Riverine Citizenship

Water potential is a significant natural wealth of most parts of the Balkans which gave rise to a surge in hydropower investments unparalleled across Europe. As part of the process, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River which runs through the Bosnian town of Bihac. This alarmed the city's residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. The book begins with this protest and it explores how the threat of dam construction transformed the seemingly apolitical love of the river into a powerful political force around which thousands of people mobilized: riverine citizenship.The book is based on interviews with stakeholders, archival research, and over twenty years of ethnographic investigations. The analysis focuses on the tension between ecological sustainability efforts in favor of renewable energy on the one hand, and citizens' historically shaped, deeply felt love for the river, on the other. The book examines how the language and promises of green transition often mask the forces of capitalist accumulation that drive this change -- whether in the form of building hydroelectric dams or promoting eco-tourism -- and thus set in motion another cycle of environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation.