Presentation short abstract

This paper examines riverine citizenship in Bosnia and Croatia through the Una River, showing how multispecies alliances and watershed-based belonging challenge state-centered politics and foster new forms of ecological and civic engagement rooted in transborder place, proximity, and care.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the entangled relationships between people in Bosnia and Croatia and the Una River that flows through both countries. Anchored in long-term ethnographic and archival research, it examines how the Una functions as both a material and symbolic force—animating civic life, ecological awareness, and political mobilization. The 2024 transborder protest at the river’s spring in Croatia serves as a pivotal moment to analyze how multispecies alliances—among humans, rivers, animals, and institutions—can catalyze collective action and reconfigure dominant political grammars.

Central to this inquiry is the concept of riverine citizenship, a form of belonging rooted in unski život, or “the Una style of life.” This mode of inhabiting the world binds people, land, and biota into overlapping civic relations, challenging conventional notions of identity and territory. I theorize riverine citizenship through the lens of watershed, not as a hydrological unit alone, but as a generative topological space—a connective tissue of land, water, and practice. Unlike topography, which implies fixity and borders, topology emphasizes flow, rhythm, and relationality.

Watershed, understood topologically, becomes a site of non-identitarian politics, where proximity and care replace ethnicity and state allegiance. Riverine citizenship constructs territories from below, grounded in ecological interdependence and affective attachment. By foregrounding the Una River’s materiality and sociality, this study challenges dominant models of sovereignty and offers a framework for environmentally attuned political engagement. It ultimately asks how politics might be reimagined to honor multispecies entanglements and respond to the precarity of our ecological present.