Buckinx, Barbara Chris JanMitrovic, Vladan2025-08-042025-08-042025-04-04https://theses-dissertations.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp014j03d310qThis thesis examines Serbia’s Jadar Project, a contentious lithium mining initiative led by Rio Tinto in the Jadar Valley, as a critical case study of Serbia’s struggle to balance economic development, environmental sustainability, and geopolitical pressures within the global green transition. The research question guiding this study is: How does Serbia navigate the competing demands of economic development, environmental sustainability, and geopolitical pressures in its approach to lithium mining, particularly through the Jadar Project? The central argument asserts that the Jadar Project exemplifies the contradictions of green capitalism, wherein core economies, such as the European Union (EU), externalize environmental and social costs to semi-peripheral states like Serbia, prioritizing economic and geopolitical interests over local sustainability. The study employs an interdisciplinary, multi-scalar framework integrating Political Ecology, World-Systems Theory, the Critique of Green Capitalism, and Social Movement Theory. Through qualitative methods, including case study analysis, document review, and theoretical synthesis, it examines the project’s local impacts, national policy dynamics, and global implications. Major themes include the tension between economic growth and ecological integrity, the role of grassroots resistance in shaping policy, the influence of EU geopolitics, and the structural inequalities embedded in the green economy. These concepts frame the Jadar Project as a site of contestation between local needs and global demands. Findings reveal Serbia’s limited agency as a semi-peripheral state, evidenced by its policy reversals: the project’s suspension in 2022 following mass protests led by groups like Ne Damo Jadar (“We won’t give up Jadar”), and its reinstatement in 2024 under EU pressure to secure lithium for the Green Deal. Locally, the project threatens water contamination (e.g., Jadar and Drina rivers), land degradation (2,030 hectares), and displacement (350 families), driven by sulfuric acid-based extraction and weak regulatory oversight. Nationally, grassroots movements temporarily disrupted the project by mobilizing resources and leveraging political opportunities, yet their influence was overridden by external imperatives. Globally, comparisons with semi-peripheral states (e.g., Chile, Argentina) and core economies (e.g., Australia) highlight systemic inequities: while Australia enforces stringent standards at Greenbushes, Serbia absorbs disproportionate harm, reinforcing its role as a resource supplier rather than an equal partner. The thesis concludes that green capitalism perpetuates global hierarchies by displacing the green transition’s costs onto semi-peripheral states. It advocates for equitable resource governance and democratic participation to prioritize local sustainability over extractive exploitation, encouraging a reevaluation of global climate policies to prevent the entrenchment of injustice under sustainability’s pretense. The Jadar Project underscores the need for a just transition that dismantles, rather than reinforces, core-periphery disparities.en-USPrinceton University Senior Theses