International Seminar, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. October 20, 2026 from 10 am to 6 pm (4^th floor and online)

The topic:

The imperative of economic growth occupies a paradoxical position in the societies of Europe’s semi-periphery. Here, growth is not an achievement to be questioned but a promise yet to be fulfilled, a civilisational standard internalised as a measure of national worth. To engage with degrowth in this context is, at first glance, to argue against the aspirations of countries historically positioned as perpetually catching up to their more developed counterparts.

Degrowth scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that growth as an organising principle generates ecological destruction, deepening inequality, and social alienation while consistently failing to deliver on its emancipatory promises. What it has not adequately addressed is how economic dependency structures the political imagination of semi-peripheral societies, locking them into development models designed elsewhere and sustained through unequal exchange. Nor has it sufficiently examined how the growth imperative is reproduced as a social and cultural phenomenon, embedding itself in collective aspirations, political identities, and everyday life in ways that purely economic analysis cannot capture.

The ecological crisis renders these entanglements still more urgent. Semi-peripheral societies bear the least historical responsibility for planetary ecological breakdown yet face some of its gravest consequences, while being simultaneously pressed to industrialise and consume their way toward standards of living set at the core.

This seminar brings together scholars working from the perspectives of world-systems theory, post-colonial and post-socialist critique, ecological economics, political sociology, and art theory to examine degrowth as simultaneously an economic, social, and ecological challenge, and to ask what transformative politics adequate to the specific condition of the semi-periphery might look like.

Programme

10:00 Opening remarks

SESSION 1
10:15 Eva Fraňková – Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno – Degrowth in the Semi-Periphery: What, Why and How?
10:50 Zoltán Pogátsa – University of West Hungary, Sopron – Tbc.
11:25 Katarzyna Gdesz – Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań – Asynchronous Ecologies of the Semi-Periphery: Degrowth, Climate Crisis, and the Politics of Catching Up in Central and Eastern Europe
12:00 Mark Losoncz – Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade – Asceticism and Degrowth
12:35 Lunch break

SESSION 2
13:35 Mladen Domazet – Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb – Together Leaving this Site of Shame and Misery (Cesarec, 1929): Ecological Limits, Social Justice, and the Forgotten Yugoslav Road to Degrowth
14:10 Milica Kočović De Santo – Institute of Economic Sciences, Belgrade – Beyond Catching Up: Planning Sovereignty, Liminal Commons and the Missing Meso-Level of Degrowth in the Semi-Periphery
14:45 Zoran Erić – Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade – The Imperative of (De)growth in Self-colonializing Countries of the Semi-Periphery
15:20 Lilian Pungas – Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University, Vienna – On Potatoes and Birch Trees – The History of Relationality and Survival on the Ruins of the (Post)socialist Industrial Dream
15:55 Coffee break

SESSION 3
16:10 Predrag Momčilović – Faculty of Geography, Belgrade – Localization of the Doughnut Economy Model in Semi-Peripheral Contexts through the Integration of the Principles of Degrowth Theory
16:45 Srđan Prodanović – Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade – Breaking Free from Productivism: How Degrowth and Pragmatic Holism Could Reframe Ecological Means and Ends
17:20 Closing discussion
18:00 End of seminar

The program is realized with support of Heinrich Böll Foundation.