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 these processes, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River which runs through the Bosnian city of Bihać. This alarmed the city’s residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. Azra Hromadžić will address this protest and explore 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.

Her talk is based on interviews with stakeholders, archival research, and over ten 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. Hromadžić will examine 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.

Azra Hromadžić is Professor of Anthropology and Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University. She has research interests in the anthropology of international policy in the context of state-making in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her first book, Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press), is an ethnographic investigation of the internationally directed postwar intervention policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the response of local people, especially youth, to these policy efforts. Several years ago, Hromadžić initiated a new project that ethnographically researches aging, care, and social services in the context of postwar and postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina. She co-edited (with Monika Palmberger) a volume titled Care Across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration (Berghahn Books 2018). In 2017, she began a new research project on riverine citizenship, war ecologies, environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her newest book, titled Riverine Citizenship: A Bosnian City in Love with the River, was published in 2024 with the Central European University Press.

Accommodation: If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at crees@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.