Editorial. Entangled Temporalities of Migration in the Western Balkans. Ethnographic Perspectives on (Im)-mobilities and Reception Governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT After the official closure of the passage to the EU (March 2016), the Western Balkans have become an area of transit for migratory flows overland from the East and the South. This introductory editorial sets the stage of the special issue and presents the contents of the articles which aim at going beyond an understanding of the ‘refugee crisis’ as a generic external threat to the EU discussing its constructive, changing dimension and exploring the fluid nature of migration trajectories which are shaped by intersecting forms of mobilities and immobilities. Through the adoption of an ethnographic and diachronic perspective, the papers further aim to understand their entanglement with the 1990s memories of migration and therefore with the temporalities of mobility, while also considering the re-emergent securitization of border areas, especially after COVID-19 pandemic, and the ambivalent pushback and hospitality policies that also occur in the Balkan countries along the route.