Emptiness as articulation of values

While both villages were targeted as locations for hydropower plants, one was finally built only in Rakita. The project in Dojkinci was canceled due to widespread protests, along with hundreds of others that were planned across the Western Balkans. This mushrooming of hydropower plants confirms the critique of the energy transition as a new socioenvironmental and technological fix (e.g., Knuth et al. 2022) that operates through the neoliberal logic of profit-making, deregulation, and financial innovation (Bouzarovski 2022), and reproduces patterns of uneven development on multiple scales (Franquesa 2018).

The energy transition in the Western Balkans has been taking place as part of the EU accession process and is reproducing the structural issues of the accession itself (Đunda 2021). Namely, it requires the liberalization of the energy market, accelerates the influx of international capital, and encourages the introduction of subsidies for renewables. Taken together, these changes create the possibility for lucrative investments for local, national, and international capital. From the policy perspective, the energy transition ap- pears merely as box-ticking rather than a socio- technological transformation. SHPPs enabled both national and international institutions to emulate the energy transition, act as if all the standards were respected but, ultimately, ignore the social and ecological consequences.

It was precisely the social and ecological consequences of the energy transition that were at the center of protests in Stara Mountain. Protests drew the public’s attention to the disturbance of aquatic life, reduced water levels, and disturbed ecosystems around riverbanks (Ristić et al. 2018). But more than that, they joined the issues of demography, marginalization, and environmental destruction (Rajković 2020; Vasiljević 2021). Depopulation, one dimension of emptiness, seemed to have opened the possibility for energy extractivism. This, in turn, created opposition to extractivism and gave rise to preservationist activism. In fact, the question is whether SHPPs would be so widespread if mountainous regions were not so depopulated and marginalized, but still abundant “water potentials” in the mountains that remained unexploited during the Yugoslav modernization. It is this complex interaction between demography, natural affordances, and the institutional frame of the energy transition as part of EU accession that gave emptiness in the Western Balkans a character different from other post-socialist regions.

This is to say that identifying how places and communities lose their constitutive elements (Dzenovska et al. 2022), whether these are peo- ple, buildings, or infrastructure, is only the starting point for understanding emptiness. As Dace Dzenovska (2020) demonstrates in her initial conceptualization, emptiness is a situated, grounded notion that is contingent upon the interpretation of those who experience it. Yet, these interpretations are often competing, as the editors of this issue maintain, which provides the political foundations of the concept. Various actors will value depopulated places as loss, opportunity, or with indifference depending on their interests (locals, state institutions, investors) and standpoints (external observers, insiders). In this sense, Dominic Martin (2021) argued for an understanding of emptiness that depends on the differential registries of observation. Similarly, Zsuzsa Gille (2020) demonstrated how different significations of vacated spaces hide disparate ideologies.

The concept of articulation extends these works on emptiness with its emphasis on conjunctural analysis of culture and politics (Clarke 2014). Stuart Hall (1996) defines articulation doubly as: (1) the formation of the ideological chain or a narrative, consisting of discourses, histories, and practices; and (²) the creation of a network of actors who form a social force despite their contradictory positions and interests. These are two interdependent processes, which means that they co-evolve and reinforce each other. They emerge from the interplay of the structural and contingent factors—from the chains of actions as much as from historical trajectories. In that manner, articulation reveals how emptiness emerges through different valuations, gains meanings, and becomes used within different projects. That is, how different actors interpret it (as loss or opportunity), which values they stress, for what purposes, and with which consequences. Thus, the article follows how valuations occur from the interactions between: the structural contexts of socialist depopulation; geopolitical events such as the embargo in the 1990s; local histories and patterns of uneven development; opportunities such as grants for rural tourism; and social values prevalent in each village.2 Such an approach highlights that emptiness can be considered a condition of global spatial unevenness, but that its appearances, mechanism, and consequences are contingent and contextual.

I am interested specifically in residual values as elements of structures of feeling (Williams 1977), as they emerged before, during, and after socialism, and became articulated in the condition of emptiness. These residuals originated from the past, but they continuously shaped the present on the levels of affects and practical consciousness. They could be incorporated or excluded if they became too opposed to the dominant culture. Together with the current social structures, the residual values formed structures of feeling. Unlike relatively coherent formations like ideology, structures of feeling are, as Raymond Williams (ibid.) explained, cultural formations noticeable for their complex, contradictory, and open-ended character.

