Forum for Educational Change - FECH

Forum for Educational Change - FECH FOR A BETTER & REIMAGINED EDUCATION! JOIN FOR A BETTER & REIMAGINED EDUCATION!

The vision of FECH is to be leaders in the processes of reforms and modernization of higher education institutions in North Macedonia through personal commitment and activism and by convening and leveraging expertise, professional capacity, and uncompromising commitment to re-imagining education. The mission of FECH is to actively participate in the development of public policies in higher educati

on, to be key actors in higher education reforms, and to inclusively represent the views of citizens on the modernization of education in North Macedonia.

A girl from Kavadarci went looking for a book and couldn't find it. Not because it didn't exist, just nobody had put fem...
06/08/2026

A girl from Kavadarci went looking for a book and couldn't find it. Not because it didn't exist, just nobody had put feminist or q***r literature on the shelves where she lived.

Sara Milenkovska kept noticing the same gap everywhere she looked. Not empty shelves exactly, but emptiness in whose stories got a place on them, whose experiences counted as worth stocking. So she started collecting books by women authors and sending them out.

Over 5000 books have gone out so far, donated to libraries that never had them. One shipment reached the women's ward of Idrizovo prison.

The books travel in six languages: Macedonian, Albanian, Bosnian, Serbian, Romani, Aromanian, to more than 20 places across the country. Even Skopje, with all its resources, doesn't stock this material consistently. Smaller cities have it worse.

Sara's take on it is simple. Access to knowledge should be a right, not a privilege.

Sara is the tenth of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

Tetovo was one of the most polluted cities in the world. Instead of another march that would fade after a day, activists...
03/08/2026

Tetovo was one of the most polluted cities in the world. Instead of another march that would fade after a day, activists carried coffins through the streets to count the people the pollution was killing.

Then they staged something stranger. A full classical concert at the city dump. Two cellists in formal black, masks on against the smell, sheet music on stands, furnaces from the nearby factory burning behind them the entire time.

Arianit Xhaferi was one of the activists behind actions like this. The reasoning is direct: classical protests lose their effect when repeated too often. Guerrilla actions don't need large numbers to work. They need an element of the morbid that forces a reaction, something people can't just scroll past.

His advice for starting when institutions ignore you is just as blunt. Identify the problem, push it through media, then go directly to the authorities. If they still don't listen, that's when you move to public action. No big organization required, no budget. Just a story, and people willing to carry it further.

Arianit is the eighth of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

Arianit Xhaferi

Nearly half of university leadership in Kosovo has been caught publishing in fake journals. ORCA tried formal letters fi...
01/08/2026

Nearly half of university leadership in Kosovo has been caught publishing in fake journals. ORCA tried formal letters first. That didn't work.

So they escalated. Mud thrown at the University of Pristina rectorate. Lectures interrupted mid-class when the professor teaching was a confirmed plagiarist. A Halloween protest where activists wore the faces of the professors themselves.

Dibran Hoxha is one of the people behind ORCA. Some of the group's activists have been arrested over the actions. They kept going regardless.

When one plagiarist was punished with nothing more than a two year ban from mentoring theses, ORCA refused to let it disappear quietly. They kept mocking the response, kept the story alive in public. The goal was never a single moment. It was sustained pressure that institutions couldn't just wait out.

ORCA is the seventh of eleven stories featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

University buildings across Tirana got occupied by their own students. Not one faculty, all of them.Sidorela Vatnikaj wa...
30/07/2026

University buildings across Tirana got occupied by their own students. Not one faculty, all of them.

Sidorela Vatnikaj was a second year student who already knew something was wrong. The faculty she studied at was bureaucratic, dehumanizing, built to kill critical thinking. When the protest broke out, she joined without hesitation.

For about a month, students stayed inside the buildings around the clock. Their mothers cooked for them. That's when it stopped feeling like a protest and started feeling like their university.

The hardest part wasn't the threats. It was being expected to carry a thirty year transition on their own, twenty year olds with no roadmap. After it ended, a lot of people left. Not just the movement. The country.

Sidorela is the sixth of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗 Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTYDIRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeexkwbOGAmqpzy79SZOlsaiGKGiSW89l7gU8JaPspfvPDsd_crPN4BivZ3EQ_aem_DOB4b-5bhzHEGEazI-jvXw

The National Theatre in Tirana had stood since 1939. In 2018, the Albanian government passed a special law to demolish i...
27/07/2026

The National Theatre in Tirana had stood since 1939. In 2018, the Albanian government passed a special law to demolish it. No public dialogue, no participation, just a decision made from above.

Doriana Musaj felt it turn personal the moment that law passed. Staying silent would have meant complicity. So for the next two years, she and others used the building exactly as it was meant to be used, for gathering, discussion, culture. 65 performances in under ten months.

Then the 2019 earthquake hit Tirana. The theatre became an emergency relief hub overnight. Over 15,000 citizens came to donate. Two hundred volunteers organized themselves to distribute aid. Not one state institution involved.

