Book Talk: Riverine Citizenship by Azra Hromadžić

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 Bihać. 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.

To interested attendees who may not be able to access the book, "Riverine Citizenship" was recently featured on the CEU Press Podcast. Listen here.

Azra Hromadžić is Associate Professor and Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professors of Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University. Her first book, Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), investigates the effects of internationally directed postwar intervention policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina on country’s youth. Her second, co-edited book, Care Across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration (Berghahn Books, 2018), researched aging and care in the context of international migration. Her most recent research explores riverine citizenship, war ecologies, migration, environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation in northwestern Bosnia.

Marina Lažetić is a forced displacement researcher and the Director of Programs at the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. Throughout her academic and professional career, she has worked on projects related to forced displacement, nationalism, armed conflicts, and human security. In her current research and writing, she focuses on civil society responses to migration, the US and the EU borderlands and border regimes, and environmental displacement. Marina previously worked for nonprofit organizations and academic institutions such as the Feinstein International Center, Belgrade Center for Security Policy, and Open Society Foundations. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Jelena Golubović specializes in the anthropology of violence. Before joining Northeastern, she held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University. Her award-winning work has been published in Journal of Refugee Studies, Ethnicities, Anthropological Quarterly, and American Ethnologist. Her first book, Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Host or Publisher Center on Forced Displacement