dgi – aleksandar matković – 11 7 26
The Right to Revolution: Conversation between Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nika Dubrovsky and Aleksandar Matković
Event date: November 7 / 2026
A conversation between Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nika Dubrovsky and Aleksandar Matković
As part of our Who Gets to Be Human? series, we invited a Serbian researcher and activist Aleksandar Matković, who has firsthand experience of what has been happening in Serbia, where students have developed extraordinary forms of self-organisation, collective decision-making, and political action without traditional leaders.
who gets to be human link: In this series we’re bringing together sociologists, writers, activists, philosophers and historians to ask what human rights actually mean today — to rethink an idea that is at once our hope for a universal humanism and a cover for crimes against humanity.
We want to explore what makes this movement different, what it has in common with the Arab Spring, and whether these new forms of political organisation can help us imagine not only how to challenge existing power, but how to build a different society.
Join us on our YouTube channel on 7 November at 6 pm London time. Whether you’ve followed the series or are joining us for the first time, you’re very welcome.
Aleksandar Matković is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona and a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He works on environmental history, political economy and the history of Yugoslavia. He runs the blog “Research and Alternatives“, and posts weekly research updates on Patreon.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost. Follow him on X.
Movement techie, revolution turned me into a writer, counter revolution turned me into a political prisoner, solidarity turned me into an exile.
Nomadic ghostofspring.com
Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and writer, who grew up in the unofficial cultural scenes of squats and samizdat in the late Soviet Union, and has written for e-flux, Artnet, Colta, Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal and other publications.
After David’s death, Nika and friends organised Carnival4David instead of a funeral; the first carnival took place in more than 250 places worldwide and grew into an annual carnival. The carnival now takes place and grew into an annual event and the Museum of Care, an open platform for reading groups, home exhibitions, DIY books and other shared projects.
In 2022, Nika and friends launched the David Graeber Institute. Find her writing on her website and Academia.edu, and follow her on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
Together with David Graeber, she created the project A4Kids.org. Their most recent book was published by MIT Press in 2024.
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