Lithium Mining in Europe’s Periphery: The Environmentalist Mobilization Against Authoritarian Rule in Serbia

Abstract

Presenter: Marko Žilović Global climate mitigation efforts require extraction of vast quantities of lithium and other minerals. At the same time, the rising geopolitical rivalries dictate that these minerals should be sourced locally or from countries that are friendly, stable, and nearby (Riofrancos 2023; McNamara 2023). How does the global volt rush (Sanderson 2022) impact the politics of the countries rich with newly valuable minerals? And, in turn, how is the politics of green transition affected by becoming entangled in the politics of these countries? I explore these questions through a case study of Serbia, where efforts by a global mining giant Rio Tinto to develop lithium mining have sparked a massive popular backlash that has delayed the project for more than two years, and possibly halted it all together. Drawing on a year’s worth of ethnographic research and interviews my paper explains the surprising success of the lithium mining opponents by their ability to associate resistance to the mine with the issue of preserving Serbian national identity. By reframing the issue in econativist terms, Serbia’s anti-mining activists have caught the country’s authoritarian regime unprepared. But in doing so they have also been forced into statements and silences that betray the wider emancipatory commitments of the transnational anti-extractivist movement, and could possibly hurt the long-term prospects of democratization in Serbia itself. My case study also produces several takeaways for the wider political economy of the ongoing push to near-shore the extractive industries. It highlights how the social license to mine remains important in authoritarian states in Europe’s periphery too, but also how the procurement of social license in such a context gets easily intertwined with matters of national politics that go far beyond the narrow concerns of corporate social responsibility policies and technocratic environmental policies.