CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Nina Đukanović

This seminar examines the alternative visions of sustainable futures that emerge from the resistance to lithium mining in Serbia. Lithium is widely understood as crucial for the green transition for its use in batteries of electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies. The Jadar Project led by the mining corporation Rio Tinto was set to become the biggest lithium mine in Europe, with the planned start of the construction in January 2022. Yet it attracted mass resistance, leading to tens of thousands of people protesting and ultimately forcing the government to cancel the project. While long histories of colonialism and extractivism mark a divide between the Global South where mining takes place, and the Global North where the materials are enjoyed, the urgency of the green transition reveals core/periphery relations as dynamic and expanding towards new extractivist projects closer to the geopolitical centres. Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this research project investigates how extractivist frontiers emerge and are contested in Serbia as a European (semi)periphery. While the cancellation of the Jadar Project was nullified in July 2024, its ongoing resistance marks a critical point of contestation of the green transition where dominant climate strategies fundamentally rely on the logic of green extractivism. Such challenges open up the space for imagining alternative futures that are not only “green” but also just.