Paper short abstract:

This paper uses land to juxtapose two visions of development: the building of a dam and a reservoir in the grand project of electrifying Yugoslav socialism in the 1950s, and the post-socialist profit-driven investments in renewable energy that have been unfolding in the same region since 2010s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses land to understand the continuities and differences between two visions of development: the building of a dam and a reservoir in the grand project of electrifying Yugoslav socialism in the 1950s, and the post-socialist profit-driven investments in renewable energy that have been unfolding in the same region since 2010s. Understanding land as being multiply productive and consisting of overlapping material and immaterial relations, I show how different developmental imaginaries make their claims to territory, and ways in which those claims affect people living in them. These spatial claims—here as elsewhere in the world—are made possible by formulating a connection between land not able to produce and the supposedly backward populations that live on it. The first part of the paper zones in on the incommensurability between official efforts to remunerate the expropriated land by making it commensurable with either different plots of land or monetary values, and the ways in which the karst landscape and the peasants challenged these efforts. The second part of the paper then examines how different forms of violence inflicted upon this land—the 1950s flooding and the 1990s war—reverberate in struggles around developmental imaginaries today.