Ghosts, Rewilded: Environmental Reverberations in the Balkans

Over the last decade, an unprecedented wave of environmental mobilizations has swept across the Balkans. The energy transition, depopulation, and popular environmentalism have entwined environment and reproduction which, in turn, has triggered a major historical reckoning. In this introduction to a thematic cluster, we explore environmental reverberations as ways in which ecological distribution conflicts not only antagonize different social groups but also resonate across space and time. First, we observe how anti-mining struggles thematize the affinities of postsocialist and postcolonial pathways, and the way histories of different regions have been compartmentalized. Second, we pay attention to trajectories of modernization in the region, arguing that a focus on soil and nonhumans can decenter ethnonational readings of regional violence. Third, we explore how environmental struggles resonate across different social milieus, while remaining rooted in enduring forces of social reproduction. Last, we explore how the energy transition becomes entwined with depopulation, revealing a cross-generational dissensus on the value of rural land. By paying attention to the material, protracted effects of power as it resonates through the landscape, historical memory, and worries over social reproduction, we suggest that the environmental humanities can offer new readings of classical regional tropes, including that of Balkanism.