Description
The line separating foreign and domestic politics in much of the International Relations (IR) literature is increasingly challenged by the planetary nature of shared crises. As global capitalism depletes social and material resources living beings needs to reproduce life across the inexorably interconnected ecosystems on Earth, strategies for mutually assured survival emerge as both urgently needed and foreclosed by the current systems of governance. Feminist political economists, from Veronica Gago to Nancy Fraser and Ilene Grabel have highlighted the structural opening emerging from the shared experience of oppression under colonial capitalism that have the potential to inform collective transformations of eco-social organization. This paper theorizes the past year of the anti-system civil movement in Serbia as a collective approach to planetary repair, encompassing efforts to rebuild (i) social contract (including inter-ethnic reconciliation); (ii) democratic governance (through alternative public institutions); and (iii) ecologies (in opposition of developmentalist extractivism). Caught in the geopolitical quagmire of resource grab, the mass movement in Serbia offers lessons of reclaiming internationalist quests for collective liberation amidst the traps of liberal cooptation.
