Under the so-called green transition, a global extractivist imperative is being directed at lithium. In its most recent incarnation across Europe, corporate and state interests have converged to impose geographies of extraction that disregard unique socio-environmental relations, their modes of production and existence. Dispersed across the continent, community and activist struggles are firmly contesting the violent implications of such an unjust transition.

The Barroso region, in Northern Portugal, is one such landscape of refusal. For the last seven years, these collectivities have been resisting green extractivism through diverse tactics of organization and invention—and in the process, new geo-social formations have erupted. This project sheds light on how these world-sustaining relations are dismantling the energy transition’s logics of the abstraction through a new grammar of collective possession, governmentality and kin.