Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the region of Southeast Serbia - where river grabbing is compounded by rapid depopulation and peasant-cum-ecological insurgency - I explore water as an 'empty signifier' caught in the cycles beyond one's time. Eco-populism creates alternative equivalences, antagonisms, and universality.

Paper long abstract:

The state regimes in the Balkans are increasingly targeting natural resources as the latest frontier. Such is the plan to create 3,500 small hydropower plants - a carbon-free technology which, however, implies putting rivers into pipes, with devastating socio-environmental impact. In the popular imagination, such development is seen as pushing beyond the limits of commodification, something that endangers 'life' itself. Focusing on the ageing region of Southeast Serbia - where water grabbing is compounded by rapid depopulation and fervent peasant-cum-ecological activism - I explore the 'River Defenders of Stara planina' - a motley network of affected villagers and their urban kin, ecologists and nature lovers, and a wide chunk of citizenry mobilised through social networks. Waging a 'water war' against the investors, the guardians increasingly oppose the 'people' to the 'state'. But exactly what 'people' they summon? Neither nation, citizenship or class describe them fully. Rather, water here functions as an empty signifier - a nexus in creating an alternative eco-populist universality. Environmental struggle thus generalises other social frontlines. But unlike in Laclau and Mouffe's model, 'life' is not merely the stuff of signs. Its equivalences are made in living webs and cycles, an intergenerational moral ecology connecting the dead, the living, and those still to be born. And if rivers became the basis of new insurgent kinship, it is because they could be imagined as the last shared substance, at once traversing different places and times. Such rivers connect, as well as divide.