While referring to values, this text does not take part in the conceptual debates on value (Graeber 2001; Otto and Willerslev 2013). Rather, values/value figures here as signposts for ideological, economic, and cultural transformations. Therefore, symbolic values, social values, or simply values, refer to the features that are normative and desirable in some context. On the other hand, economic and productive value refers to exchange value that is accumulated in the form of economic capital.³ Finally, when writing about valuation, I am referring to the power-laden process of inscribing, recognizing, and ordering of values.

The history of the Yugoslav emptying

Emptying in the two villages was a consequence of Yugoslav socialist modernization and it was exacerbated by geopolitical factors after the fall of socialism. Yugoslav socialism relied upon the ideal of “directional change” (McMichael 2000: 7), which was common globally for similar development projects after WWII. In Yugoslavia, its linear and hierarchical view of progress conditioned material well-being and emancipation upon the transformation of peasants into workers (Woodward 1995) This transformation left different traces in Dojkinci and Rakita because of their different pre-socialist paths. In the nineteenth century in Dojkinci, sheep-keeping was the pivot of socialization, as well as of communal and kinship relations. It was coordinated between families through institutions of collective work like bačije, and its main product was the hard, old cheese, kačkavalj. Over time, dairy production stimulated development of small-scale artisanal production and commerce, and the export of kačkavalj enabled the rise of the first capitalists in the mountain who built the first hydropower plants (Petrović 1997). Such a development of the indigenous capitalist class followed Marx’s crucial findings on the origin of the industrial capitalists among artisans and guild masters (Marx 1978), which Li (2014) also supported in her ethnography of primitive accumulation in Indonesian hinterlands. Like in these studies, the cheese trade generated inequalities and forced many people to seek daily work in other places (Petrović 1997).

On the other side of the mountainous range, in Rakita, sheep herding was also central to community organization and subsistence production. But the livelihood of the village depended on other commodities, such as coal, and miners’ labor (Šantić and Martinović 2007). The privately owned mine Jerma opened in 1926, and it employed hundreds of miners from surrounding areas. It also stimulated the infrastructural and socio-economic expansion of the village. These different histories provided unique affordances for the articulation of emptiness today. In Dojkinci, depopulation is interpreted as an obstructor to family-based, entrepreneurial progress. In Rakita, it signifies an abrupt end to industrial development, the fruits of which are today’s displaced railway, ruined school, and cinema.

Yugoslav socialist modernization had contradictory effects in the mountains, and it is remembered as both a curse and a blessing at the same time. After WWII, it ironed out some inequalities through the collectivization of factories, mines, and hydropower plants. It also brought improvements in the areas of production and export of cheese (Lazarević 2021), social reproduction, and culture (Petrović 1997). These traces are still visible in ruined cooperative dairy farms, cultural centers, and ambulances—infrastructure that many locals yearn for today. However, modernization also drained populations from rural areas to towns. As peasants from Dojkinci left for education and work in the textile, rubber, and construction sectors, the village was becoming increasingly depopulated. Since 1978, only two children were born in Dojkinci (Petrović 1997). Self-reproduction in Stara Mountain turned into a bare, day-to-day existence of elders. In Rakita, emptying occurred more abruptly but with the same consequences. The mine was shut down in 1962, due to low productivity or environmental reasons, interpretations differ. When the Yugoslav model turned fully to market socialism, miners went to the construction sector, which offered better working conditions. With miners leaving Rakita, the village’s population, and social life decreased as well. Those who remained continued working on the dairy farm or commuted for work in textile or metal industries in the nearby town (Šantić and Martinović 2007).

The socio-material decline continued in late socialism, too. Production in many dairy farms dropped during the economic crisis of the 1980s and then halted because of the embargo on exports (including cheese) in the 1990s (Lazarević 2021). Since then, the population of Dojkinci has been oscillating between 50 and 100 mostly retired residents. In Rakita, the center of economic and social activity moved to the nearby spa Zvonačka Banja seven kilometers away (Šantić and Martinović 2007). The switch from mining to tourism lasted only until the 2000s when the spa complex was unsuccessfully privatized and closed. Today’s population of Rakita is also below a hundred, with a few children of school age, and a few working people who commute to the nearby Babušnica.

