Description
This paper is concerned with the emergence of a new lithium extractivist frontier in Serbia, and the local resistance to it. The Jadar Project was set to become the biggest lithium mine in Europe, an element widely understood as crucial to the so-called green transition as a key component of batteries used in electric vehicles. However, following mass protests, the project was cancelled in January 2022 before the construction began. While long histories of 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 “home”. Within this context, the mine occupies a liminal space where Serbia is referred to as being at the “doorsteps of Europe” by the mining company Rio Tinto which at the same time promises to position the country as “the European hub” for green energy. Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the article investigates how extractivist frontiers emerge and are contested in Serbia. I argue that this frontier is always in an ongoing process of becoming, embedded in multiple forms of attachment and resistance that emerge around local relationships with the soil, land, history, and memory, and their reverberation and remobilisation in the struggle against lithium mining.
