Between Peripheries and Solidarities: Resisting Green Extractivism in Serbia

This article is concerned with the multiple forms of attachments that emerge in the wake of lithium mining efforts in Serbia and expanding green extractivism in the Balkans more broadly. The Jadar Project was set to become one of the first and the biggest lithium mines in Europe, a metallic element widely understood as crucial to the so-called green transition. However, the mining plans attracted widespread resistance, led by the local community of the Jadar Valley, many of whom are farmers and agricultural workers. The government was ultimately forced to cancel the project in January 2022 following months of protests, yet the cancellation was nullified two and a half years later. Based on a close ethnographic engagement with the affected communities and their allies, I describe the local relationships with the soil, land, history, and memory and their reverberation and remobilization. What emerges is a particular sense of peripheralization and Balkanization, of being designated a colony or a sacrifice zone, a forgotten corner of Europe where lithium mining is to take place. Crucially, however, as this article shows, what also becomes possible is the formation of solidarities across the Global North and the Global South based on common struggles and shared experiences of attachment to the land. This article thus focuses on the forms of attachments that lay behind mass resistance, becoming a fundamental challenge to the logic of green extractivism.