However, the connections between villages and those who migrated to towns did not entirely halt even during the 1980s and 1990s when depopulation reached its peak. Many people frequently visited those relatives who remained in the villages and helped them around their houses or in their fields. In fact, subsistence agricultural production was a part of the privately led “small economy” that acted as a buffer and absorber of unemployed masses during economic downturns caused by the oil shocks. This subsistence production gained its importance, especially during the hyperinflationary 1990s in Yugoslavia, the time which people in villages remember as relatively secure while urban residents queued for essentials. Economic downturns caused by privatizations and austerity measures strengthened, even more, the relations between villages and their former inhabitants. Faced with retirement, lost jobs in older age, and therefore unemployability, or upon receiving severance pay in privatized factories, it was common to return to villages in the early 2000s (Bogdanov 2007).

This condensed genealogy of depopulation demonstrates that Yugoslav emptying had a logic distinctive from that of post-socialist emptying identified in the Latvian case. While the latter resulted from the unprecedented process of global integration, neoliberal restructuring of the post-socialist state (Drahokoupil 2009), and East-West labor mobility (Dzenovska 2020), the former was the consequence of the nationally governed industrial development. The national scale was at the core of the rural depopulation in Yugoslavia, and it remained so even when the state dealt with the oversaturation of the labor market by facilitating the mobility of the workforce from peripheral regions to Western Europe (Ströhle 2016). This centrality of the national scale also meant that this emptying was not necessarily led by a disinterested state as in post-socialism (Dzenovska 2020). Villages maintained their relevance for the Yugoslav state: initially, as sites of induced transformation, and then as negatives of urban advancement. Even with fewer residents, villages could still count on welfare and infrastructure, until the post-socialist transition fully dismantled them. But at that point, the rural-urban divide was fading because many towns in Serbia were undergoing a decline like that in villages, and this is the process that is still active. It is this transition from depopulation to the general socio-material deterioration which marks the shifts from socialist to post-socialist emptying in Serbia.

The periods before, during, and after socialist modernization did not simply supersede and erase each other. Social change rarely results in a rupture and disappearance of social systems, as Charles Tilly (1989) reminds us. Likewise, complex value systems nested in Stara Mountain did not disappear with the detachment of people from places. They left their residual values and structures of feeling through which the present is emotionally colored and interpreted. As usually happens with structures of feeling, (Williams 1977), these are also complex, inconsistent, and open-ended. This is noticeable in people’s narratives when they in one breath blame the socialist state for draining the mountain of people, and in the next breath, they express gratitude for the social mobility they enjoyed in the same period, then exalt socialist modernization as setting the standards for community well-being, while claiming that the village was most developed in the pre-WWII era of communal labor, artisanship, and sporadic family entrepreneurship. These structures of feeling became fertile grounds for different articulations of emptiness. In Rakita, it took the form of the loss of infrastructure and was expressed as a yearning for it. In Dojkinci, where emptiness appeared as a loss of people, tourism was an attempt to recover communal relations.

Rakita: Emptiness as an asset for extractive capital

The decay in Rakita is especially visible in the condition of infrastructural objects. There are no cesspools, so people release wastewater directly into the river that passes through villages. Garbage collection in the area does not exist either, so visitors can easily spot small landfills along the river and smell waste burned in metal barrels. And the condition of the road between Rakita and Zvonce is such that divides rather than connects the two villages. Unlike Dojkinci, Rakita belongs to a municipality with a historically weak industry and high poverty rate; many of its residents had permanently left and did not turn their homes into weekend houses; and its surrounding was not recognized as having exceptional natural beauty. Finally, the role of ethnic marginalization needs further research as this is the area with the Bulgarian majority.

The protests against SHPPs, which were organized jointly by a group of locals and the movement Let’s Defend the Rivers of Stara Mountain, tried to unify some of the socio-economic and ecological concerns. The activists argued that the investment would destroy the already decaying roads, limit locals’ access to their land and reduce the levels of water, but these concerns failed to unify the village. However, these concerns mobilized mostly activists and visitors from urban areas, failing to bring in more locals who remained silent or unconvinced.

