François Lerin (AIDA based) and Claire Bernard (CIRAD) dedicated almost a year to conclude a special issue of the Journal Balkanology about “ Environment in the Balkans: Historical and Contemporary questions”, a file with eight scientific articles, both in French (with English summary) and English.
This 2021 volume and all the previous of Balkanologie are in open source, freely accessible. Founded in 1997, the journal Balkanologie is published by the French Association for Balkan Studies (AFEBalk). Twice a year, it publishes research in the humanities and social sciences relating to South-Eastern Europe, an area understood in the broad sense as extending from Hungary to Turkey, with a large temporal scope: from the Ottoman era to our days.
The introduction by Francois and Claire is only in French deals with Environment in the Balkans: Historical and Contemporary Issues. First we try to tried to find out if the Balkans were a relevant aggregate for dealing with environmental issues – exploring this possible relevance though: the Climate change issue, Biodiversity and resources and pollutions.
But we also try to understand how the environmental issue is “framed” in the Balkans region. To use the pragmatist terms of Richard Rortry, it is a question of giving some indications on the way in which the “scientific conversation” on the environmental question engages in the region.
Over the past three decades, conflicts, wars, nationalism, religious and identity issues have operated as major organizers of social science narratives in the Balkans, as well as issues of governance, post-communist transition and integration into the European Union.
An “audience” for environmental issues has only recently been built around narratives and analysis of related stories, problems and conflicts. Without constituting epistemic or practitioner’s communities, the “program” (of this scientific conversation) is undoubtedly in the process of being constituted…
After this we presents the issue by distributing the articles in three types.
(1) Moments of the environmental history :
- George Andrei Whose Nature Is It? Contesting Forest Regulation and Land Reform in Interwar Transylvania
- Josef Djordjevski “The (Still) Beautiful Blue Adriatic”: Tourism, Yugoslav Socialism, and the Adoption and Limitations of Visual Preservation on the Eastern Adriatic Seaside, 1960s-1990s
- Tibissaï Guevara-Braun 1973, l’année du tournant environnemental dans l’Albanie communiste ? (1973, the Year of the Environmental Turn in Communist Albania?)
(2) Sector analysis :
- Chloé VlassopoulosFrom a Greece of Lignite (Coal) to a Green Greece? The Energy Sector in Forced Transition
- Hélène Karka The Environmental Conflicts Arising during the Exploitation of Precious Metals in the Chalkididiki Peninsula (Northern Greece)
- Nebojša Vukadinović The Geo-Culture of the Environment in Serbia
(3) Environmental mobilizations :
- Jelisaveta Vukelić, Mina Petrović et Ana Kukuridi Environmental Activism in Serbia: Challenges to Cooperation Between Professional and Grassroots Organisations
- Sanja Potkonjak et Tea Škokić A City Worth Fighting For: Accidental Environmentalism and Resistance in Post-Industrial Society
