The Jadar project, run by the mining giant Rio Tinto, targets a unique lithium sodium borosilicate ore called jadarite, found only in Serbia’s Jadar Valley, a relatively densely populated farming region of more than twenty-two villages. The deposit was confirmed in the 2000s, and the company’s involvement deepened in stages: a memorandum with the municipality of Loznica in 2011, a national-level memorandum signed three months after Aleksandar Vučić became president in 2017, and a 2.4 billion euro commitment in July 2021, with initial production targeted for 2026 and full operations by 2029. When the European Green Deal was announced in January 2020, the project was rebranded as a mine at Europe’s doorstep, a way to loosen dependence on Chinese lithium supply chains, even though Chinalco remains Rio Tinto’s largest shareholder.

Scientific scrutiny arrived late but landed hard. For most of the first two decades of the 2000s, while the company was assembling land and permits, almost no Serbian academic work on the project appeared, something the researchers attribute to an information asymmetry: scientists had access to little beyond promotional pamphlets. That changed after October 2020, when Dragana Đorđević, an associate researcher at the University of Belgrade, began speaking publicly about the environmental risks. In May 2021, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts held a conference titled The Jadar Project – what is known?, giving a platform to both the company and affected locals; most experts concluded the project posed a serious threat. Critical papers then appeared in international journals, including a 2024 study in Scientific Reports on pollution during the exploration phase that logged more than 100,000 downloads, an extraordinary figure for an academic article.

The political response was swift. In January 2022, facing the country’s largest environmental mobilization and pressure on Vučić’s electoral campaign, the state revoked Rio Tinto’s exploration licenses and cancelled the spatial plan for Loznica. But the victory was short-lived. In August 2024, after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Belgrade and the Constitutional Court overruled the cancellation, the project was reinstated, and Serbia signed memoranda with German firms for privileged access to the lithium. What followed, the study argues, was the most intense phase of repression, aimed squarely at the academics whose work had helped fuel the opposition.

The most dramatic case involves Matković himself, a research associate at Belgrade’s Institute of Economic Sciences at the time. On 10 August 2024, the day of the largest anti-lithium protest to date, his open letter appeared on the cover of the daily Danas, documenting a twenty-seven-fold increase in mining foreign direct investment over a decade while living standards stagnated. In the months that followed, he and his family received a stream of death threats, some containing sensitive personal information available only to them, some written in German, and all urging him to stop criticizing Rio Tinto. A case was filed with the UN Special Rapporteur for Environmental Defenders. Pro-government websites listed him among ecological terrorists, and more than 500 intellectuals worldwide signed a letter of support.

Other tactics were quieter but arguably more corrosive. After the Scientific Reports paper appeared, Nigel Steward, Rio Tinto’s chief scientist, together with three University of Belgrade scientists, asked the journal to withdraw or correct it, alleging methodological flaws and manipulated references. The authors learned of the attack from media reports before the editor contacted them, then endured what Đorđević called a tactic of exhaustion: six rounds of revision on top of their original work. The journal initially refused to retract, citing a lack of proof, and requested only technical corrections. But on 6 January 2026 it finally retracted the article, stating that although the data was robust, the interpretation was not sufficiently argued. No full refutation study was ever published; the challenge came through retraction demands rather than competing science.

Institutional exclusion followed a parallel track. Ratko Ristić, a soil and water conservation expert who co-authored the paper and spoke at the academy conference, described what he called silent repression: he was removed from the State Audit Committee for Projects of National Importance, from the board of the Vinča Nuclear Research Institute, and from his post as vice-rector for international relations, without consultation. President Vučić publicly disclosed figures from his private tax declarations, calling him a thief who robbed the state. A financial inspection was ordered into Đorđević’s institute, and tabloids published false claims about her employment history. Aleksandra Bulatović, a senior research fellow, was summoned by police for allegedly calling for a violent change of the constitutional order, after a public speech that emphasized transparency and professional dialogue. Her institute responded that scientific articles should be met with scientific discussion.

The study also documents interference inside the project’s own environmental assessment. Biologist Imre Krizmanić reported that although the law required a year-long biodiversity study, only six days were funded, and that field access was hampered by manipulated pandemic protocols, delayed departures, misleading navigation, and company-imposed limits on survey areas. Rio Tinto called these allegations malicious and bizarre, saying the study’s logistics were the sole responsibility of the biology faculty it hired. Separately, the researchers found that environmental protection conditions for the project were issued despite opposition from eight of the institute’s own experts, and that in 2023 the company hired a private firm, Ergo Group, for the economic impact assessment rather than public institutions. A December 2024 documentary, Not in My Country, produced with ties to a KU Leuven institute that had received Rio Tinto funding, gave 54 percent of its airtime to project supporters and omitted the repression of scientists entirely; several Serbian interviewees said their statements were used without consent and their requests for removal ignored.

What makes the Serbian case a novelty, the authors argue, is not the existence of corporate pressure on science, which has parallels from Spain’s Aznalcóllar mine disaster to Romania’s Roșia Montană dispute, but its contemporary geopolitical packaging. Here, the repression was justified in the language of climate necessity: dissenting geoscientists were framed as obstacles to a green transition that Europe needed, and therefore as legitimate targets. The mechanisms identified, smear campaigns, ad hominem attacks, financial and legal intimidation, institutional exclusion, censorship of assessment reports, and retraction pressure, all personalized the conflict, targeting the scientist rather than the evidence. The authors note that the playbook did not stay confined to academia: after August 2024, similar tactics spread to students and protesters, hundreds of whom were arrested, and Serbia was downgraded to repressed in a global civic freedoms index in December 2025.

The study is not exhaustive, and the authors are candid about its limits: some affected scientists declined to participate out of fear, Rio Tinto declined to give critical feedback on the manuscript, and one of the authors is himself a victim of the repression described, a positionality they acknowledge. The company, for its part, announced in 2025 that it condemned all attacks on independent scientists and called for dialogue based on facts. But the researchers’ conclusion is unsparing: a just green transition must begin with protecting academic freedom and epistemic justice, because without institutions capable of resisting localwashing, filmwashing, and other forms of knowledge management, climate policy risks reproducing the very violence it claims to solve. As of December 2025, the Jadar project was still awaiting publication of its environmental impact assessment, and the scientists who questioned it were still waiting for a debate conducted in evidence rather than threats.

Subject of Research: Repression of the Serbian scientific community over the Jadar lithium mining project, 2020–2025

Article Title: “Mine your own business”: on the repression of the Serbian scientific community over the lithium mining project in the Jadar Valley (2020–2025)

Article References: Matković, A., & Stettler, A. (2026). “Mine your own business”: on the repression of the Serbian scientific community over the lithium mining project in the Jadar Valley (2020–2025). Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 617-634. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-617-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-617-2026

Keywords: Serbia, Jadar lithium mine, Rio Tinto, academic freedom, scientific repression, green transition, lithium mining, environmental politics, epistemic repression, manufactured doubt, Vučić government, Geographica Helvetica