“Yearning” for the decaying or absent infrastructure remained the main articulation on the local level. This yearning is a dialogical discursive field that connects those who yearn and those who provide the desired objects. As such, it is the main reason why emptiness is perceived as a favorable condition from the perspective of capital. It enables investors in hydropower to create clientelist dependency relations and promote their extractive projects as opportunities for gaining basic provisions. Correspondingly, the yearning depicts that the residents experience emptiness through the loss/absence of infrastructural objects and that they try to gain any benefit in the context in which they are deprived of basic services. In that way, the extractive model of development becomes a matter of common good or at least of reciprocal gains.

If we analyze the discourses around basic infrastructures in Rakita—complaints, desires, promises—we can even more clearly grasp these pragmatic or strategic uses of emptiness. Drawing on the recent work on state theory and clientelist relations in the post-Yugoslav region, I argue how yearning for infrastructure (Jansen 2015) contributed to emptiness being an asset- value for investors to accumulate more capital. Infrastructure in my case is not only a mirror of decay and depopulation but also a privileged point of retraction of relations between the local communities, the state, and the capital. This is so because infrastructure has a double character, being the material embodiment of ideological and biopolitical state-society relations, and a way of belonging (Appel et al. 2018), on the one side, and a vehicle, a fix for capitalist accumulation (Harvey 2001), on the other. To look at that condition of emptiness through the lenses of infrastructure requires me to zoom out from Rakita alone to the broader region of Zvonce, Zvonačka Banja, and Rakita, as they are all immersed in the same condition of yearning and clientelist dependency.

The most important topic in Zvonačka Banja, a place seven kilometers away from Rakita, was the privatization and renovation of the swimming pool within the ruined spa complex. No wonder since the remarkable modernist hotel was remembered as the main source of local prosperity. The spa complex was again stirring hope among my hosts and other locals. My host Mara, an almost 60-year-old woman, lived with her mother-in-law. Like many men from the area, her deceased husband and father-in-law were construction workers. Mara lost a job in a textile factory in the early 2000s and worked in agriculture in Italy but returned ill and incapable to continue work. Since then, the two women have been living on minimal pensions and sporadic, low-rent accommodation.

Among the recent tenants were the workers on the SHPP who lived here during the construction. I wondered at first whether these women were in favor of the power plant because the rentals added some income to their livelihood. But they would often describe SHPPs as an opportunity for some small improvement in the village. Mara would emphasize this “small”, stressing how little was needed and how much it was desired. She felt the same way about the swimming pool and the deteriorating road. “Little, little, at least something, so that something starts moving here where we live,” she would repeat with a somehow begging tone, as if she was asking for a favor she did not expect to materialize. Simultaneously, while talking, Mara’s voice got crossed with the voice of the prime minister on the TV, who was listing factories, highways, and hospitals that the government opened in the last years, a vivid example of “enhancement of infrastructure” (Harvey and Knox 2015), which has been the benchmark policy of the ruling party for a decade.

What can an SHPP bring to the village which got its electricity decades ago? What and how much is that little, and what is its price? What if that little is not about the amount, but referred to something basic, essential that was missing, and which was perceived as a backbone of everyday life? Stef Jansen (2015) identifies this missing element as the absence of the social state, more precisely, the state emptied of its socio-economic function in comparison to its counterpart during the Yugoslav period. Today’s statehood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he argues, is desired, and yearned for as the state is perceived as a holder of the key to the “normal life”. Yearning for the little around Rakita is yearning for the basic provisions of that “normal life”, and it is expressed mostly through the missing infrastructure. If infrastructure becomes perceptible in urbanized regions only when it fails (Graham 2010), I would argue that in rural peripheries it is normalized in its absence and a constant desire, and it becomes noticeable only when it is materially perceptive.

Emptiness here takes the form of yearning for infrastructure. It appears as a structure of feeling about deprivation of basic services, but without a strong sense of being entitled to them. Something people wish for, but without the capacity to fight for it. It is the desire directed to anyone who can provide for it. It acts like doxa (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), legitimizing developmental projects, and allowing for their status of “the last hope”. Moreover, yearning is strategically employed by the involved sides, which points to the dialogical character of this phenomenon. On the one hand, the need for infrastructure is well-recognized by institutions and investors and employed to make locals consent to extractive projects through promises of improved infrastructure and more. On the other hand, yearning around Rakita does not remain the condition of waiting for the state. It is employed by residents who are convinced that extractive investments are their rare opportunity to gain some collective or individual benefit.

