Ivan Rajković

While climate change is understood as a frontier of environmental degradation (the Anthropocene) and capital accumulation (the Capitalocene), how it creates possibilities for political association remains underexplored. Connecting discussions on populism, multispecies studies, and “the anthropology of life”, this project explores popular environmental movements in the Balkans as novel political formations. It achieves this by focusing on ecopopulist alliances, or counterhegemonic associations that unite different social groups as a “people” that protects “life itself” against those seen as spreading “death.” The project asks how such a vitalist focus changes earlier populist patterns, as well as how it restructures participants’ own identities. It asks whether we are witnessing new form of equivalence in the making, where, instead of capitalist abstraction of values into Value, it is lives that are abstracted into the “Life itself” – thus pointing to novel grammars of making human and nonhuman lifeforms mutually commensurable.

Website address: https://ksa.univie.ac.at/en/department/people/post-docs/ivan-rajkovic/