Paper Short Abstract:

Going beyond a vision of ecopolitics as uneven class exchange, this paper explores conflicting narrations of debt - obligations towards the capital, the ancestors, and the future generations - that are mobilising Serbian environmental protests against hydropower and lithium extraction.

Paper Abstract:

As Andrea Muehlebach shows, water insurgencies often cite a debt to life to confront financialization as a form of life in debt. But such declarations of debt to life are never about nature in the abstract, nor are they only about the descendants. In the Balkan eco-riots, they are always textured by debts to ancestors, all remembered in particular struggles for liberation, with obligations to children to be born inasmuch as to those who died for the land. Like premodern gifts, the debt of life comes haunted by the ghosts of those who gave their lives, and who can now be framed as the real owners of the environmental commons – transforming the present generations as mere stewards of longer cycles of transmission. Thus, where states cite their debt to green capital – and where green capital itself acts in the name of the future generations – the eco-rebels cite their debts to the past relatives: a grandfather who died starving, or a mother who, lying at a deathbed, wants to take one more swim in a local stream. This means that there is no straightforward way to abstract the environment into one planetary good, or easily demarcate the nationalist from the antinationalist, the particularist from the universalist, the right- from the left-wing. Instead, we witness myriad forms of commons – all embedded in particular transgenerational struggles – which can be put into equivalence with one another, but never entirely removed from the land(s) they grew upon.