After decades under a Stalinist regime, the latecomer transition in Albania began thanks to the large-scale exodus of hundreds of young people which stimulated the mobilization of university students. In turn, the student movement became the catalyst of a wider social mobilization once fear faded away from December 1990 onwards. These experiences were nevertheless short-lived as they ended up absorbed and marginalized by the new political elites that had emerged from the intellectual milieus once ‘organic’ to the system. Furthermore, such late-in-coming protest waves occurred in a situation of economic and institutional breakdown that constituted a considerable encumbrance for the re-organization of Albanian civil society.