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MINING LITHIUM IN EUROPE’S(SEMI)PERIPHERY AND THE MAKING OF AN
EXTRACTIVIST FRONTIER  
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Nina Djukanović
July 5, 2024
LeftEast
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_ Lithium mining in Serbia reveals the ever-expanding extractivist
frontiers and integration of peripheries. Yet, the resistance to the
lithium mining project, serves as a testament to the possibility of
fighting for alternative sustainable futures. _

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Perhaps more than any other material, lithium has, in recent years,
been increasingly presented as the silver bullet for the
so-called _twin transition_—the digital and the green transitions.
Lithium is essential to most conventional batteries used in diverse
technologies, from phones and laptops to increasingly and
overwhelmingly so in electric vehicles. It has become the symbol of
growth-based solutions to climate change where technological fixes,
rather than more equitable and just structural changes, take the
primary role.

Escalating concerns within the EU regarding its material sovereignty
and security have been intensified by the conflict in Ukraine and the
growing awareness about China’s dominance of the battery supply
chain, as well as other green technologies. As a result, ensuring
access to critical raw materials such as lithium has emerged as a
paramount priority for the Western powers. The introduction of the
EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) in 2023 has further
underscored this goal, signalling a strategic shift towards mining
closer to “home” for better control over supply chains.

In line with this objective, the EU has strongly supported mining
projects in member states as well as in its “immediate outside.”
Notable plans for lithium mining include projects in Portugal, Spain,
Germany, and the Czech Republic, where they have also attracted
significant opposition from the local communities. In Serbia, an EU
candidate country, the construction of Europe’s biggest lithium mine
was to begin in 2022. Led by Rio Tinto, one of the largest mining
companies in the world, the Jadar Project in the western part of the
country has been portrayed both as a green solution for the EU and as
an unprecedented economic opportunity for Serbia.

Yet, the project has attracted widespread resistance from part of the
local community that refused to sell their houses and leave their
land. They are predominantly farmers and agricultural workers fighting
for their right to say no and to protect nature, the environment, and
their way of life. Their resistance also becomes a fundamental
challenge to the hegemonic understanding of sustainability and the
green transition coupled with digitalisation and electrification based
on relentless mining and extractivism (see Voskoboynik and Andreucci
2022). Following months of mass protests that erupted in the autumn
and winter of 2021 and attracted tens of thousands of people that
blocked roads, bridges, and highways, the Serbian government was
ultimately forced to cancel the Jadar Project in January 2022, before
the construction of the lithium mine could have even begun.

The cancellation marked a notable triumph for the anti-lithium mining
movement. However, Rio Tinto continues to operate in Serbia, openly
supported by the government, President Aleksandar Vučić, and some
Western embassies. Locals and activists maintain their resolve to
prevent lithium mining, opening space to envision different green and
sustainable futures from the semi-periphery. Based on ethnographic
research and close collaboration with the locals and activists
resisting lithium mining in Serbia, this short essay attends to
questions of peripherality and the making of an extractivist frontier
in the Balkans.

FROM THE “BALKANS” TO THE “WESTERN BALKANS”

The dominant discourses on “the Balkans” are not new but a product
of the long history of othering (Todorova 1994, 1997; Goldsworthy
1998; Wolff 1994). Todorova, in her seminal work on _Balkanism_,
writes, “the Balkans have served as a repository of negative
characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image
of the ‘European’ and the ‘West’ has been constructed” based
on this “dark side within” (1997: 188). While closely related to
Orientalism, Balkanism is distinct in that it denotes a particular
geographical space, occupying a liminal
position between the West and the Rest, historically as a borderland
between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and at present
between the EU and the non-EU.

In the decades since the publishing of Todorova’s work on Balkanism,
scholars on the regions have both built on the concept and further
complicated it, emphasising the semi-peripherality of the Balkans as
being in a constant process of becoming rather than firmly set within
the clichés of wars and ethnic hatred (Rajković and Vasilijević,
forthcoming). Crucially, important work has been done to position the
scholarship on the Balkans or ex-Yugoslavia in the broader
conversations on post-socialism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism
(see Kušić et al. 2019). This has particularly been the case since
the end of the wars in the 1990s, neoliberalisation, and the
involvement of the EU and US in the construction of the Balkans
materially, politically, and discursively.

