The Balkans are haunted not only by the legacies of war and nationalism but also by ecological violence, including excessive extractivism and uncontrolled pollution. However, the region cannot be reduced to victimhood or marginality. In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Ivana Dinić examines human-land relationships in Montenegro and their role in the fight for a just future.
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Can a poisoned and ecologically damaged soil nurture “unbribable life”? In the context of the ethnically divided, post-conflict Western Balkans, which are facing outmigration and an increasing number of ecologically harmful practices, this question seems almost rhetorical. Amid significant power imbalances between the affected local communities and the national and international players interested in pursuing controversial projects like Vlora airport in Albania, established within the last wild river delta in Europe, or the lithium-extraction initiatives in western Serbia, the countering of land-grabbing and ecological degradation in European (semi)peripheries seems an elusive fight observed from afar.
But what if one changed the lens of the microscope? Instead of observing the violence inflicted by the powerful or the significant activist efforts, one would observe the land as a “way of life” for those living “on, with, and beyond the soils” (Kušić 2022) in Southeastern Europe. How have ordinary lives been unfolding in the Balkans against the backdrop of pollution across different systems and temporalities? And what else might we learn from the meanings, characteristics and affects attributed to land in the (semi)peripheries? By asking such questions, one might encounter fresh arguments and unexpected ‘seeds’ for broadening the alliances on the ground. These ‘seeds’ contain traces, sentiments, and practices one needs to appeal to in the attempt to fortitude the “unbribable life in exhausted and poisoned communities.” Finally, by centering the lived experiences in the neglected Balkan peripheries, transgressing the existing North-South divisions in developmental debates, the repertoires of global environmental struggles may be enriched, too.
Pluriversal meanings associated with land
Artistic projects are arguably vital tools in approaching land as a way of life, as they capture the deeply layered practices, memory, and affect. This article amplifies the voices of those entangled with the Southeastern Europe soils by drawing on two artistic projects: the fieldwork-coupled photography exhibition “Spaces of Peripheralization: Extractivism, Pollution and Environmental Future in Southeastern Europe” by Miloš Đurović – presented in May 2025 – as well as the 2021 short film “Bokahontas” by Jana Radan, set in the coastal town of Herceg Novi, Montenegro. While Đurović’s photographs center air pollution in the north Montenegrin municipality of Pljevlja and Radan’s short film focuses on the sea, both contributions feature visual and narrative elements, relaying on ethnographic fieldwork (Đurović) and semi-biographical memory work (Radan). Through this blend, the interventions establish intimate dialogues that highlight the pluriversal meanings associated with land as an ecosystem comprising soil, water, and air.
Montenegro is an ideal case for studying the aforementioned interconnections. Apart from being the most prominent EU candidate state in the Western Balkans and aiming for full membership by 2028, Montenegro incorporated the concept of an ‘ecological state’ into its constitution in 2007. Although the cases of Pljevlja and Herceg Novi represent urban spaces, with municipalities accounting for populations of around 24,000 and 31,000, respectively, they are marked by outmigration and/or lack of economic opportunities, rendering them marginalized both in regional as well as in broader systems theory terms. What, then, can we learn from the ways in which people and soils are entangled in two different frontier spaces of Montenegro?
Đurović’s photographic exploration of Pljevlja – Montenegro’s northernmost municipality bordering Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, endowed with mineral wealth and fossil fuels but long burdened by air pollution – provokes a reconsideration of how extractivist hierarchies operate. According to the author, in Pljevlja, resource extraction is not simply a dynamic between the former colonial ‘center’ and its former colony. Instead, Pljevlja complicates this binary: the town’s lead and zinc are now exploited by a company from Poland, thus making a former socialist state the center for extraction from another ex-socialist state in Southeastern Europe. To be sure, the author suggests that extractive dynamics existed during Pljevlja’s socialist period as well, at the time when Montenegro was a federal republic within socialist Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia’s post-WWII industrialization took place on the account of using the resources from places like Pljevlja, with the latter experiencing development in terms of infrastructure and population growth. Nevertheless, the promise of district heating in Pljevlja was not realized during the socialist period.
Material conditions across eras and systems of governance
Nostalgia for a “town alive with miners, financial stability, a school full of children, the hum of machines, and tavern songs,” as described in the account of a village near Pljevlja that accompanies Đurović’s photos, reveals more than mere sentimentality. It highlights the comparison of material conditions across eras and systems of governance. Crucially, in conversation with Đurović, locals expand the notion of extractivism beyond minerals to include human and intellectual capital, as well as cultural heritage, such as medieval tombstones relocated from Pljevlja to Montenegro’s old royal capital. The latter extractions occurred under the framework of the current liberal-capitalist regime. This broadened understanding of extractivism thus links depopulation, resource loss, and cultural depletion into a lived equation against which various systems are measured.
