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Contribution type: New Concept
Concept: Moba (Serbian cyrilics: Моба)
Name of the contributor: Milica kocovic Kočović De Santo
E-mail of the contributor: mickocovic@gmail.com
Language / region: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin (South Slavic, former Yugoslav); Balkans / Southeast Europe Category: Praxis (also Common Term) Suggested location for the map and contemporary example: Topli Do, Stara Planina, Serbia Etymology: Commonly linked to molba ("request, plea"), from moliti ("to ask, to pray"). A household asks its community neighbours for help, and the help is given without payment. In most of the cases this is understood as a favour that will be returned. Short definition: Moba is a practice of intensive collective labour, freely given by a village comunity to a single household. It takes two forms. In reciprocal moba, the household that receives help takes on a social debt: an obligation to return the same labour and goodwill when another household issues the same call. In milosrdna moba (merciful moba), the village comes together for a household that has lost a family member, and nothing is expected in return. In both forms, moba binds the community together and keeps any single household from falling too far behind the others. It is a practice of reciprocal, unpaid collective labour.
Extended definition: For centuries, moba organised life in Balkan mountain and rural communities. Pastoralism, smallholder farming and forest foraging depended on it, and it left a material heritage of shepherds' shelters and common livestock common structures. These village cultures were never individualistic. It was common knowledge that a family could not survive alone. Harvesting, haymaking, building a house or preparing for winter required more hands than any single household had. Moba answered this need: the village gathered and worked intensively, without payment, for one household at a time. In reciprocal moba, a household calls on its neighbours for help. The work is freely given, but it creates a social debt (društveni dug): the household is obliged to answer the next call from another household, returning the help in the same measure, through labour and kindness. This debt is not settled in money and cannot be bought off. It is repaid only by showing up as a support to others. In this way, moba circulates labour through the whole village and continually renews the ties between households. Milosrdna moba (merciful moba, Cyrillic: милосрдна моба) follows a different logic. When a household lost a family member, and with it hands for work and often a breadwinner, the village first completed all the essential work for that household, and only then turned to the work of others. Nothing was expected in return. This was not charity allocation from the strong to the weak, but a way for the village itself to survive: a community that lets one of its households collapse weakens itself. Together, the two forms show that moba is not simply a technique for getting work done. It is a way of community social reproduction. Moba levelled inequalities, shared the burdens of loss, and made interdependence visible and practised. Labour, body, rhythm and celebration were woven together, as the work usually ended with shared food and song, and the work itself renewed bonds between people, land and water. Moba is not a "cultural residue" of a pre-modern past. It is a living epistemology, an ontological survival that resists what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls epistemicide. Through moba, knowledge about land, seasons and care is transmitted across generations as embodied practice. Its roots reach into pre-Christian Slavic cosmologies (Mokosh, Perun, Veles), where earth, body and community were not separated. Today, moba re-emerges in struggles to defend the public goods and commons. In the village of Topli Do on Stara Planina, residents held barricades for 120 days in 2019 against small hydropower plants that threatened to divert their rivers into pipes. After the investor withdrew, villagers re-introduced moba tradition to rebuild some houses, repair small bridges, renovate the church, and upgrade shared septic systems, and they reactivated the village cooperative (zadruga) and sub-municipal local community (mesna zajednica). Here, moba turned defensive resistance into everyday commoning: the reproduction of life and territory rather than a one-time protest. Moba also lives on beyond its village origins. In its original meaning, as freely given collective labour that binds people together, it reappears in nowtopias, permaculture communities and other contemporary initiatives, where people gather to build, plant and harvest together as a conscious alternative to wage labour and market exchange. These new forms do not replace the tradition. In villages, moba has never stopped: it continues to be called, answered and returned, as it has been for generations. Like mycorrhizal networks beneath the soil, moba as prefigurative pedagogy connects struggles across geographies. It resonates with sumud (steadfastness) in Palestine, where planting an olive tree after its destruction is at once labour, care and resistance, and with collective work traditions elsewhere (buen vivir, ubuntu, sharmadana etc.). Moba shows that alternatives to capitalist individualism and extraction are not only imagined for the future. They are already practised, remembered and reactivated in the present. References: Kočović De Santo, M. (2026). Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide. Capitalism Nature Socialism. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2025.2607978 Kočović De Santo, M., Karazarifi, L., & Kuźma, I. (2026). Radical Relationality from the Periphery: Water Movements and Liminal Commons in Southeast and Central Europe. International Journal of the Commons, 20(1), 333–346. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1672 Kočović De Santo, M. et al. (2025). Participativne prakse u odbrani javnog dobra i stvaranju zajedničkog na području sela Topli Do, opština Pirot. FDU, Beograd. de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide.