Tag Archives: Serbia

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Astrea Nikolovska: Geopolitics Socks

Image 1: Gift shop window in Belgrade, May 2025, photo by Astrea Nikolovska

In the mid-2010s, the tourist center of Belgrade was full of various souvenirs featuring the image of Vladimir Putin. T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, pins, and magnets were sold at every souvenir stand. It was not particularly surprising, given that Serbian people have long felt a particular closeness to Russia. The Pan-Slavic idea of a brotherhood rooted in similarities in language, script, and a shared “Slavic soul” still carries emotional weight in Serbian popular imagination (Đorđević et al. 2023). It also should not be forgotten that, in and around the 2010s, Putin was not yet the image of evil he represents today. In 2008, he danced with George W. Bush in Sochi, exchanged gifts and understanding for 16 years with Angela Merkel, and remained a regular interlocutor and a “victim” of Emmanuel Macron’s “charm.” At that time, he was still seen as an authoritarian, but one the West could work with. Even though the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in Eastern Ukraine framed Putin as “the bad guy,” he was the kind of bad guythatthe “West” could still do business with. A decade later, despite Putin’s fall from grace in the eyes of the “West,” in Serbia, the situation did not change much. His face continues to fill souvenir shelves across Belgrade: Putin on mugs, Putin on T-shirts, and now, additionally, Putin on socks. But he is no longer alone.Putin on socks in 2025 comes in the company of Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Orbán, and many other strongmen of similar provenance.

Although these socks are sold in a country that has been historically and currently entangled with many of these political figures (Bieber and Tzifakis 2019), having itself a leader worthy of being included in this gallery (Dufalla and Metodieva 2024), they are not part of any sort of state propaganda or institutionalized narrative. They are a pop-cultural, vernacular object that emerged from below. Stumbling upon a souvenir stall where the faces of Kim Jong Un and Trump sit alongside those of Harry Potter, Lionel Messi, and Van Gogh’s auto portrait, the first impression is one of absurdity. What in the world is happening here? How did all these faces come together on a souvenir stall in Belgrade, on no less than a sock? But as philosophy and theatre have taught us (Bennett 2015), absurdity emerges not from nonsense, but from the collapse of sense itself, in that very instant when categories blur and meaning no longer holds.

The absurdity here reveals an ongoing collapse of the symbolic order, the contemporary political and social momentum in which distinctions between fiction and politics, villain and hero, history and fantasy, and most importantly, “East and West,” no longer hold (Hall 2018, Krastev and Holmes 2019). In Serbia, a country that has been navigating complex alignments, these socks can be seen as tokens of political ambivalence; they neither celebrate the politicians depicted on them nor entirely ridicule them. They become a site where contemporary contradictions are literally woven together. Stepping into them, one also steps into a world where politics is increasingly driven by affect and spectacle, rather than ideology or coherence (Mouffe 2014).

In contrast to “Western” contexts, where affiliations with NATO, the EU, or the UN impose tighter boundaries around political belonging, Serbia inhabits a more fluid, contradictory position. It resists simple categorization due to its decades-long historical association with Yugoslavia. Until the nominal end of the Cold War, Serbia was part of a socialist, non-aligned federation that positioned itself outside both NATO and the Soviet bloc, nurturing the legacy of sovereignty, self-reliance, and skepticism toward global power structures (Stubbs 2023). During the 1990s, the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, followed by the UN embargo and international isolation, further complicated this legacy. The NATO bombing in 1999, executed without UN Security Council approval, deepened public resentment toward “Western” institutions and reinforced a sense of betrayal by the global order, and made space for many conspiracy theories about the plans in the “West” to destroy the “East” (Byford and Billig 2001). At the same time, Serbia remained formally tied to many of these same “Western” institutions, borrowing from the World Bank and IMF, belonging to the UN, maintaining the accession dialogue with the EU, and even participating in NATO military exercises. Serbia also actively nurtures political, economic, and cultural ties with Russia and China, deepening its entanglement in competing global projects and imaginaries. These overlapping allegiances do not cancel each other out; instead, they coexist simultaneously, producing a geopolitical orientation that is neither fixed nor static, but ambiguous, ambivalent, and situational.

