Following the third uprising in Maribor (2012), the authorities responded with a mass incarceration of and legal proceedings for 28 protesters. They were remanded into preventive custody for a month as a warning to other protestors. Following the sentencing of seven protesters, the Freedom of Uprisers! Group was founded, and it made analyses of repression and criminalization of uprisings on the basis of interviews with the criminalized protestors. The analysis does not provide definite answers, but—by organizing the knowledge—rather opens numerous issues that call for collective answers to these questions: How can a formal democracy introduce a state of emergency? How did the criminalization of uprisings become an expression of a systematic spin of a social riot into crime news? How to resist repression and systematic violence? Thus, by arranging small, severed pieces of lives of the penalized uprisers and smashed parts of our society, the group Freedom for Uprisers! is searching for answers to these questions.
