Dispatch #29
Read about Serbia’s largest student movement in decades, Japan’s political deadlock over separate surnames for married couples, and Lebanese documentaries on the country’s ongoing crises
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
First up, from Serbia, a powerful report on the country’s largest student movement in decades, as thousands challenge President Vučić’s grip on power and demand new elections, despite violent crackdowns and muted EU criticism.
From Japan, a deep dive into the decades-long political stalemate over letting married couples keep separate surnames, a debate that has become a fault line within the ruling party.
And from Lebanon, a filmmaker wrestles with the challenge of representing a country’s endless collapse without reducing it to a single, unchanging catastrophe.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
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Inside Serbia’s Student Protest
Serbia’s largest student movement in decades is challenging President Vučić’s grip on power, demanding accountability and new elections amid violent crackdowns and waning EU criticism
It’s the middle of summer, 36°C. Many people are on vacation, and only a few tourists wander through Belgrade’s city centre. But the calm is deceptive. As Philine Bickhardt reports in the Swiss newspaper Republik, the country is in a state of emergency. Since a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people, protests have not stopped.
Students are protesting against the increasingly authoritarian President Aleksandar Vučić, demanding new elections. It is the largest student movement since May 1968, which also swept through Yugoslavia but quickly ended after a conciliatory speech by the socialist leader Josip Broz Tito. Now, the numbers of youth on the barricades are soaring, at times exceeding 300,000 participants, as in March 2025.
The entire university is “under total occupation.” Classes are suspended, and students hold their plenary meetings outside. For months, teachers across the country, from primary schools to universities, were on strike, returning only under government pressure. Still, students continue to occupy nearly all faculties, sleeping inside and controlling the entrances.
In March, the government cut professors’ salaries and threatened to withdraw funding. By early June, the professors gave in and agreed to resume teaching, a decision many students now support, Bickhardt writes. Months of protest have left them exhausted and financially strained. For those paying privately, between €800 and €2,500 a year, losing a year of study is hard.
When Translator visited the Faculty of Philosophy, the building was plastered with posters, one reading blokada ako ne sada (“blockade if not now, when?”). Elsewhere in the city, we spoke with a young student planning to leave Serbia for studies in Ljubljana. While it is quiet now, he said, the protests will resume after the summer break.
At the outset, students had four demands: the release of all documentation of the railway station collapse, an investigation into violence against students, the dismissal of charges against unlawfully detained protesters, and an increase in the education budget to 20 per cent.
Previously, the students had avoided addressing President Vučić directly, cheekily using the informal “ti” in their slogan “You’re not in charge.” Now, the protests target him openly: under the constitution, Bickhardt explains, only the president can dissolve parliament and call elections.
Arrests and trials were already underway. Sociology teacher Marija Vasić was detained for two months before starting a hunger strike. Then, on the night of 28-29 June, police violence escalated sharply. Over the next nine days, around 1,400 protests and blockades erupted across the country. More than 500 people were arrested, many held for days before facing trial.
Vučić pardoned the “thugs” who had attacked peaceful students after their detention and trial. Among them were men who broke a female student’s jaw in Novi Sad and a driver who deliberately rammed a roadblock, injuring student Kristina Vasiljević. The EU’s response to the crackdown was slow, avoiding explicit criticism of Vučić.
Press freedom is under severe threat, says journalist Marija Šehić, who had been dismissed from Euronews for alleged “careless or negligent work” and “disciplinary violations.” Serbia ranks 96th out of 180 in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.
Bickhardt doesn’t hold back in her critique of the protest movement, diagnosing a problematic shift to nationalist rhetoric. The students chose June 28 for a major protest, a date charged with patriotic symbolism. It commemorates the 1389 Battle of Kosovo which Serbian nationalists use as a founding myth to claim Kosovo. The choice was not accidental; speeches from the day repeatedly invoked the defense of “Christian Europe” against the “Islamic Orient.”
There’s even some far-right activists involved, invoking “Serbian integralism” and the idea of a “Greater Serbia”. The student who read out the movement’s demands also spoke of Kosovo’s “betrayal”, a term used by Vučić himself, echoing Slobodan Milošević, who in 1989 gave a nationalistic speech in Kosovo on the same date, foreshadowing the 1990s wars.
Bickhardt argues that this “opening to the right” was meant to broaden the base for new elections but ultimately risks aligning the movement with Vučić’s own nationalist rhetoric while fuelling ethnic tension. To make matters worse, feminist groups have spoken out against sexism in the movement. Emilija Milenković, a political science student, points out that on 28 June almost all speeches were by men, despite women leading many protests and blockades.
Bickhardt concludes that the movement’s initial diversity has given way to conformity. The movement’s future remains uncertain, but the country has already changed. Old fears are gone, and with new students arriving this autumn, the revolutionary spark might be lit again.
Philine Bickhardt is a research assistant at the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich.
Original article (“Protest zwischen Aufbruch und Rückschritt”) by Philine Bickhardt was first published in German on 1 August 2025.
It’s available here.
Republik is Swiss online news magazine.
Summary by IJ.
Who gets to keep their name?
In Japan, the decades-long debate over allowing married couples to keep separate surnames has become a political stalemate, exposing deep divisions within the ruling party
In Japan, the question of whether married couples should be allowed to keep separate surnames is not just a matter of bureaucratic formality. It is, as reporter Nao Sakata writes in Chihei, a test of political nerve, a wedge in the ruling party, and a reminder that sometimes in politics things move excruciatingly slowly or not at all.