Image 2: Souvenir stall at the Belgrade fortress Kalemegdan, May 2025, photo by Astrea Nikolovska

This uneasy coexistence of resentment and dependence largely shapes how political symbols like Vladimir Putin and other strongmen emerge as popular objects. In 2010, when Putin made his first appearance around Belgrade’s tourist offer, Radio Free Europe published a short article claiming the Putin souvenirs are part of “Putin mania.” When something is proclaimed “mania,” it often suggests a kind of irrational collective obsession. But can the proliferation of memorabilia featuring Putin’s face truly be dismissed as irrational or delusional? Calling it mania makes it seem like a passing craze or emotional overreaction. Still, this label overlooks the deeper context in which it emerged. It pathologizes a behavior that is not a symptom of a psychological disorder, but rather a popular expression that challenges the dominant hegemonic order that tries to fix identities into clear categories, such as moral, good, and evil, rational and irrational, or, in this case, geopolitical.

In that sense, these socks can be seen not as simple glorification of the strongmen whose images they carry, but as products of the political and ideological confusion, often accompanied by ambivalence, irony, nostalgia, resistance, or general frustration with the world that rapidly gets complicated and devoid of language and politics to articulate the complexities. All of these conditions also frame contemporary populisms (Mazzarella 2019). The socks, therefore, represent a reified form of populism from below, a grassroots aesthetic practice that captures the contradictions, disillusionments, and ambivalences of the current geopolitical moment. In the absurd pairing of figures like Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Messi, Van Gogh, and Harry Potter, these socks stage a kind of chaotic equivalence, flattening political, historical, and moral distinctions into a fashion/tourist garment. This flattening, however, does not have to be a celebration of authoritarianism, nor an explicit critique; it is something messier: an affective disorder sublimed into an everyday object as mundane as a sock.

The garment itself contributes to the absurdity of this whole story. Their physical position intensifies the sense of ambivalence, as the political message here is displaced from the more traditional messages written on T-shirts or baseball caps. The images of the strongmen are pushed down to earth, below eye-level messaging, on garments that can be easily shown or hidden, intimate, but importantly, often associated with dirt and stench. This shift leaves the meaning of the socks open to varieties of decoding (Davis 1992). Should they be taken seriously or dismissed as a joke? Are they bought and worn in admiration, irony, provocation, or simply for fun? The answer is never fully settled, and it is precisely this unresolved quality that makes them such apt carriers of contemporary populist feeling.

While not a typical space of political speech, socks as a fashion garment carry potential for subversion. They sit low on the body, close to the ground, and often partially hidden, yet they offer a recognised space for subversion within otherwise regulated outfits. In many corporate and professional environments, where suits and shirts are standardized, socks become one of the few tolerated sites of individuality. When I lived in London in 2009–2010, I noticed men in almost identical dark suits whose only visible departure from the dress code was brightly coloured or patterned socks. The rest of the outfit signalled obedience, but the socks remained as the space of individuality, a small insistence on not being fully absorbed by the uniform.

Today, socks also have a momentum and represent a symbolic battleground. For younger generations, especially Gen Z, socks have become a highly visible fashion surface, a place where logos, images, and slogans circulate as markers of taste, irony, or stance. Online, there is an entire “sock war” between millennials and Gen Z: while millennials are presupposed to favour short, invisible socks, Gen Z insists on longer, visible socks that are meant to be seen. The fashion industry has followed this shift, building whole lines and trends around socks as statement pieces rather than neutral accessories.