Therefore, the investor promised to asphalt the terrible road between the two villages if he was allowed to excavate the major hydropower pipework as part of the project, something the protesters in Rakita rejected for fear of being cut off from the only available road. Or why the investor first built one part of the SHPP in Zvonce, where he had already made donations for infrastructure, which prevented any overt dissent. Importantly, these provisions did not signal that a non-state actor was filling the gap left by the neoliberal state, as one could schematically think about the absence of the state. Rather, state and non-state actors worked together, and created a clientelist dependency network, resembling the system of connections in Bosnia, veza, or štela (Brković 2017), within which the investor was centrally positioned as the only actor willing to promise a better infrastructure, clear the riverbed, provide temporary jobs, or payments for land near the power plant.

Such a discursive articulation of emptiness as yearning reveals one side of the articulation process—that of connecting social actors into a distinguishable network. This is the network of dependency with local gatekeepers at its center. They hold some power in the village and mediate between the community, local institutions, and the investor. These mediators are also political actors, like representatives of the Bulgarian community or the president of the local council. They are often wealthier, with renovated houses, highly educated children, or relatives working abroad. As some opponents of the SHPPs told me, these mediators have access to resources such as jobs and public funds and can help people get Bulgarian citizenship, which allows them to work across the border. In that sense, it is visible how in Rakita’s context of long-term deprivation class and political relations form the skeleton of this dependency network. During my short time spent in Rakita, I could witness how this clientelist network limited the efforts of ecological mobilization, disunited the locals, and enforced the existing social divisions. Yet, the short research period was insufficient for grasping how the intersectionality of class, gender, generation, and ethnicity defined the limits of present actions and imagined futures in addition to historically structuring clientelist relations. These will be the focus of the next phase of my research.

The ability of this network to create consent is limited, which proves how contingent the articulation process is. Both social alliances and discursive formations depend upon multiple factors, as Li (2000) also depicts in her study of indigenous articulation. Likewise, experiencing, and interpreting emptiness depends upon the local history and social relations. The articulation would have taken a different path in the absence of Rakita’s history of modernization through mining, or the presence of more supportive institutions. Its temporality could have been more backward-looking like nostalgia, had investors with all their promises been absent. The dependency network would differ too had the local mediators developed more equal relations, as happened in Dojkinci. Or if the gatekeepers resisted investors’ attempts, excluded them, but then became both provisioners and facilitators as occurred in another village, Topli Do (see Rajković this issue).

The discursive articulation has its limits, too, and requires minimal correspondence between the elements. This became evident when the Bulgarian consul visited Rakita during the peak of the resistance. To reconcile the opposing sides, he promised to facilitate with the municipality the construction of a wastewater system. As a first step and sign of goodwill, he donated a prefabricated, small church worth 22,000 euros. However, neither the supporters nor the opposers used it for religious purposes. Overgrown in high weeds, the church became the object of mockery, a witness of the clientelist relationship and unfulfilled yearning. As Jansen (2018) also observed during the protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this absurd church proved that there are limits to identity politics. Yearning cannot be easily satisfied with provisions that do not at least nominally correspond to objects of yearning. Nor can emptiness easily be filled with a random element that does not relate to the way this condition is experienced.

There is nothing new in how capital uses strategies of “corporate responsibility” to make local populations more willing to accept ecological costs, mask them, or try to break resistance (Kirsch 2014). What makes this case of SHPPs specific is the correspondence between needs and promises, and their strategic use. It would be too easy to assume that those like Mara supported SHPPs because they only benefited individually or because they lived in illusion. I am arguing that the condition of emptiness, or what I identified in this case as yearning for infrastructure, points to the distinctive ways the condition of emptiness is experienced and mobilized in local politics.

Dojkinci: Development through rural tourism

If infrastructure in Rakita revealed how emptiness is favorable for extractive projects, the renovations of family homes in Dojkinci point to rural tourism as another developmental vision in Stara Mountain. Depopulation was perceived as a threat, and rural tourism appeared as a savior through its promise of coupling and enforcing symbolic values of homes (kinship, tradition, and social status) and the economic value of houses. This section disentangles the coupling of symbolic and economic under the enabling conditions of EU accession, rural development, and valuation of nature. The section depicts how the two villages were set apart, how the two developmental models clashed within the same space, and how rural tourism became envisioned as an alternative to extractivism.

