The leaders of the regime in Serbia see the state's future in lithium mining, and the EU is in a hurry to make them commit to that vision before they think about it. We already know about the environmental damage that lithium mining causes — so does the regime, because protests forced them to back down on this plan once. What about social consequences? Think about every resource extraction state you know of, whether the resource we are talking about is legal (petroleum, palm oil) or illegal (coca leaves, opium poppies). Some of the characteristics of these states: 1) a cartel tends to form around control of the resource, 2) the state behaves in authoritarian ways to enforce this cartel’s monopoly, and 3) contestation in these states tends to be violent and centred around control of the resource.
Even if the project “succeeds,” the future does not look good.
Let's talk about lithium