Vortrag Iva Lučić: Extracting Nature, Making Peripheries: Global Perspectives on the Balkans as Extractive Periphery, 1870–1990

Zweite Veranstaltung des Berlin-Brandenburger Colloquiums für Umweltgeschichte (BBC) im Wintersemester 2024/25.

Online via Zoom von 18 bis 20 Uhr.

Veranstalter des BBC ist das ZZF Potsdam.

Zum Vortrag

Iva Lučić (Stockholm):
Extracting Nature, Making Peripheries: Global Perspectives on the Balkans as Extractive Periphery, 1870–1990

How and why do some regions rich in natural resources become economic and ecological peripheries of extraction? What is the role of political turmoil in their long-term transformation? These questions stand at the core of the project examining peripheralization processes by means of natural resource extraction. It studies forest exploitation in the Balkans between 1870–1990, a period marked by advancing extractive industries and major socio-economic and environmental transformations. The project breaks new ground in more than one sense. First, by exploring the hitherto neglected Balkan region, it challenges mainstream theories on extractivism and centerperiphery models as it elaborates a novel methodological approach that studies political governance, ecology and social circumstances through the interplay of bottom-up and top-down perspectives. Second, it explores the multiple peripheralization processes of one region under a variety of shifting polities, including empires, post-imperial nation-state formations and communist regime. Third, it engages with cross-regional comparisons of the Balkans with extractive peripheries in other parts of the world. The project develops new explanatory models about how socioeconomic and environmental inequalities emerge and materialize on different spatial and temporal scales. In doing so, it seeks to enhance our comprehension of contemporary conflicts over natural resources and their ultimate social and environmental costs.

Short biography
Iva Lučić is Associate Professor of History at the Department of History, Stockholm University and Pro Futura Scientia Scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. She is the author of Im Namen der Nation: Der Politische Aufwertungsprozess der Muslime im sozialistischen Jugoslawien 1956- 1971 (Harrassowitz, 2018) and Gebrochenes Brot: Ein Frauenorden zwischen zwei Weltkriegen. Die Eucharistieschwestern (Anton Pustet Verlag, 2020). She is currently co-editing Imperial Natures: (Re)Thinking Late Habsburg Governance through the Environment with environmental historian Jawad Daheur (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France) for Berghahn Books. Her longer-term research focuses on the dynamics of extractivism under a variety of shifting polities, including empires, postimperial state formations, and communist regime. It focuses on forest extraction in Bosnia and Herzegovina from late Ottoman to late socialist period.