normalize intervention in the name of peace.

Structured in two sequences, What Does the Name of War Stand for Today? positions participatory practice as possible acts of political subjectivation, where dominant narratives begin to fracture. It recognizes war not as a past crisis, but as the governing logic of the present—unfolding through the hijacking of memory, surveillance infrastructures, militarized borders, racialized abandonment, neocolonial extractivism, and weaponized domination.

What Does War Stand for Today? is an art-theory project by Grupa Spomenik (2010–12), which was co-founded by Milica Tomić. The project is developed in collaboration with groups in Prishtinë, Tuzla, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Berlin, Bregenz, and beyond. Based on the translation of Catherine Hass’s thesis of the same name, it articulates the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia not as concluded historical events, but as the emergence of a new mode of waging war that has since taken permanent form and become globally sustained.

Sequence 2: Is There Anything in This World You Would Be Ready to Give Your Life For? [Wofür steht der Name des Krieges heute? Teil 2: Gibt es etwas auf dieser Welt, wofür du bereit bist, dein Leben zu geben?]  

Connecting local sites across planetary mines, Sequence 2 of the event series takes a conversation on the extractivist frontlines where war economies persist—not despite peace, but through it. This talk traces how extractivism functions not merely as an economic model, but as a global political order that reshapes land, law, and life. From new lithium mining zones in Serbia– promoted as national salvation and as vital to EU green agendas—to the global systems of dispossession and environmental destruction, today’s war reveals itself as a logic of extraction. This logic is legitimized through the political discourses of sustainability, transition, and rescue, while simultaneously appropriating and repurposing the emancipatory legacies of antifascist and anticolonial struggles. In defending those legacies, many of today’s forms of resistance emerge—not only in response to what has been lost, but in commitment to what still refuses to be silenced or erased.

Aleksandar Matković, *1988, Places of belonging: Berlin, Amsterdam, Fruška Gora mountain. Affiliation: Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. Book: At the Dawn of Revolution: Marxist education in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, forthcoming 2025.

Godofredo Enes Pereira, *1979, Places of belonging: Porto, London. Affiliation: Territorial Research Group (GIT). Book: 2025 CERFI: Militant Analysis and Collective Equipment, forthcoming 2025.

Jelena Petrović, *1974 in Svetozarevo, Yugoslavia. Places of Belonging: Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Vienna, Belgrade. Affinities: Grupa Spomenik, Red Min(e)d. Book: Women’s Authorship in Interwar Yugoslavia. The Politics of Love and Struggle, 2018.

Milica Tomić, *1960 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Places of belonging: Belgrade, Zenica, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Graz, Vienna. Affinities: Grupa Spomenik, Four Faces of Omarska, Annenstrasse 53. Book: Geography of Looking. Matter of Appearance, 2023.