The persistence of symbolic values of homes is especially noticeable in the narratives of those who returned and renovated their houses. For many, the return felt like an expected step because returnees were formed through village life and never entirely interrupted their communal and kinship ties. Their oscillatory movements between the city and the village were built on kinship and obligations, economic necessity, and peasant habitus, which did not disappear in the socialist modernization. Marina is one of those who considers herself a returnee and who stays in Dojkinci until winter. When she retired, she felt claustrophobic and idle in the city; she “could not imagine herself sitting with a purse in a park every day.” Disenchanted as she contemplated how one of the largest textile factories had been carelessly broken and discarded and how she had lost her steady income a few years before her retirement, she decided to start spending the biggest part of the year in Dojkinci, where she has been tirelessly working in the fields and collecting wild fruits and mushrooms. Despite all the hardships she had experienced as a girl in the patriarchal context, she belonged in the village and felt purposeful in everyday work.

Like others, Marina has also been renovating her home. At first, these renovations were necessary to prevent the collapse of houses, which would cause guilt and grief as well as public condemnation, especially if it was a family home. This would be the final step of emptying—the disappearance of the family’s traces in the community. The social condemnation highlights the double symbolic values of homes: that of family legacy and prestige. Houses are not only sentimental objects but also measures of diligence, capability, and social status (as careful maintenance and continuous investment rather than luxury).⁴ This is evident in how renovations transited from a necessity, such as roof reparations, and construction of bathrooms and cesspools, into nurturing a rustic, authentic look. Such a trend was emblematic of post-socialism as houses became new objects of symbolic value, with their distinctive aesthetics, and even limited use as owners spent limited time there (Tomić et al. 2018).

From symbolic to economic value

Besides symbolic values, yet another value of the house—a house as a source of exchange value—started appearing with the availability of the first EU grants for rural development, when rural tourism started appearing as a rare if not uniquely viable economic option in the village. It is the EU’s vision of rural development that enabled this tipping point. Generally speaking, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has been devoted largely to increasing global competitiveness through conglomeration, modernization, and cheapening of food production (Bogdanov 2007). Such a system, based on extensive rules and conditions, disfavored small producers,⁵ especially in newly accessed countries from Eastern Europe (Aistara 2018; Gille 2016). As the subsidy system moved toward the promotion of competitiveness, the emphasis was on the multifunctional, multi-sectorial, and flexible vision of development, within which support for rural tourism became the model of “economic diversification”, which was supposed to mark the end of traditional coupling of peasantry, land, and production.

A similar package of rural support has been available to Serbia as an accessing country through the IPARD fund. This was the tipping point for turning houses into commodities for touristic entrepreneurialism because only a few people decided to use subsidies to renew their livestock.⁶ Ivan was one of those who did not apply for the grant although he had the necessary skills and resources. He was a retired livestock technologist who worked for a long time, until its dissolution, at the largest breeding farm in the mountain. He still keeps a few sheep but emphasizes that he produces cheese only for the family and because he grew up doing so. “I would never sell my cheese because no one knows its value nor the amount of work it requires,” he stressed. Citing complicated procedures and low subsidies, he did not find it worth developing his cheese production. With rare exceptions, sheep-keeping became a way of reproducing the values of labor and tradition when no viable economic possibility was left.

Tourism remained a rare option for filling the depopulated villages, and it also figured as such in both municipal and state practices. Like with the glorification of individual success in Latvia (Dzenovska 2020), the media often portrayed a householder—devoted, entrepreneurial domaćin rooted in his land and family—as a model of success. Such glorification steered public attention from the fact that rural communities were depopulated, villages were infra- structurally devastated, and livestock had decreased dramatically nationwide due to low sub- sidies, uncontrolled imports, and reduced national budgets for agriculture (Pejanović 2009). Rural tourism became an important pillar of agricultural development of national developmental strategies, something that the municipalities took on as well in their vision of development of Stara Mountain, resulting in the opening of a large hotel on one of the peaks, or in using EU funds for turning a former military barrack into an attractive motel in Dojkinci and renovation of the road to it. Rural tourism was constructed on several scales as the last hope, and it was enthusiastically picked up by locals, too, like a business opportunity and a mission for revival.

