In Search of an Electrified Future: The Affective Afterlife of the Extractive Industry in Mitrovica, Kosovo

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses hopes around the promissory potential of mineral resources through the lens of affect. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2019 in South Mitrovica in Kosovo, it explores how citizens of a de-industrialised and politically unstable city envision the future around and beyond the extractive potential of the Trepça mine. It does so by examining two encounters with two different modes of electricity – a power cut and New Year lights – as instantiations of the mine’s affective force that evoke the historically specific promise of modernity shaped during Yugoslav socialism. Through the motif of electricity, the article demonstrates how this industrial past orients collective hopes towards an extractive future. Retrospectively shaped, these hopes remain intangible, however, and riddled with doubts, friction, and contestation. Divergent visions, then, attempt to ground a viable future amid the uncertainties triggered by postsocialism, the war and its aftermath, and de-industrialisation.