Abstract: This dissertation is about democracy, and what it came to mean to young people in postsocialist Serbia struggling to remake the world around them. It focuses on young student activists who were working to reform the university and in turn create new kinds of citizenship and political practice. I trace the intersections of 'democracy' as an analytic, set of practices, and normative framework—and the contradictions and tensions that emerge at these intersections. These university student activists drew on multiple, contradictory ideologies and modes of representation to craft democratic practice in the post-revolutionary, postsocialist period. At the center of this process was a fundamental tension: Students were embracing democratic action and social change at the same time that the conditions for political engagement, and the terms of political legitimacy and power more broadly, had been called into question. In response, different student organizations claimed shifting and often contradictory grounds for political action and entitlement. When considered in ethnographic and historical context, the micropractices of competing student organizations were exemplary of how democratic citizenship was being forged in Serbia. Students drew both on familiar forms of politics and alternative ways of imagining the nature and meaning of democracy. By engaging new and old political and social imaginaries, students and other citizens reconfigured the political as a category of action and identification. In the process, complex and competing forms of political legitimacy, authority and practice were produced and made meaningful. I argue that when such varied bases for politics intersect in newly democratic societies, 'failures' occur not despite democratic forms but because of the contradictions within and among those forms. As alternatives to liberal democratic models are challenged on the world stage, political and economic power is shored up by pointing to the breakdown of newly democratic states. With European Union expansion, certain markers of democracy, such as elections, are increasingly used to measure democratic capacity across formerly socialist Europe. My dissertation shows that what appears to be a failure of democracy in these contexts is in part different kinds of democratic logics and forms of power playing out in practice.