Energy transition and environmental contestation in the Balkans
Online workshop
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, 12 December 2022
Call for papers
Long considered to lag behind the European “coal curtain”, the Balkans are quickly turning green – and contestably so. Investments into hydropower and explorations of lithium reserves, among others, are lauded as steps towards the long-awaited “energy transition”. But they also forge a new frontier of environmental spoil, capital accumulation, and state violence. In turn, new ecological conflicts aggregate on a history of uneven development and a pervasive sense of demographic freefall, resulting from mass outmigration to Western Europe and the lowering of life standards. In this regard, the Balkans as a semi-periphery stand apart from both the Global North and South: they experience an active de-development of their institutions as well as an actual degrowth of their populations, popularly understood as “dying out”. As a result, all regional politics is quickly turning to be environmentalist, population-themed, and transcending class and generational divides. From networks of “river guardians” who act in the name of “the life itself”, through agricultural producers who see lithium and gold extraction as a sign of neoimperial occupation of their lands, to state policy-makers who frame large corporations as investment into the nation’s children – environmental and reproductive issues have been jointly repoliticised in varying ways.
We start from this plurality of positions to explore what kind of agency is enabled – and constrained – with a popular shift to environmentalism. Is “nature” becoming a new reservoir of political imagination in the Balkans? If so, how does it reshape the field of power? How do the traditional biopolitical tropes – of land and nation, care and (de)population, inheritance and the future – get reinvented through environmentalist action in the Balkans? And how do the global tropes of environmental justice – climate change, overgrowth and generational rebellion – get embedded in the region’s semi-peripheral, ageing and unequal social realities? We invite social science and humanities scholars who focus on environmental actors of all stripes – whether policy makers, investors, activists, insurgents, residents, artists or experts – to join us for a workshop and creation of a special issue thereafter. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- What popular common sense do Balkan eco-movements articulate? What protest repertoires they use, and what “chains of equivalence” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) they articulate between different classes, genders, generations? What moves the social movements to unity, and what to inner antagonism?
- What affective registers do the tropes of “extinction” and “revival” convey, and for whom? What reproductive demands do the (anti-)extraction initiatives make visible – a right to work, a right to land, a right to age and inherit? Which reproductive conflicts get the centre stage, and which ones are pushed to the background?
- What can we learn by paying attention to various non-human others – species and infrastructures – that have long shaped Balkan environmental histories? What can a focus on asymmetrical, multispecies exchange shift in our understanding of the region’s 20th century urbanisation, as well as in the current initiatives of reviving rural lands?
- What shapes does ecology take at the periphery of Europe, and at the global semi-periphery more generally? How can the scholars of the Balkans transcend the dichotomies of environmental humanities – the West and the Rest, the modernist and the indigenous, environmentalism of the rich and environmentalism of the poor?
Please send your expressions of interest (250 words abstract) to ivan.rajkovic@univie.ac.at and jvasiljevic@instifdt.bg.ac.rs by 20 October 2022.
The workshop will be held in online format at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory on 12 December 2022.
We expect the selected authors to submit full papers three months later, and plan to submit the entire special issue for review at the open-access journal Comparative Southeast European Studies by spring 2023.
Timeline:
Abstract submission deadline (250 words): 20 October 2022
Notification of abstract acceptance: 27 October 2022
Precirculation of presentation drafts by the authors (3000 words): 1 Dec 2022
Online workshop: 12 December 2022
Special issue proposal submission (by editors): 15 January 2023
Full paper submission to the editors for an internal review: 15 March 2023
Submission to the journal: 1 May 2023
Organisers:
Ivan Rajković
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna
Jelena Vasiljević
Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade