Exploring and explaining participation in local opposition: brown coal mining in Horní Jiřetín

This book summarizes a three-year research project on local opposition to coal mining in the Northwestern part of the Czech Republic. The research focused on the relational dimensions of the opposition movement and the political context in which the movement operates. Funding for this project was awarded by the Czech Science Foundation to Masaryk University for the years 2017–2019 (project No. 17-08554Y). The research yielded five peer-reviewed articles that introduced the historical and political context of coal mining in the country (Černoch & Lehotský, 2019), explored the media discourse around coal in the Czech Republic (Lehotský, 2018; Lehotský, Černoch, Osička, & Ocelík, 2019) and around its future in the wider Central European region (Osička et al., 2020), and explored the opposition network attributes (Ocelík, Lehotský, & Černoch, n.d.) as well as the perspectives and discursive positions of the opposition’s representatives (Černoch et al., 2019). The following text recapitulates and expands on these articles.