On Sunday, March 30, during a peaceful demonstration in the city of Niš, southern Serbia, Professor Natalija Jovanović, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Niš, was attacked with a knife by a woman.
The incident took place in front of numerous witnesses during a student protest titled “Pod lupom nauke” (“Under the Lens of Science”). Professor Jovanović suffered a hand injury while trying to defend herself and was transported to the hospital. The attack has caused outrage and strong reactions across the country, including accusations of indirect responsibility against Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who had publicly discredited the Dean just days earlier.
At Dialektika, we firmly and unequivocally condemn this violent act and express our full solidarity with Professor Jovanović, her family, and the academic community of Serbia.
The attack occurred within a broader political context marked by growing polarization, where President Vučić’s government has been consistently accused of co-opting institutions, controlling the media, and delegitimizing social protest. Discursive persecution of critical voices—including students, professors, and activists—has created a climate of hostility in which physical violence is emerging as the logical extension of the symbolic violence promoted by those in power. The current protests, led by academic and student sectors, have arisen in response to this suffocating atmosphere, demanding greater transparency, academic freedom, and an end to state-sponsored propaganda.
Philosophy, by its very nature, unsettles. Not out of provocation, but out of purpose: its task is to question the given, the naturalized, the hegemonic. From Socrates to the present day, those who have made the pursuit of truth their existential commitment have faced various forms of repression—censorship, exile, public vilification, even death. This is not to draw exaggerated comparisons or glorify suffering, but to underscore that genuine critical thinking is always intolerable to systems that depend on silence, obedience, or deception.
Professor Jovanović was not attacked by chance. She was attacked for what she represents: the free university, intellectual responsibility, and the possibility of thinking in public without submission. To harm a teacher for her ideas or her presence is not just to target an individual—it is to strike at a principle: that thought must be able to exist without fear.
Professor Jovanović was not attacked by chance. She was attacked for what she represents: the free university, intellectual responsibility, and the possibility of thinking in public without submission.
From our international community, we affirm that no project of democratic transformation is possible without the protection of the right to dissent. And that right cannot be reduced to a mere legal formula—it must be actively defended in every university, every square, every medium, and every classroom.
Today, in Serbia, a dean was stabbed. Tomorrow, in any other country, it may be a student, a teacher, a researcher. The defense of philosophy is not a local or elitist cause—it is an act of commitment to human dignity.
Because in times of violence, to keep thinking is to resist.
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Dialektika
Global Forum for Critical Thinking, Humanities and Social Sciences
