“Mine your own business”

On the repression of the Serbian scientific community over the lithium mining project in the Jadar Valley (2020–2025)

Bibliographic Data

ID24235154
AuthorsAleksandar Matković (0000-0001-8072-6220, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain)), Adela Petrovic (0000-0002-1404-7454, Charles University)
Year2026
Volume81
Issue4
Pages617-634
Publication date2026-10-19
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographica Helvetica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7312 • E-ISSN: 2194-8798
PublisherCopernicus GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.5194/gh-81-617-2026
OpenAlexW7222943331
LanguageEN
References cited56

This article examines the repression of scientific dissent surrounding the proposed Jadar lithium–borate mine in Serbia. Based on media analysis, institutional documents, semi-structured interviews, and communication with the Rio Tinto mining company, the article analyses nine publicly documented cases of academic obstruction, delegitimization, intimidation, and censorship between 2020 and 2025. It shows that critical scientific arguments were primarily challenged not through open debate but rather through smear campaigns, ad hominem and verbal attacks, financial and legal intimidation, institutional exclusion, obstruction of fieldwork, attempts to retract research, and the selective mediation of expert voices. These practices personalized epistemic conflict by targeting the persons of the scientists rather than their evidence, thereby narrowing the space for public environmental debate. Situating the Jadar project within Serbia's authoritarian political context and the European Union's market-based green-transition agenda, the article argues that extractive projects require not only territorial and regulatory but also the disciplining of knowledge production, which became both systemic and public in Serbia. The Serbian case thus demonstrates how corporate-led green transitions can produce an anti-scientific climate in which critical expertise is marginalized and extractive development is presented as an inevitable response to climate and geopolitical pressures. In times of increasing political polarization, accelerating climate crisis, growing anti-scientific rhetoric, and rising political and corporate control over a scientific world that is now run via principles of new public management, we need more than ever to ponder and perhaps rethink the close but also obfuscated relation between politics and science. (Willert, 2024:135)

ad hominem · Authoritarianism · censorship of science · environmental debate · extractive development · lithium mining · New public management · Rio Tinto · science and politics · Serbia · smear campaigns · Academic Freedom and Politics · Extractivism and Socioeconomic Issues · Mining and Resource Management

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