Strongman socks in Belgrade tap into the longer history of socks as a space for expression of individuality and the current Gen Z-driven fashion moment. They occupy a small but symbolically dense zone in the outfit, where political images can be worn without fully declaring themselves, and where individuality, irony, and unease can be articulated in a small but persistent way. They can be shown or kept hidden, treated as “just a joke” or as a quiet statement, depending on context. Anti-hegemonic yet non-revolutionary, the socks reflect the logic of populism that speaks not in programs, but in symbols; not in policies, but in feelings (Moffitt 2016). They do not offer a clear alternative, but use fashion as a field to symbolically challenge the existing order (Hebdige 1979). They capture the mood of collapse, the sense that something is ending, but nothing coherent is taking its place. And in doing so, they allow the publics, both local and international, to laugh, recoil, recognize, and step into the confusion together.

Image 3: Gift shop in Belgrade, June 2025, photo by Nikola Mijović

When I asked the souvenir vendor who buys these socks, he replied lightly: “Our people, and tourists equally.” This shared consumer interest suggests that the contradictions and political taboos these objects embody extend far beyond Serbia. The political ambivalence is global. The sense of ideological disorientation, the collapse of clear moral or geopolitical categories, is something many people feel. However, in most places, it remains unspoken, not because it does not exist, but because the vocabulary that could express it is not available. The categories invented during the Cold War, such as “East” and “West,” as well as liberal and authoritarian, good and evil, security and threat, no longer capture the complexity of the moment. The boundaries that once organized the world as Cold War binaries, moral hierarchies, and communist versus democratic geopolitical allegiances are rapidly blurring. The “West’s” presumed moral superiority is increasingly challenged, not only by the powers like China or Russia or the rise of South-Asian, African, and Latin American economies, but from within, as demands to reckon with colonial violence, historical erasures, and structural inequalities intensify. The very institutions that claim to uphold universal values, such as the UN, NATO, ICJ, ICC, and the EU, are viewed in many places as partial, self-interested, or inconsistent.

After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a large-scale military attack on Gaza. As the death toll among Palestinian civilians rose and humanitarian organizations raised alarm over war crimes and genocide, many “Western” governments remained silent or offered unwavering support to Israel. Many observers noted the double standards of “Western” powers. The double standard casts doubt not only on the “West’s” credibility but on the very idea of universal human rights, suggesting that some lives are more grievable than others, and some civilian casualties more politically useful. The vocabulary of international law, human rights, and humanitarian intervention, once mobilized to justify the post-1989 liberal order, now seemed hollow, selectively applied, or brutally ignored. The invasion of Ukraine and then the attack on Gaza reactivated language, fears, and geopolitical imaginaries of the Cold War. Still, this time, the clarity of the ideological divide had eroded. In 2025, the global stage appears more complex than ever, caught between nostalgia for a past structure and the inability to define or navigate the present one. Liberalism no longer feels like a neutral, impassive pillar, but like one political option among many, often failing to account for people’s lived experiences of inequality, disillusionment, or humiliation.

Image 4: Gift shop in Belgrade, June 2025, photo by Nikola Mijović

Serbia, however, and Belgrade in particular, offers a space where that confusion is not only visible, but lived and openly consumed. The state itself occupies an in-between position, not fully aligned with any of the powers, and this liminal stance seems to enable a kind of open market for ambiguity. In Belgrade, the things that cannot be articulated elsewhere, such as the political contradictions, the uncomfortable affinities, and the guilty fascinations, are not silenced and repressed, but sold at eye level for a few euros on socks. To wear Victor Orban, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong-un on one’s feet is not necessarily to endorse them. It is to participate in a new kind of meaning-making, one that is bodily, ironic, and resistant to simple interpretation. These objects blur the line between joke and statement, between mockery and nostalgia. They reflect a world where people no longer trust the categories handed down from above, where “East” and “West,” “good” and “bad,” “rational” and “irrational,” no longer hold explanatory power.

