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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in Barroso, Portugal, this paper analyzes the local resistance to a lithium mine framed by the EU as strategic for the region's sovereignty. It shows how "green securitization" accelerates extraction while displacing commons-based, multispecies logics of care and reciprocity.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a seven-year socio-environmental conflict in Covas do Barroso (northern Portugal), where a rural community resists an open-pit lithium mine proposed by a UK company. Based on sustained ethnographic fieldwork, it traces how the EU’s framing of lithium as a “strategic” resource and the political instruments that support it recast upland commons and forested landscapes as sites of security and strategic control. I show how this reframing produces a paradoxical “green security”: the rhetoric of rapid decarbonization under pretenses of EU sovereignty accelerates extractive infrastructures while marginalizing local life ways and ecological relations. By focusing on the community’s defense of the baldios (historical commons) and everyday practices—communal irrigation, collective baking, shared farm labor—I argue that these practices enact a form of care-based citizenship (care-tizenship) and an ethics of refusal that contests extractivist logics. The dispute mobilizes memories of past contamination, unmet promises of infrastructure, divergent sustainability imaginaries and concerns about turning autonomous livelihoods into “zones of sacrifice.” Internal divisions within the village reveal plural and sometimes contradictory futures. This case exposes three core contradictions in contemporary “just transition” politics: the erasure of local temporalities, the technoscientific sidelining of embodied knowledge, and the violation of moral economies of reciprocity. I argue that these tensions are produced through processes of securitization that extend beyond military frames to include extractive governance, infrastructural violence, and the criminalization of dissent, recasting forested commons as strategic spaces while displacing multispecies, commons-based logics of protection and coexistence.