Description
2015 is overwhelming identified as the benchmark date of a migration crisis in Europe. The presumed intensification and heterogenization of migration flows prompted EUrope 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 they are governed, diversified, and deviated. Particularly across decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, borders have been emancipated from their linear and territorial dimension and promoted to methodological and epistemic instruments. In this paper, 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 these borders appear in the first place. By investigating cases of the prolonged, forced, and unexpected assemblage of migrants and inhabitants in the Western Balkans, this paper explores the entangled agencies, histories, and subjectivities that emerge from the encounter of subjects that EUrope intentionally positions on its peripheries and proposes an analytical move from border-thinking to frontier-making. Advocating for a dialogue between scholars in Critical Balkan Studies (CBS) and Critical Migration Studies (CMS), it introduces frontier-making as an approach to study encounters between subaltern subjects in contested spaces where EUropean disciplinary power is simultaneously constantly replicated and constantly subverted.
