Periphery in Movement: Rethinking Resistance at the Periphery of Europe

A recent article published in Voluntas, titled Periphery in Movement: Struggles Against Extractivist Lithium Mining in Serbia, by Ana Vilenica (SustainAction Project) and Vladimir Mentus, offers a new angle to look at the contemporary struggles in Eastern Europe. The article introduces the concept of Periphery in Movement through the case of resistance to Rio Tinto’s planned Jadar Project for lithium extraction in western Serbia.

The struggle around lithium mining emerged in the context of the global green transition, where lithium has become a strategic resource for electric vehicles and energy storage technologies. While these projects are often framed as necessary for decarbonization, they also expand new extractive frontiers. In Serbia, the proposed mine raised serious concerns about environmental devastation, legal deregulation, and the transformation of rural landscapes into sacrifice zones serving global supply chains.

In response, a broad resistance movement emerged, bringing together local communities, farmers, environmental activists, and people of Serbia. One of the most visible and effective tactics used by the movement was blockades, which disrupted circulation and forced the issue of lithium mining into national political debate. These blockades became a powerful form of collective action, demonstrating how local resistance could scale up and challenge both corporate power and state support for extractive development.

To understand these dynamics, the article introduces the concept of Periphery in Movement, developed in dialogue with theoretical debates on extractivism emerging from Latin America. The notion of Periphery in Movement emphasizes three key elements. First, it foregrounds how struggles emerging in peripheral regions are shaped by unequal power relations within global extractivist systems. Second, it draws attention to the internal contradictions and tensions within movements themselves, produced by the complex positionality of actors operating under conditions of peripheral dependency. Third, it highlights the propositional dimension of resistance, which is often overlooked in the East European periphery, a region frequently perceived as being in a permanent state of catching up with the West.

In the case of the anti-extrctivist movement in Serbia, this propositional dimension was often expressed through the radical demand that “everything must stop” so we could move forward. Rather than negotiating the terms of extraction, the movement insisted on suspending the processes that make such projects possible in the first place. Through blockades and other forms of disruption, the movement halted the advance of extractivist infrastructure and opened space for broader debates about ecological survival, (peoples)democracy, and neo-colonialism.

At the same time, the article shows how movements learn from one another. The anti-lithium movement drew on tactics and organizational logics developed during earlier campaigns against small hydropower plants. Later, these practices circulated further when the student led-movement adopted and expanded the tactic of blockades. In this new context, blockades evolved beyond instruments of protest and became spaces of political experimentation, where new forms of collective organization, cross-movement alliances, and political articulation could emerge.