IVA LUČIĆ: “Extracting Nature, Making Peripheries: Global Perspectives on the Balkans as Extractive Periphery, 1870–1990”

Abstract

What is an extractive periphery? And how can we understand the economic and ecological careers of such regions as they face radical political change? These questions stand at the core of this lecture, which will analyze and theorize the dynamics of extraction-based peripheralization processes under a variety of shifting polities.

The presentation addresses a particularly fascinating case: forest exploitation in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1850 and 1990, a period marked by advancing extractive industries in Europe and globally along with dramatic socio-economic and environmental transformations. Bosnia became a global provider of timber in the later 19th century and remained so throughout the 20th century, exporting its oaks, beeches, black pines to destinations like Australia, the Middle East, and across Europe. In parallel, it experienced multiple geopolitical recontextualizations, functioning as an integrated part of four political entities of very different kinds: two empires (Ottoman and Habsburg Empire), post-imperial multi-national state (Interwar Yugoslavia), and a multi-national socialist federation (Socialist Yugoslavia). Whereas these four political regimes were engaged in exploiting Bosnian forests on an industrial scale, they did so under markedly different circumstances: different legal systems, changing economic ideologies, and shifting ecological conditions. Moreover, Bosnia’s forest extraction did not lead to any economic development of the region. Instead, it resulted in multiple irreversible ecological damages.

My talk will discuss in depth two regime shifts in particular: the inter-imperial transition from Ottoman to Habsburg governance and the post-imperial transition from Habsburg Empire to Interwar Yugoslavia. More broadly and on a theoretical level, I propose an analytical model for analyzing the dialectics of continuities and discontinuities across different regime shifts and their impact on the dynamics of extractivism that pivots around four inter-related aspects that all lie at the heart of extraction-based peripheralization: property relations, state-capital relations, global timber trade, ecological transformations.