However, because of the ways it intersects through family, communal, and environmental relations, this model of development reproduces old and generates new social and spatial fragmentations. Gender and class inequalities dating back to socialism dictate different temporalities of renovations. Men, who worked at the factory for automotive tires (privatized later under multinational Michelin) or in the military or police, had better salaries and pensions and could renovate houses more quickly and comprehensively. Women who retired from textile industry renovated room by room, always look- ing ahead for the next steps and feeling like they were lagging. These inequalities continue through applications for grants. While the grants were nominally available to everyone, in practice, only those with enough knowledge, access to initial capital, and knowledge could go through lengthy and competitive procedures. Finally, few locals in Dojkinci aspired to extend their businesses, which could result in touristic monopolies, as started happening in another village, Topli Do. Like in a capitalist microcosmos, the gatekeeper in Topli Do (and the former leader of the protests) built a hostel, competing in that way with another entrepreneur who acquired seven houses (see Rajković this issue).

Rural tourism also mimics the underlying patterns of uneven development and differentiates between the places which do not possess enough “natural capital”. That relates to the way natural environments around Dojkinci and Rakita are differently valued and points to the importance of spatial affordances and their valuations in the articulation of emptiness. The recognition of natural exceptionality strengthens the availability of grants, infrastructure, and interest of residents and visitors. In that sense, while both environments can appear breathtaking to visitors, it is the area around Dojkinci that has the second highest category of a nature park. In the long run, this status secures the long-term development gaze and entrepreneurial initiatives by authorities, investors, and residents.

This nested commodification of houses, the mountain, and its resources were all part of the developmental vision, and this was one of the main strategies of anti-SHPP activists for presenting alternatives to extractivism realized in Rakita. In the conjuncture of the symbolic value of the mountainous landscape, the existing institutional frame, and local practices, and amplified by the environmental protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, both renovations and tourist visits to Stara Mountain skyrocketed, demonstrating how some empty places remain incorporated in capitalist valorization.

Houses in Dojkinci do not become pure commodities overnight nor do most of the owners aspire to become entrepreneurs. Homes continue to exist and change as a trinity of three values—tradition, social status, and commodity—in hope that they will each enforce each other’s realization. But they are rarely on equal terms and without trade-offs as the social fragmentation deepens. Similarly, hopes for tourism as a magnet for returnees and want-to-be-peasants are strong, as is the determination to keep maintaining the base of the house by turning the meaning of the house upside-down in terms of intimacy, function, and everyday life. Yet, anxieties about the impossibility of continuing the tradition sometimes prevail, as in the realization that those who come will not be “authentic” locals with respective skills, habits, and roots. As if the future brings a difficult trade-off between demographic survival and the maintenance of tradition.

Conclusion

How and under what conditions can emptiness be articulated as favorable for extractive accumulation or in the form of rural tourism? To answer this question, I first traced the genealogy of depopulation in socialist Yugoslavia and then demonstrated how “emptied” places get re-valorized and incorporated into the “productive” side of the capital. On the one hand, symbolic values attached to homes in Dojkinci, such as family legacy and prestige, started giving rise to the house as economic value. This happened within the global turn to rural tourism and the restructuring of agriculture, but it was led on the ground by people’s emotions, memories, and calculations of opportunities. On the other hand, the yearning for infrastructure in Rakita demonstrated how emptiness became a favorable condition for capitalist accumulation through the extraction of natural resources. Defective infrastructure, as the dominant mirror of emptiness, was a meeting point of promises given by the investor, and the opportunity to make claims to basic provisions, on the side of some residents.

The identified reintegration of empty spaces in processes of accumulation is likely to continue globally in the context in which industrial agriculture and bio-production compete for new frontiers, global tourism seeks new exotic landscapes, and intensified energy production needs more fields, hills, and roofs. After all, the emergence of SHPPs in the former Yugoslav countries was not accidental. It was the model which traveled worldwide (Erensü 2018), looking for exactly that mixture of depopulation, remoteness, and resourcefulness. My contribution has shown how such new extractions relied upon these specific local conditions of emptiness.