On a grey February morning, members of the Liberal Democratic Party’s “Working Team” filed into a closed-door meeting room in the Diet (Japan’s parliament). Their task: to decide what, if anything, the party might do about the nearly three-decades’-old proposal to amend the Civil Code. “We would like to take into consideration both diversifying values and traditional family systems,” Chairman Aizawa Ichiro began, offering the kind of preamble designed to offend no one and satisfy even fewer. Inside, Chihei reports, it was less a debate than a stalemate. Proposals had been written but not shared; a senior member confessed to avoiding conversations altogether, fearing they might be seen as taking sides.
Today’s gridlock has a long tail. In 1996, after five years of study, the Legislative Council recommended legalising optional separate surnames. The bill never reached the Diet floor – an almost unheard-of fate – thanks to fierce resistance inside the LDP. Since then, the measure has been introduced 26 times, only to be shelved, withdrawn or quietly expire. The LDP, now in the minority, remains split between those invoking tradition and those citing the practicalities of modern life. One party insider dispensed with niceties: “A compromise is obviously impossible.”
But beyond the Diet, patience is wearing thin. Surveys suggest that nearly 600,000 couples are waiting to marry until the law changes. Advocates point to Japan’s record-low fertility rate – 1.15, the lowest since data collection began in 1947 – and warn that obstacles to marriage are obstacles to addressing demographic decline. On 11 June, labour unions and civil-society groups arrived at the Diet with 630,000 handwritten signatures, heavy in both ink and implication. “We don’t want this human rights issue to become a political issue,” said Yoko Sakamoto, president of m-Net, a nonprofit that has been pressing the case for years.
Original article (“夫婦別姓を「問題」とするのは誰か”) by Nao Sakata was first published in Japanese on 7 July 2025.
It is available here.
Chihei is an imprint of Chiheisha, a Tokyo-based publishing house founded in early 2024 in Jimbocho, the city’s historic book district. Its team, drawn from across publishing and media, began releasing books in April and launched the monthly magazine Chihei 地平 (“Horizon”) in July 2024. In Japanese, the name evokes earth, paths and perspective – and, written in kanji, carries the wish for peace on earth, a principle at the heart of the company’s mission.
Summary by TMH
How do we understand the Lebanese “Catastrophe”?
A filmmaker grapples with how to represent Lebanon’s endless collapse
In this sweeping and introspective review, Muhammad Omar Janadi reflects on the layered attempts of three recent Lebanese documentaries to make sense of Lebanon’s perpetual state of disaster. The films – A Frown Gone Mad فتنة في الحاجبين by Omar Mismar, Msaytbeh: The Elevated Place by Rawane Nassif, and Nécrose by François Yazbek – were screened at the Gabes Film Festival in Tunisia earlier this year. Together, they form a cinematic conversation about trauma, memory and the limits of understanding.
The piece opens with a haunting quote from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We will never understand Lebanon.” It sets the tone for a text concerned not with definitive answers but with the ongoing struggle to narrate a country that seems to “reproduce the tragedies of the self and the other.” Each film offers a different vantage point on this narrative paralysis, invoking metaphor, memory and the body as sites of meaning-making.
Mismar’s A Frown Gone Mad unfolds entirely within a beauty salon on the outskirts of Beirut, where customers, male and female, young and old, receive Botox and filler injections while chatting with the owner Bouba about the looming threat of war. “In the July War [2006], I worked more than I ever had in my life,” Bouba says. War here becomes both backdrop and sales pitch: the language of beauty offers “discounts to die for”, while clients seek a sense of control over a life that seems constantly out of grasp. Through static shots and an observational style, Mismar’s camera captures not just the cosmetic rituals but the somatic anxiety of a population “living under the permanent threat of collapse.” As Janadi writes, the salon becomes “a space where politics meets flesh, and anxiety is transformed into an aesthetic routine.”
Rawane Nassif’s Msaytbeh takes a more personal and poetic approach. It’s a return, after 20 years, to the Beirut neighbourhood of the director’s childhood, seen through the vantage of absence: her parents have died, and the past is gone. Rather than filming interiors, Nassif lingers on the building’s balconies, filled with drying laundry and potted plants. Memory is projected onto a bullet-ridden bathroom wall in “Beit Beirut”, a former sniper’s den turned museum. For Janadi, this choice creates a powerful visual metaphor: “The balcony becomes a border zone, a contact point between private grief and public ruin.”
Finally, Yazbek’s Nécrose offers a more experimental, almost hallucinatory meditation on national decay. Drawing on philosophical texts, dream logic and poetic voiceover, most notably from Lebanese poet Ounsi el-Hajj, the film begins with a sequence of medical imagery, endoscopy footage, and X-rays, suggesting a body under examination. “Necrosis” becomes a metaphor not only for cellular death but for the chronic illness of a city like Beirut, still reeling from the 2020 port explosion. In one particularly striking image, the ruined port is framed like the aftermath of a cosmic event. “Perhaps the port explosion is a kind of Big Bang,” Janadi reflects, “that ends one form of life and gives birth to another.”
What unites these works is their resistance to resolution. Instead of building toward closure, they linger in ambiguity, exploring how metaphor can become a tool for conceptual survival. Lebanon, Janadi suggests, is not just a place of failed governance but of exhausted language, where even the most intimate gestures, like a Botox injection or a remembered balcony, carry the charge of catastrophe.
By the end, Janadi does not claim that these films solve Lebanon’s mystery. But they offer a way of sitting with it, of seeing it more clearly not through facts but through form. “We may not understand Lebanon,” he concludes, echoing Darwish, “but these films make us know it more deeply.”
Original article (“كيف نفهم «الكارثة» اللبنانية؟”) by Mohammed Omar Janad was first published in Arabic on 4 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Mada Masr is an Egyptian independent news outlet known for its critical, in-depth journalism on culture, politics and society across the Arab world.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team