Furthermore, Kušić’s (2022) approach insists on looking beyond ecological degradation to reveal other forms of human-soil interaction in Southeast Europe. In this regard, Đurović’s visuals – especially in the segment “White Gases on the Blue Sky” – also capture daily realities of co-existence and resilience: in one striking image, a mosque minaret pierces the horizon through a shroud of vapors in a municipality with Christian-Orthodox religious majority, signaling the persistence of multireligious life amid the pollution. What is more, the snow on the images depicting the winter season is improbably white, with the buildings constructed in the second half of the 20th century ‘still firmly standing.’
The local children’s drawings, which were as well included in Đurović’s fieldwork reveal the infrastructural sites such as playgrounds, parks and other civic spaces, as particularly valued by Pljevlja’s youngest residents. Thus, it is at the intersection of the longing for district heating – aimed at improving the air quality of the town – the history of multicultural cohabitation, and the persistence of social infrastructures that the imaginaries of Pljevlja’s future – transcending the image of a merely peripheral and extractive zone – may emerge.
Inverting common migratory narratives
By contrast, “Bokahontas” exposes dimensions of water pollution in the Bay of Kotor (in Montenegrin: Boka Kotorska), where the semi-fictitious, future-set narrative centers on Daria, a prominent biologist specializing in human longevity studies. Framed from the vantage of 2050, the film uses climate change-induced devastation of Mediterranean as a springboard for Daria’s temporal and geographical reflection. Daria, who now lives in Havana, recalls her idyllic 2020 childhood summer on the beaches of Herceg Novi, a period of pandemic-provoked stillness before both Daria and her friends emigrated to pursue education and careers. Through personalized vignettes, the audience meets Vjera, a future Olympic water polo champion and the first female from Boka to win the title; Luka, a filmmaker in London who owes his success to his talent for English and his popular YouTube channel; Vasilije, a future ship captain; and Robert, whose parents moved to Boka from the UK in search of a slower life. The film illustrates how the Balkans became a haven for some by inverting common migratory narratives towards, instead of away from, Southeast Europe. It is a “place according to the measure of a human being.” Daria’s immigrant parents, who escaped war to find a home in Boka, are another example of the region’s capacity for welcoming and reinvention.
This cosmopolitanism is reinforced by common childhood play, gender-inclusive practices (girls and boys playing together; Vjera as the only girl playing in the local boys’ water polo team), and an openness to newcomers. In all of this, the sea is a crucial element – it has brought geographical openness to the otherwise small local community, attracting people from other regions of Montenegro and the Balkans to move to Boka. In the words of one of Herceg Novi’s most distinguished artists Vojo Stanić, who was born in Podgorica and grew up in Nikšić and Belgrade, it became clear that he was to relocate to Boka for good “the first time he dipped his feet into the sea water.” From migrants and refugees from all over the world to prominent regional and local travelers attracted or enabled by the sea routes – the accounts are subverting images of the Balkans as closed, homogenous, or peripheral spaces. At the same time, the film does not shy away from depicting the precariousness of small-town tourism economies, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when some families were forced to fight for survival and youth were driven out of town in search of opportunities.
Reimagining and reclaiming place
Yet it is the enduring optimism and imagination of children – epitomized in the final scenes of Daria and her friends setting off in a fishing boat during the ‘longest summer of their lives’ – that confers a sense of hopefulness. Similar to Đurović’s photographic ethnography, Radan’s film centers the lived, affective experiences of individuals living amidst polluted land and sea. This suggests that Southeast Europe is both threatened by ecological violence and cannot be reduced to victimhood or marginality.
Both works thus actively rewrite the Southeastern Europe peripheries, highlighting the aspects of their ‘centrality’ through cultural diversity, infrastructural resilience, and a storied history of struggle for inclusion. As economic fragility, nationalist discourses, and environmental degradation persist, the two outlined cases shed light on the foundations upon which alternative futures in the Balkans may be re-imagined. Making clear that the ‘seeds’ for such futures have already been ‘sown,’ albeit scattered and intentionally neglected, provides a deeper understanding of the dimensions of the ‘unrooting’ of extractivist and similar projects. Mobilizing for a just, sustainable future in the Western Balkans thus begins with centering the plural, affective, and historically-situated experiences of those living with and beyond the region’s soil and waters. The artistic interventions help sustain the local capacity to reimagine and reclaim place. The stories and images from Pljevlja and Herceg Novi thus serve as a vital testimony – against fatalism and in service of justice – both within the region and as parts of a broader search for environmental repair.
Excellent article!