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2015 is overwhelming identified as the benchmark date of a migration crisis in Europe. The presumed intensification and heterogenization of migration flows prompted EU and national authorities to respond with an intensification and heterogenization of bordering practices. Looking at the combination of these two processes, in the last decade, scholars in migration studies became obsessed with borders. Crossed, trespassed, raised, enforced. The border represents today a central spatial and epistemic category through which we observe migrants’ mobilities, and produce knowledge about how these are governed, diversified, and deviated.
In my work, I contend that an overwhelming attention to borders as malleable and pluriform objects, and the indissoluble link between border enforcement and the invention of a migration crisis overshadowed the material histories and geographies through which borders appear in the first place. Looking specifically at the context of the migration ‘crisis’ on the ‘Western Balkan Route’, I claim that thinking exclusively about borders prevents to account for the complex entanglement of histories, agencies and subjectivities that emerge in the prolonged, forced, and unexpected assemblage of migrants, inhabitants, and other actors in the Western Balkans. In turn, I propose to widen the focus from borders to the frontiers where these borders appear and transform.
The Western Balkans extends across European space, but they remain outside of the EU border. The contemporary externalization of the EU border in the Western Balkans must be contextualised with a larger and longer process of marginalization and othering that constitute the relation between EUrope and those objectified as undeserving others inhabiting and crossing its peripheries. For migrants, this marginality is rooted in experiences of forced mobility and immobility associated with forms of colonial governance that find its contemporary expression in the racialisation and criminalisation of migration and in the externalization and securitization of borders. For inhabitants, it is rooted in the experience of multiple conquests, conflicts and political interventions that have historically placed the Balkan territories, and peoples into an asymmetrical and subordinate relation to EUrope; the most recent one being the policy-framework of border externalization and securitisation deployed by the European Union in the Stabilization and Association Framework.
Making frontiers into central research objects, I disavowed ways of thinking about migrant mobilities as linear trajectories from one point of origination in the formerly colonised world to one point of destination in the EU. I also rejected the imaginary associating Western Balkan states, languages, peoples, and histories with dark, marginal, and liminal voids. Researching frontiers is about entangling these constructed mobilities and immobilities, focusing on how they are caught in moments of unforeseen and unintentional interruption and on what synergies emerge from them.
By investigating the prolonged, forced and unexpected assemblage of migrants and inhabitants in the Western Balkans, my research explores the entangled agencies, histories, and subjectivities that emerge from the encounter of subjects that Europe intentionally positions on its margins; on its frontiers. Inhabitants and migrants encounter in the Western Balkans and, with them, the histories, agencies and assigned subjectivities that position them on the margin of EUrope assemble.
In my work, I wish to argue that these histories, agencies, and subjectivities shall not be flattened and, as they encounter, they should not be thought as disentangled from one another. What unites them is a contested relation with EUrope. What unites them is that EUrope governs them, confining them beyond a border that is hard to escape. At the same time, lived experiences of connectivity and subversion cultivated on European margins represent opportunities to subvert the border logic that the EU imposes on those inhabiting and attempting to cross the frontier.