Focaal

Many places in the post-socialist world undergo emptying: a loss of their constitutive elements—people, infrastructure, services, and futures past. Some people see this emptying as a loss, others as an opportunity. We argue that the shift from loss to opportunity—or vice versa—is a site of the political, that is, a moment of decision about the place of the present in a framework of meaning that gives form and direction to life. Drawing on contributions to the theme section, as well as on literature on hegemony, the political, and Anthropocene, we identify a potential tension between re-politicization on the scale of geopolitics and de- politicization on the scale of the planetary.

This article analyzes the concept of “nothingness” as a part of human- resource relations in pre- and post-industrial landscapes. It addresses nothingness as a part of mythological narratives in Kvartsitnyi settlement in northwestern Russia. Kvartsitnyi was built in the 1970s near the new quartzitic sandstone quarry and was initially viewed as a modern settlement attracting workers from all around the country. However, in the early 2000s, the quarry went bankrupt and closed. The pre-industrial landscape of Kvartsitnyi is often viewed in the interviews as empty, and the quarry's closure recreated this symbolic “nothingness.” These narratives resemble mythological creation stories when a new world appears from nothing but is destroyed as a result of human mistakes. The article discusses the cosmogonic myth of Kvartsitnyi within the larger context of Soviet and post-Soviet myth-making.

Drawing on fieldwork material from Mariupol collected between 2015 and 2018, this article investigates how the municipality and residents addressed the indeterminacy surrounding Soviet urban legacies in the context of wartime transformations before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. First, it discusses attempts by the local government to reposition the city from a Soviet industrial center to a symbol of an independent, “European” Ukraine, relegating most elements of the Soviet urban legacy to the category of “waste”. Afterward, it shows how a group of artists and activists challenged rigid dichotomies of waste and value through practices of urban walking, re-embedding the same materialities in a present where the role of the Soviet past is acknowledged but reconsidered through a critical lens.

Post-Soviet deindustrialization and the economic collapse of the 1990s led to a decline in the significance of the Donbas coal-mining region both economically and symbolically, while the start of the Russian war in Ukraine in 2014 aggravated the sense of isolation and fragmentation. The combined effects of these two forms of violence led to technocratic governance, in part promoted and encouraged by the international humanitarian organizations that entered the region after 2014. Where war and neoliberalism narrowed horizons for good life, fragmented technocratic governance limited horizons for political engagement. It also ignored and neglected the potential strengths of inherited socialist state infrastructure that could offer a safety net and a point of reference for citizens’ engagement with the world and each other.

Emptiness appears as a condition of possibility of two common visions of rural development in Serbia—extractivism and rural tourism. This article investigates the underlying sociocultural mechanisms of this relationship. It compares two mountainous villages in Serbia that were depopulated during modernization of Yugoslavia and included in hydropower investment schemes during the current energy transition yet ended up within different models of development and contrasting articulations of emptiness. In Rakita, emptiness takes the form of yearning for defective or absent infrastructure and serves as an asset in extractive projects. In Dojkinci, rural tourism has emerged as an alternative to extractivism. While both local communities and institutions take it as the last hope for depopulated but naturally exceptional localities, tourism brings commodification and increasing social differentiations.

When environmental activists in Serbia encountered decarbonization in form of predatory hydropower, they launched a massive campaign against an actual degrowth that plagued their depopulating lands. This bridging of environmental and reproductive concerns helped to create a broad ecopopulist alliance that saved the local rivers, and yet it sneaked in another quasi-universalist subject—urban, middle-aged, and male—who assumed a central role in the countryside eco-revival. As they “bring life back” to the “dying” Balkan Mountains, I argue, revivers also erase the ways of life that still thrive in their aging abodes. Such duality reveals emptiness as a problem space that is necropolitical inasmuch as it is vitalist. To direct the further flow of life means to decide who can survive—and who is anyhow destined to expire.

This article traces transformations of labor through an exploration of a relatively new employment sector in supervised postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where internationally funded, temporary, project-based contracts are the rule. Focusing on atypical white-collar precarious workers who have strung together 10 to 25 years on successive short projects in IGOs and NGOs in Sarajevo (under the umbrella of democratization, peacebuilding and EU integration agendas), I investigate their ways of strategizing to accumulate such continuity through cultivation of three kinds of assets: sector-specific competences, favorable positionality, and a disposition of optimism. I argue that their “successful” strategizing, generally in line with neoliberal rationality and mainly developed within this sector, is facilitated by similar structural conditions of overall precarity, temporariness and provisionality in wider BiH society.

Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey. On the edge: Life along the Russia-China border. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021.