Sleeping on coal: Trajectories of promoting and opposing a lignite-fired power plant in Kosovo

The young Republic of Kosovo sits atop the fifth largest geological lignite reserve on the planet. In the face of an unreliable electricity supply, the Government has promoted the New Kosovo Power Plant as a key project for energy security and national economic development. Efforts to add new coal-based generation capacities have sparked a debate over appropriate approaches to achieve a reliable and affordable electricity supply. Drawing on a governmentality-inspired analytics of protest, we explore how critical civil society organizations engage with and challenge the rationalities and practices that establish the New Kosovo Power Plant as a project of major national importance. We conceptualize dissent as a counter-conduct-resistance enacted in the context of 'the conduct of conduct'. We find that critics employ different notions of energy security to promote alternative paths to governing a reliable energy system. We argue that critics simultaneously challenge and reinforce a political strategy of securitization, which constructs power plants fuelled by domestic resources as backbones of national economic development. The case helps illustrate possibilities for and constraints on enacting dissent against a project of national prestige, which are also likely to occur in comparable conflicts elsewhere.