Radical Relationality from the Periphery: Water Movements and Liminal Commons in Southeast and Central Europe

This article examines how water movements in European semi-peripheries enact radical relationality through concrete struggles over water, infrastructure, and governance. Based on a comparative analysis of five cases from Serbia, Poland, and Greece, it shows how communities respond to privatization pressures, ecological disasters, and governance failures by transforming defensive mobilizations into liminal commons – durable yet flexible arrangements that emerge within institutional uncertainty and are grounded in territorially embedded hydro-social identities.

Focusing on semi-peripheral contexts marked by legal pluralism, fragmented authority, and incomplete marketization, the analysis shows how ruptural moments create institutional gaps that enable collective learning, institutional bricolage, and the reconfiguration of governance practices. In these cases, liminal commons emerge as transitional arrangements maintained through negotiation, relational practices, and care-based norms.

By empirically grounding radical relationality in specific hydro-social territories, the article contributes to commons scholarship by demonstrating how semi-peripheral conditions shape distinct pathways from water defense to commoning, highlighting the roles of crisis, territorial embeddedness, and relational identities in contemporary struggles over water governance.