Contesting the EU border: lessons and challenges from the Bosnian frontier

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 2018, the Bosnian Canton of Una-Sana became the bottleneck of the Western Balkan Route and the last frontier before the EU border. These events illustrate the logic through which the EU border performs in the Balkans, by containing and excluding both those inhabiting and those crossing the region. This study theorizes the Balkans as a liminal space, where the EU border is produced through a colonial logic diffusing dichotomized and hierarchical relations of subordination. It zooms in on the Bosnian frontier as a site where the EU border is simultaneously sustained and contested, drawing attention to tensions and initiatives enacted thorough the assemblage of those gathering beyond it. The paper is written in dialogue with people on the move, activists, volunteers, scholars and practitioners met during fieldwork in the Una-Sana Canton. Their lived experiences of connectivity, cultivated in spaces where the border simultaneously contains and assembles them, compose the central data of this study. Bringing scholarship on borders and migration in conversation with Balkan studies, the paper engages with liminality as an opportunity to rethink transversally about local, regional and global trajectories of coloniality assembling histories and bodies in the Balkans.