At 4:30am in 2020, armed police cleared the building and bulldozers moved in while the city slept. The theatre was gone by morning.

Doriana still doesn't call it a loss. The fight shifted the conversation, she says, from what counts as development to who actually gets to decide the fate of a city. Activism doesn't always guarantee success. It guarantees dignity.

Doriana is the fifth of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

Doriana Musai

The National Theatre in Tirana had stood since 1939. In 2018, the Albanian government passed a special law to demolish i...
27/07/2026

The National Theatre in Tirana had stood since 1939. In 2018, the Albanian government passed a special law to demolish it. No public dialogue, no participation, just a decision made from above.

Doriana Musaj felt it turn personal the moment that law passed. Staying silent would have meant complicity. So for the next two years, she and others used the building exactly as it was meant to be used, for gathering, discussion, culture. 65 performances in under ten months.

Then the 2019 earthquake hit Tirana. The theatre became an emergency relief hub overnight. Over 15,000 citizens came to donate. Two hundred volunteers organized themselves to distribute aid. Not one state institution involved.

At 4:30am in 2020, armed police cleared the building and bulldozers moved in while the city slept. The theatre was gone by morning.

Doriana still doesn't call it a loss. The fight shifted the conversation, she says, from what counts as development to who actually gets to decide the fate of a city. Activism doesn't always guarantee success. It guarantees dignity.

Doriana is the fifth of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

An abandoned warehouse in Podgorica. A group of strangers with nothing in common except one thing: they needed somewhere...
25/07/2026

An abandoned warehouse in Podgorica. A group of strangers with nothing in common except one thing: they needed somewhere to create.

No funding, no roadmap. They just started. Made pastries, played music, stayed all day. That first day became DKC Pomorandža.

It's now one of the few genuinely independent cultural centers left in the Western Balkans. No corporate sponsors deciding what counts as culture. Just people organizing things themselves.

Katarina Stanišić was one of them. Her advice to anyone who wants to start something: have the will. Everything else gets figured out.

DKC Pomorandža is the fourth of eleven stories from our new handbook on guerrilla activism across the region.

🔗 Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

A canopy collapse killed sixteen people in Novi Sad. Corruption that had been ignored for years, finally catching up wit...
23/07/2026

A canopy collapse killed sixteen people in Novi Sad. Corruption that had been ignored for years, finally catching up with someone.

The opposition's response was a sixteen-minute road blockade. Students thought that was pathetic.

So they took the universities instead. No leaders, no parties, just open plenums deciding everything together. One faculty blocked, then almost every university in the country.

Within a month: the largest protest in Serbian history. Over 150,000 people in the streets.

Siniša Cvetić was part of it from day one. His take is blunt: liberals negotiate, plenums organize. Nobody to arrest, nobody to buy off.

Siniša is the third of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

Tijana Đuknić helped start a festival most people said couldn't work.Mirëdita, Dobar Dan brought Serbian and Kosovar art...
20/07/2026

Tijana Đuknić helped start a festival most people said couldn't work.

Mirëdita, Dobar Dan brought Serbian and Kosovar artists onto the same stage. It started in 2014. Named after Bekim Fehmiu, an actor both countries claimed as their own.

Real encounters between Serbs and Kosovars barely exist. Politicians fill that gap with hate speech instead.

Last year, the Serbian government banned the festival on opening day. Death threats came first. Then bomb scares. Then a pig's head in the mail. Right-wing groups surrounded the venue. The bus with participants got turned back at the city entrance.

The festival happened anyway. Somewhere else.

Young people still show up scared, carrying whatever prejudice they grew up with. They leave with friendships they can't explain back home. Tijana says an Albanian friend from Kosovo shouldn't be a political statement. Right now, it still is.

Tijana is the fourth of eleven activists in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region. Her story, along with ten others, is documented in full.

🔗Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

Ajna Jusić never knew her father. He was never named, never talked about, until she stood in front of a form in Sarajevo...
18/07/2026

Ajna Jusić never knew her father. He was never named, never talked about, until she stood in front of a form in Sarajevo asking for his name and had nothing to write. That's the moment she decided she couldn't stay silent anymore.

She founded Forgotten Children of War. Not a slogan, an actual legal fight for children born from wartime sexual violence to be recognized under Bosnian law. It took years. Anger alone wasn't going to do it, so she started with education, then found the people who could actually move it forward: activists, artists, lawyers working the same fight across different countries.

When the law finally passed, she didn't celebrate. Her first thought was that it was about time. The real feeling came later, watching children born from that violence start claiming legal status on their own, exercising rights that didn't exist for them before.

She still says every award she gets belongs to them first. A reminder that these children are here. They're your neighbors, your colleagues, your families.

Ajna is the second of eleven activists featured in our new handbook, a guerrilla tour through seven countries in the region. Her story, along with ten others, is documented in full: how it started, what it cost, what changed.

Read the full handbook here: https://www.fech.mk/2026/07/14/resistance-a-guerrilla-tour-of-the-region/

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