When an Australian PhD candidate, a Thai national of Chinese heritage, sets to explore Serbian humor in the 1990s as a subversive political tool of resistance to the regime of Slobodan Milošević, right off the bat we can expect a very interesting result! Janjira Sombatpoonsiri’s book Humor and Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia meets these expectations. What we got is an attractive and dynamic analysis of innovative means of political struggle, which makes a valuable contribution to the study of global forms of non-violent resistance and alternative political practices.

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri’s book has a very well founded and clear structure. After a useful theoretical and methodological introduction, the author lays out the results of her research in two parts. Part One considers the history of political humor in Serbia, while Part Two focuses in detail on the final phase of the struggle against Milošević’s regime and the activities of the opposition movement Otpor. What makes Part One especially interesting is that the author goes all the way back to the role of the theatre of the absurd in 1930s Yugoslavia and the activities of the Zenit movement in the 1920s, in which she discovers the seeds of linking art and politics. Also praiseworthy is the way she analyzes the influence that culture exerts on creating certain modes of humor in socialist Yugoslavia, leading the author to a very important conclusion that political humor was not intuitive but rather culturally influenced. Subsequent chapters show the process of constructing political humor during the protests of 1992 and 1996–97, which gives a historical footing for the emergence of the Otpor movement that played a vital role in ousting Milošević from power in 2000.

Part Two is devoted entirely to Otpor and—as the author puts it—its subversive humor. Sombatpoonsiri has divided Otpor’s activities into three principal categories: satirical street theater, parodic protest actions, and carnivalesque events, through which she describes various activities and analyzes them in the framework of the methodological hypotheses presented in the introduction. I should stress the importance of the final chapter in which the author analyzes the growth of Otpor’s network and activities throughout Serbia, revealing how the protest’s decentralization played a vital role. Humor was of singular importance, because by mocking the government Otpor rendered its violence ineffectual, eliminating fear even in the local communities that rarely decide to put up an organized resistance. This proves the author’s central thesis of humor being a nonviolent weapon that is highly effective in sabotaging dictatorships. Thanks to the analysis of the collected material and interviews with participants of the protests, Sombatpoonsiri has produced a very fine and useful typology of the modes of humorous political resistance, which can almost serve as a “user’s guide,” a vade mecum for future protests.

At the end of the book there is a very precise conclusion as well as useful appendixes which present the scientific methodology and the chronology of nonviolent struggle in Serbia during the 1990s.

The overall impression is of a good, carefully researched work, presenting in a detailed and clear way the “other side” of Serbia, a side that the world’s public has rarely seen in the years of wars and crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, which makes this a very much needed work even for its informative qualities. Its further importance stems from the methodologically and theoretically well-grounded analysis of non-violent struggle and the use of humor as particularly damaging tools that a violent government finds difficult to resist. One possible objection to this analysis is its lack of a comparative approach, which would show if these methods of struggle, were comparable to similar approaches in other eastern European countries or other global experiences. If this dimension was included it would be clearer whether this was a unique and authentic political experiment or was humor used in similar ways in other political crises. Then we could also assess the hypothesis that political humor was a result of previous interactions between culture and politics. This would also give the author a more reliable and stronger conclusion about the extent to which the Serbian nonviolent humorous protest was a unique case. Nevertheless, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri’s book Humor & Nonviolent Struggle in Serbia is a significant and extremely interesting contribution to the history of non-violent resistance and especially the history of Serbia and southeastern Europe in the difficult and dramatic final decade of the 20th century.