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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the ruin of the listed Yugoslav military headquarters generates divergent communities and political imaginaries, focusing on the recent student protest that emerged after the Serbian government leased the site for free to Jared Kushner for redevelopment into a luxury hotel.

Paper long abstract

The destruction of the Yugoslav military-headquarters (Generalštab) during the 1999 NATO bombing left a prominent ruin in the very center of the Serbian capital. For more than two decades, this modernist complex, listed as a cultural heritage site, remained physically unreconstructed, functioning as an unofficial monument to the bombing and a material anchor of unresolved war memory. This paper examines how the ruin generates divergent communities and political imaginaries, focusing on recent student mobilizations that emerged in response to the Serbian government’s decision to lease the site for free to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, for redevelopment into a luxury hotel with a museum of the NATO bombing on the premises. Shortly after the announcement of the deal and the illegal removal of the building’s cultural heritage status, students protested to preserve the Generalštab as a protected cultural monument of architectural modernism and a site of collective memory, explicitly rejecting its transformation into a privatized space.

In justifying the transfer of the Generalštab to Jared Kushner, Serbian authorities framed it as a barrier to development, transforming it discursively into a resource through tropes of foreign investment. Drawing on participant observation, media analysis, and engagement with protestors, this paper examines how this ruin generates two antagonistic communities: one oriented toward the preservation of public space, cultural heritage, and political accountability, and another aligned with privatization and populist narratives of progress. It shows how a ruin can materialize polarised temporalities - between war memory and promised futures, public heritage and private capital.