Race in place: scales of difference along the Balkan Route of migration

This paper is an ethnographic examination of race, racialization, and racism among members of a Muslim post-Yugoslav population who have not emigrated–who stayed “in place”–but whose location just outside EU borders has brought people from outside Europe to their community as illegalized migrants along the Balkan Route to the EU. Residents of Bihać and the northwest region of Bosnia–Herzegovina make sense of how racial hierarchies position both them and the migrants, and in turn how racism functions in their society, through overlapping and simultaneously imagined global, regional, and local scales. Distancing from racism based on Bosnia’s specific positioning was common, while local racializing hierarchies such as those that inferiorize the Roma were often understood through frameworks of ethnicity. This made possible a simultaneous identification with “Europe” and whiteness and a distancing from racial thinking and racism as a problem of the “west” even through divergent stances towards migrants.