“We are also the colonized” The green transition’s colonial matrix of power at Europe’s rural peripheries

This article examines how Europe’s green energy transition functions as a governance strategy which reproduces long-standing processes of internal colonial subalternization affecting rural communities. Focusing on the lithium mining rush – particularly, on the ‘Mina do Barroso’ project in Covas do Barroso – it traces how these dynamics operate across intertwined scales: Portugal as a peripheral European economy, and the Barroso region in Trás-os-Montes as a rural periphery within Portugal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this article situates contemporary green extractivism within a longer trajectory of rural dispossession, internal colonization, structural politics of abandonment, and the Othering of rural communities and territories. This article contributes to contemporary debates on decoloniality and energy transitions, by arguing that green extractivism in Barroso extends historical colonial grammars which devalue rural worlds, transforming decarbonisation into a new vehicle for onto-epistemic domination and territorial dispossession.