And for that that cannot be named, the socks speak instead.They articulate confusion not through clear-cut discourse, but through juxtaposition. On one stall, Trump, Orban, Kim Jong-un, and Messi coexist without hierarchy, commentary, or context. The socks do not explain; they stage. They do not tell people what to think, but rather reflect what people already feel, joke about, or cannot yet fully articulate. Not sure how to feel about the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Have a pair of Maduro socks!

By placing dictators and pop icons side by side, by turning power into fashion, and by refusing to explain themselves, these socks expose the very contradictions that liberal democracies try to hide: that moral clarity is unstable, that ideology is marketable, and that political feeling is messy, unresolved, and often absurd. They testify to the change in the rules of the game once invented and refereed by the winners of World War II. They, however, do not proclaim new political loyalties, but instead give form to a spectacularized disorientation in which current politics is driven less by ideology than by affect, aesthetics, and irony. Like memes or graffiti, they operate through juxtaposition and absurdity, recalling the logic of what Laclau (1996) named the empty signifier, a symbol whose power lies in its ambiguity, able to unify diverse and even contradictory demands by standing in for a broader sense of discontent, without anchoring itself to a single fixed meaning.

A version of this text was originally published on the MEMPOP project blog.

Astrea Nikolovska is an associated researcher on the ERC project “Memory and Populism from Below” (MEMPOP), hosted by the Institute of Ethnology at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are devoted to the visible and invisible legacies of the Cold War, questions of sovereignty, counter-liberalism, the aesthetics of commemoration, and popular forms of politics. She holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, and has an interdisciplinary background in theatre and cultural studies.

References

Bennett, Michael Y. 2015. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bieber, Florian, and Nikolaos Tzifakis. 2019. The Western Balkans as a Geopolitical Chessboard? Myths, Realities and Policy Options. Policy Brief. Graz: The Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG). https://www.biepag.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_Western_Balkans_as_a_Geopolitical_Chessboard.pdf.

Byford, Jovan, and Michael Billig. 2001. “The Emergence of Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in Yugoslavia during the War with NATO.” Patterns of Prejudice 35(4):50–63.

Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Đorđević, Vladimir, Mikhail Suslov, Marek Čejka, Ondřej Mocek, and Martin Hrabálek. 2023. “Revisiting Pan-Slavism in the Contemporary Perspective.” Nationalities Papers 51(1):3–13.

Dufalla, Jacqueline, and Asya Metodieva. 2024. “From Affect to Strategy: Serbia’s Diplomatic Balance during the Russia-Ukraine War.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 0(0):1–20.

Hall, Stuart. 2018. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power (1992).” Pp. 141–84 in Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, edited by D. Morley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge.

Krastev, Ivan, and Stephen Holmes. 2019. The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London: Penguin Randomhouse.

Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipation(s). London: Verso.

Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48(Volume 48, 2019):45–60.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. 1st ed. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2014. “By Way of a Postscript.” Parallax 20(2):149–57.

Stubbs, Paul, ed. 2023. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Cite as: Nikolovska, Astrea 2025. “Geopolitics Socks” Focaalblog November 17. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/11/17/astrea-nikolovska-geopolitics-socks/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after

Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)

the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.

The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs. 

Renewables between liberalization and water-grabbing

The Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation. From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12 years.  FITs are the means of subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of subsidized electricity prices

If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.

Investors and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources. The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through FITs.

Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).

In this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards, allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018). This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.

Struggles against SHPPs

I first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes through room rentals.

Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)

Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).

“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.

Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)

I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.

Unlike in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for some Serbian communities.

Whose market, whose energy transition?

SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.

These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.

While the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources. This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.

Such investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.

Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.

Bibliography

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain. Indiana University Press.

Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara Mountain].

Ristić, Ratko, Ivan Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA, Vol. 50 [Derivate small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and unmeasurable ecological damage].

Bankwatch, 2019. “Western Balkans Hydropower: Who Pays, Who Profits?” Accessed February 23, 2021. https://bankwatch.org/publication/western-balkans-hydropower-who-pays-who-profits.

Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/