The Novi Sad accident has all the hallmarks of a collapsing social canopy. The surplus of funds has not been used to improve the standard of living, but rather to fund projects like the Belgrade Waterfront, luxury villas, and SUVs that the new elite arrogantly drive through streets, which are falling apart, the weekly Radar said in its latest issue.

Igor Stiks is a political theorist and author, he was born in Sarajevo, grew up in Zagreb, and studied in Paris and Chicago. He has worked at the University of Edinburgh and has lived in Belgrade for the past decade. He currently teaches at the Faculty of Media and Communications. In his interview with Radar, he discussed Rio Tinto’s Jadar lithium mining project, the vision of society it imposes, and the political untouchability of the ruling regime – especially when it makes mistakes.

Lithium and Kosovo dominate the Serbian public sphere, competing for attention. How do you assess the current situation?

It must be acknowledged that, over the past ten years, the Serbian authorities have been very skilled in shaping and controlling the public agenda – deciding what gets discussed, what doesn’t, what is important, and what is concealed. Initially, lithium was concealed beneath major topics like war, Kosovo, and East-versus-West tensions – which failed because environmental protests happened. Now, a different strategy is being tested: marketing lithium as an unmissable opportunity for the country’s future! When it comes to Kosovo, which has always been understood through the territorial “sanctity” principle – that people fought over, died and killed for – I wouldn’t say there is a resolution in sight, but rather an unraveling. The lithium issue is getting tangled up in this, bringing with it a new vision for the state and society. Since Serbia has been deindustrialized and has failed to develop new technologies or services, what it still has left to sell are water and land, and everything beneath them.

This vision is not new – we have seen it play out in Latin America. Is there anything to be learned from that?

We know this isn’t just about mining and ecologically questionable ore processing, but about societal restructuring. This usually means that the profits are siphoned off by the elite at the top, while the middle class, fearful for its survival, usually ties itself to the state, that is, to the regime, or the ruling party. Money from resource extraction is distributed to the loyalists, and mechanisms of state repression are used to quash resistance. However, there is one key difference: in the Balkans, we are witnessing demographic implosion, whereas Latin American countries had both a large labor force and brutal dictatorships that exploited them. So, who will be doing the mining here? We are heading toward a new 21st-century model where special interest zones import labor, operating outside state jurisdiction. The greatest profits will be extracted by international corporations, since that is the purpose of their existence. And, of course, they will pay rent to the regime in power.

It is a pure coincidence that we finished this conversation just moments before the tragedy in Novi Sad, so now I need to ask you a follow-up. Does the collapse of the canopy at the reconstructed railway station serve as a metaphor for what you talked about?

Still in shock, I read through the edited version of our conversation, and it is clear that it really does contain all the elements of a collapsing social canopy: the farce of progress has turned into a tragedy.