Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IPELSEE (International Political Ecologies of Land in Southeast Europe: Policymaking, everyday experiences, and alternative political imaginaries)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31
IPELSEE studied the transformations of land and landscapes in South East Europe (SEE). It paid particular attention to the parallel processes of postsocialist transformation, different stages and paths of EU integration, and the restructuring of global capital flows. It also included regional imperial histories that shaped land use and land ownership before Yugoslav socialism. Its main contribution is an approach to land as differently assembled human-soil relations: as a policy object, an everyday experience, and a site of political imaginaries. It had two aims: (1) to develop an international political-ecology framework capable of studying human–soil relations across multiple scales, and (2) to use that framework to better understand transformations in rural and agricultural land use in South East Europe. While political science and international relations have focused on issues of power, sovereignty, and territory, they have habitually ignored the human-soil relations that make the land they talk about and the rural areas where those relations are grounded. IPELSEE tackled this gap to provide a more grounded understanding of the intersection of international politics and political ecology of land and landscapes. It used well-trodden methods (interviews, participatory observation, document analysis) and innovative methodologies (participatory mapping) to investigate human-soil relations and their transformations. Beyond academic contributions to international political ecology within IR, interpretive methods in IR and PolSci, and SEE area studies, communication activities focused on research regions to counter the stigmatisation of rural areas and shed light on practices of land use and land ownership that are not only used traditionally but can also contribute to more sustainable and just land use in the future.
Work was completed in six work packages (WPs). WP1 sought to critically examine the existing literature on international political ecologies of land and landscapes and provide a new approach to studying land within International Relations. In this WP, the most important output is a forthcoming Special Issue on 'Grounding IR' (currently in review, planned for publication in 2026). This Special Issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to show how thinking from land lends itself to studying international politics. The Special Issue is planned to have an introduction and eight articles, with the Fellow co-authoring the Introduction and also contributing a single authored article. WP2 was focused on empirical investigation. Here, the Fellow completed in-person fieldwork in Croatia and online interviews in Bosnia and Herzegovina. WP3 included dissemination activities. In addition to the SI already mentioned, the Fellow organised two international workshops and is working on an additional double Special Issue. The first workshop took place in Cres, Croatia, as a part of the CEEISA-ISA Joint International Conference 2024, held in Rijeka in June 2024. The second workshop was a two-day event organised at the University of Vienna in 2025. While the Cres workshop started working towards the Special Issue "Grounding IR: The Land Question in International Politics," the workshop in Vienna gathered scholars working on political ecology in SEE more broadly and started the double Special Issue "Political Ecologies of Southeastern Europe: Legacies, Transformations, and Futures." Outside of these special issues, the Fellow published an article in East European Politics and Societies and a co-authored book chapter. The Fellow also participated in nine international conferences and completed six invited presentations at European universities. In addition to these achievement, the Fellow also co-organised a reading group that has met online over 20 times.
IPELSEE moved beyond the state of the art in two ways: by introducing land as an important epistemic and political category in International Relations, and by further developing a political ecology approach to studying South East Europe. Within IR, issues of land and landscapes were sidelined for several decades for both empirical and disciplinary reasons. Empirically, it seemed that globalisation and transnational flows of capital, people, and ideas were rendering location a less relevant category. In the discipline itself, a focus on the physicality of location was associated with older, environmentally determinist theories that were often entangled with racist and nationalist political projects. This project tackled these omissions by focusing on land as a multifaceted object with three dimensions: land as culture, land as territory, and land as a resource. This approach brings together the growing importance of land in both the practice and study of international politics, and engages the opportunities and limitations of older engagements with land within the discipline. Within studies of South East Europe, the last five years have seen a growing scholarly focus on environmental issues that moved in parallel with increasing environmental conflicts. By forwarding a political ecology approach, the project brought together and further developed these existing efforts.