Format/Structure

This will be an academic panel based on a special issue we are preparing. We've included the participants and their titles.

Long Abstract

This panel investigates political ecologies of Southeastern Europe—a region often overlooked in mainstream political ecology debates, yet one where human-nature relations recently came to the forefront of political, social, and economic struggles. What do political ecologies of Southeastern Europe look like? What kind of legacies shape them? How are they transforming, and what possible futures might they open or re-negotiate? The panel brings together contributions that engage both historical and contemporary political ecologies across the region. Together, these cases foreground the multifold role of natural environments: as a foundation of political formations, an object of governance, and a mobilizing resource. By situating diverse human-nature relations within the region’s layered imperial and (post-)socialist histories, this panel challenges the preipheralization of Southeastern Europe in global political ecology narratives. It demonstrates how the region offers vital insights into broader questions of extraction, conservation, resistance, and more-than-human politics. In doing so, it contributes to the conference’s invitation to trace the diverse origins and multiple futures of political ecology–through empirically grounded, regionally situated, and historically nuanced scholarship.

Andrija Filipović (Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade, Serbia): Visualizing Yugopetrolscapes: Photography, Oil Infrastructure, and Socialist Yugoslav Petronatureculture

Iva Lučić (Stockholm University, Sweden): Political Ecology in the Era of Post-Imperial State-Building

Ioanna Chatzikonstantinou (Politecnico di Torino, Italy): Changing forest and fire management in Greece: A political ecology perspective through the case study of Evia island

André Thiemann (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia): The National Park Đerdap in Times of African Swine Fever

Alexandru Iorga (Constantin Brăiloiu Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, Romanian Academy & Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Romania) & Călin Cotoi (Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest & Romanian Academy, Bucharest): The politics and technologies of an East European wetland: modernity and ruins in the Danube Delta