23/06/2026
🟢 Common Grounds: An Assembly for Non-Extractivist Future
Belgrade, 3-4th July, 2026, KC GRAD
🔴 The Balkan Peninsula is increasingly taking center stage on the global map — not only as a region of remarkable landscapes and layered histories, but also as one of Europe’s emerging frontiers in the search for critical mineral resources. Across western Serbia, hundreds of exploratory drilling sites for lithium and boron reflect a growing wave of foreign direct investment in mining and resource extraction. In the past two years alone, investments in the sector have multiplied sixfold, while over the last decade the increase has reached an extraordinary twenty-seven times its previous scale.
A similar momentum is unfolding in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where dozens of locations in the country’s eastern regions are currently being surveyed for minerals considered vital to the development of green technologies and the global energy transition.
At stake are not only landscapes and ecosystems, but also forms of life, memory, and belonging that have shaped communities across the region for generations.
The striking asymmetry between the economic costs and benefits of these projects — together with the potentially irreversible environmental risks they pose in densely populated agricultural regions — has sparked widespread public resistance, growing into the largest wave of social mobilization in the region’s recent history. The movement’s central slogan, “You Will Not Dig” (“Nećete kopati”), has united people across political, cultural, regional, and, perhaps most significantly, ethnic divisions.
Across the region, these struggles follow a shared pattern: the erosion of public interest, opaque decision-making processes, and escalating violence against both nature and local communities in service of global supply chains. Yet they have also given rise to powerful forms of solidarity, resistance, and collective organizing. In response to these dynamics, the Assembly creates a shared space where activist, policymakers, researchers, and cultural actors meet together, opening a dialogue grounded in lived experience.
🟢 Whole program is held at KC GRAD in Belgrade, and simultaneous translation into English is provided. The event is organised by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe in cooperation with partners and KC GRAD.
🔴 https://rosalux.rs/common-grounds-an-assembly-for-non-extractivist-future/