Of Being Stuck or Moving On: Border Temporalities Along the EU’s External Border in the Western Balkans
Abstract
This article focuses on two temporal dimensions of borders in an entangled perspective: first, the temporal dimension according to which borders may establish a temporal taxonomy by marking those living across the border as being more or less advanced or backward, and second, borders in the function of channelling mobility, accelerating or slowing down movements, or even bringing them to a standstill. Referring to social anthropological case studies at the EU external border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, this article shows the entanglements of the different border temporalities and their impacts on migrants’ and locals’ self-perceptions. It argues that it is not only migrants from the Global South who dwell in a liminal time-space due to the increasing fortification of the border, but also that parts of the native population feel stuck due to the impossibility of imagining a future and of moving forward in life in their home region. This is reinforced by the movements of others leaving or transiting the region, a situation that has become symptomatic for the Western Balkans.
Keywords: border temporalities; spatio-temporal hierarchies; EU-external border; mobility; transit; liminality; Western Balkans.
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