In his exploration of Serbia’s peripherality, Matković (2014)
provocatively asks: “How does one become a periphery?” Looking
into the structural, legal, and institutional systems that underpin
peripherality, Matković argues that most of Serbia’s “legal and
even fiscal policies are determined by its peripheral role.”
Importantly, Matković stresses that becoming a periphery is a process
and refrains from categorizing Serbia as a periphery just yet. While
Matković refers mainly to the politico-economic exploitation and
dependencies that come out of the global unequal power relationships,
Kušić and others highlight the affective experience of peripherality
that is based not only on outside representations but also on the
internal subjectivities inhabited by “peripheral selves”
(Majstorović 2020).

What has recently become known as the “Western Balkans” serves as
a political and geographical category for a particular part of the
Balkans. The area is characterised by one defining feature: these
countries are not yet members of the EU, but all are candidate states,
marking “another kind of Europeanization” (Petrović 2014).
Relatedly, Jensen (2009: 820) traces how the process of “the
creation of a ‘borderless Europe’ […] involved the making of its
‘immediate outside’—an outside that was to become an inside.”
It is through these liminal and multiple degrees of peripherality at
the border of the EU that the green extractivist frontier emerges –
and is resisted.

MINING LITHIUM AT THE “DOORSTEPS OF EUROPE”

The enduring legacy of colonial extractivism, which persists into the
present day, has been characterized by the unequal extraction of raw
materials from the Global South for the benefit of the Global North
(Petras and Veltmeyer 2017; Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2009). However, the
new green geopolitical paradigm marks a fundamental shift, or rather
an expansion, of extractivist frontiers to new places and spaces. In
the name of green growth, mining projects are expanding across the
globe at an unprecedented rate, following the extractivist logic of
ever-increasing material consumption and economic growth.

The case of lithium mining in Serbia makes visible the contested
relations between green extractivism, the making of the sacrifice
zones and peripheries, and the “Europeanisation” of Serbia. A case
in point is Rio Tinto’s framing of the mining project, positioning
the planned mine at the “doorsteps of Europe.” This conveniently
constructs Serbian space as not European—or not European
enough—despite its geographic location in Europe. At the same time,
however, Rio Tinto has promised to “position Serbia as the European
hub for green energy.” Here, the mine occupies a liminal position,
like the country itself—both central to Europe’s green transition
and yet, from certain perspectives, outside of Europe.

The notion of being on the “doorsteps of Europe” resonates
strongly with Serbia’s positioning as being in the “EU’s waiting
room,” a characterization often used to describe Serbia’s EU
accession process. Jansen (2009) describes in detail what he refers to
as the “present entrapment,” a sense of being “stuck” that the
citizens of the Western Balkans experience through the discriminatory
visa regimes and immigration policies. Todorova’s depiction of the
country as perennially “lagging and lacking,” stuck in a perpetual
process of catching up, further reinforces this sense of stasis.
Consequently, the mining project becomes easily justifiable as a
development opportunity on Serbia’s path to finally joining the EU.

The green transition marks a new shift in the global commodity and
supply chains and relations between the cores, the peripheries, and
the semi-peripheries as the extractive frontier expands in
unprecedented ways, as pushed for by the mining industry and other
interest groups. But the Balkans, whether referred to as such or as
the Western Balkans, or in this case Serbia, have been subjects of
numerous transitions, from the post-socialist transition marked by a
weakening of labour rights and social protections, privatisation of
key industries and neoliberalisation of life itself, to the ongoing
green transition.

TOWARDS NETWORKS OF SOLIDARITY AGAINST GREEN EXTRACTIVISM

The inherent liminality of this position, existing within Europe yet
outside the EU, or, to put it differently, being European but not
European enough, carries important implications. While many
peripheries exist within the cores, and there are notable lithium and
other critical raw materials mining projects within the EU borders,
the situation in Serbia stands apart. As Matković (2014) puts it:
“In contrast to many countries on the edge of the EU, Serbia is
located on the periphery of the periphery.” The weakness of the
Serbian institutions, the semi-authoritarian regime of President
Vučić, the culture of corruption, and the atmosphere of fear all
contribute to the hailing of large-scale infrastructure projects like
the lithium mine as a path to development.

At the same time, the situation in Serbia is far from equal to the
long colonial and violent histories of extractivism in Latin America
and other places across the globe where Indigenous people are at the
forefront of the struggle against the ever-expanding extractivism.
Understanding the colonial histories of extractivism and the
construction of peripheries is vital. Yet, these terms must be used
with care when describing the dynamics within Europe—a geographical
space itself subject to contestations.

