Description
Over the past decade, the discipline of European Studies has increasingly engaged with theorizations that challenge dominant understandings of Europe and foreground perspectives from its margins, particularly Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. This paper contributes to this trend by theorizing the Western Balkans as a crucial site in which competing conceptualizations of Europe are articulated, especially through the European Union’s externalized migration governance. Focusing on the 2023 Italy–Albania Protocol on Migration, which authorizes the establishment of Italian-managed migrant detention centers on Albanian territory, the paper employs Judith Butler’s post-structural feminist framework to argue that Albania, positioned as Europe’s periphery, became a crucial site where Europe is being discursively and materially redefined. Through discourse analysis of Italian and Albanian media narratives and political speech acts, the paper identifies an emerging vision of Europe based on excluding racialized non-European migrants, reproducing colonial heritages, and replicating center-periphery power dynamics. Simultaneously, a counter-narrative emerges from Albanian and transnational civil society actors opposing the agreement, reimagining Europe through plurality, solidarity, and transnational horizontal cooperation. The paper thus reconceptualizes EU migration agreements in the Western Balkans as central, not peripheral, to the ongoing renegotiation of Europe in multiple sites.
Keywords: European Studies, Western Balkans, Migration Governance, Postcolonial Europe, Italy-Albania Protocol, European Identity.
