Water potential is a significant natural wealth of most parts of the Balkans, and it has given rise to a surge in hydropower investments unparalleled across Europe. As part of the process, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River, which runs through the Bosnian town of Bihać. This prospect alarmed the city’s residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. The book begins with this protest, and it explores how the threat of dam construction transformed the seemingly apolitical love of the river into a powerful political force around which thousands of people mobilized: riverine citizenship.

The book is based on interviews with participants, archival research, and over twenty years of ethnographic research. Azra Hromadžić focuses on the tension between ecological sustainability efforts in favor of renewable energy, on the one hand, and citizens’ historically shaped, deeply-felt, love for the river, on the other. She shows how the language and promises of green transition can mask the forces of capitalist accumulation that drive this change — whether in the form of building hydroelectric dams or promoting eco-tourism — and thus set in motion another cycle of environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation.

Azra Hromadžic is Associate Professor and Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professors of Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University. 

“From the depths and flows of its emerald waters, Azra Hromadžić has channeled the ethnographic sensorium of the ‘one and only’ Una into an insightful, poetic treatise on riverine love—love as affect, ethics, and politics. If we listen with her, we hear how joy can emerge in war and greed can color devotion. Above all, she offers us an anthropology of hope born from the entwined lives of a river and its people.”

Paul Stubbs:

“This book is an extraordinary testimony to relations between the River Una and the Bišćani in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina who live alongside her. It flows seamlessly from socialist childhood, through the river as a source of joy and escape during a deadly war, to collective action that defeated plans to build a damn and new threats emerging from the river's rebranding as a site of ecotourism. Riverine Citizenship is a meditation on multispecies love, never shying away from the painful, the destructive, and the violent, as rigorous and innovative as it is moving and poetic. It is a passionate plea for an expanded ethics of care and an inclusive ecological citizenship.”