It is the local communities and activists who are readily bridging
different geographical and political categories, including the
reductionist overemphasis on nation-states, in their effort to create
solidarity networks against lithium mining and other forms of green
extractivism. In July 2022, representatives of nine organisations from
Chile, Portugal, Spain, and Germany came together with the locals and
activists in Serbia to sign a Jadar Declaration, a joint basis for
international cooperation and solidarity in their resistance to
lithium mining. Since then, many similar meetings and gatherings have
facilitated the exchange of experiences and empowered vastly different
local groups from different sides of the world. These groups share a
common vision of justice and a close relationship with the land.

The case of lithium mining in Serbia thus reveals the shifting and
ever-expanding extractivist frontiers and the fluid integration and
designation of peripheries. Yet, crucially, amid these shifts, the
resistance to the lithium mining project, with its echoes of global
anti-colonial and anti-extractivist sentiments, serves as a testament
to the possibility of envisioning and fighting for alternative
sustainable futures.

_REFERENCES_
Acosta, A. (2013). Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the
same curse. Beyond development: Alternative Visions from Latin
America, 1, 61-86.

Goldsworthy, V. (1998). Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the
imagination. Yale University Press.

Gudynas, E. (2009). Diez tesis urgentes sobre el nuevo extractivismo.
Extractivismo, política y sociedad, 187, 187-225.

Jansen, S. (2009). After the red passport: towards an anthropology of
the everyday geopolitics of entrapment in the EU’s ‘immediate
outside’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(4),
815-832.

Kušić, K., Manolova, P., & Lottholz, P. (Eds.) (2019, Mar).
Decolonial theory and practice in Southeast Europe. dVersia.

Majstorović, D. (2019). Postcoloniality as peripherality in Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Dialoguing Posts, Special issue of dVversia ed. P.
Manolova, Kušić, K., & P. Lottholz, 131-148.

Majstorović, D. (2020). Love as Practice of Solidarity. On Culture,
(9).

Matković, A. (2014). How to become a periphery? – The case of
Serbia from Yugoslavia’s disintegration to its “European
integration”. Green European Foundation, Brussels.

Petras, J., & Veltmeyer, H. (2017). Imperialism, capitalism and
development. In The Essential Guide to Critical Development
Studies, 128-137. Routledge.

Petrović, T. (2014). 1 Introduction: Europeanization and the Balkans.
In Mirroring Europe (pp. 1-19). Brill.

Rajković, I. and Vasiljević, J. (forthcoming). Environmental
reverberations in the Balkans. An introduction to the special section.
East European Politics and Societies.

Todorova, M. (1994). The Balkans: from discovery to invention. Slavic
Review, 53(2), 453-482.

Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Todorović, I. (2022). Jadar Declaration unites activists in global
resistance against lithium mining. Balkan Green Energy News. Available
at:
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Voskoboynik, D. M., & Andreucci, D. (2022). Greening extractivism:
Environmental discourses and resource governance in the ‘Lithium
Triangle.’ Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(2),
787-809.

Wolff, L. (1994). Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on
the mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

NOTE FROM LEFTEAST EDITORS: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY SECOND COLD WAR
OBSERVATORY
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MAY 2, 2024.

_NINA DJUKANOVIĆ is a doctoral candidate in the School of Geography
and the Environment at the University of Oxford. She is an
environmental geographer whose research examines the relationship
between extractivism and environmental justice and the contested
understandings of sustainability and green transition. Her current
research focuses on lithium mining in Serbia, where she conducts an
ethnographic investigation into the lived experiences of local
communities affected by the prospect of lithium mining._

_LeftEast is a place where various voices, efforts and groups from
around the region, broadly understood, come together in a sustained
analytical and political effort. This is a platform where our common
struggles and political commitments come together beyond the national
borders or the straightjacket of national languages. Therefore, this
platform is a political act. Ideologically, it is explicitly left-wing
in orientation, that is, left of the classical social democracy.
Nonetheless, it aims to remain largely inclusive and open,
accommodating enough strands of the contemporary left without losing
the critical edge and while maintaining a dynamic environment for
intellectual conversations._

* Lithium
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* Extractivism
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* mining
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* Balkans
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* Serbia
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* Europe
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* Rio Tinto
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