Racialized Urbanism on the “Balkan Route”: Racial and Spatial Junctures of Postsocialist Transformations and Border Regimes

Violent border regimes regularly block thousands of migrants trying to cross from border cities of the Western Balkans into the European Union (EU). These cities are places where transitions from socialism to neoliberal capitalism are also driving social ruptures and infrastructural decline. Our ethnographic study is located in one such city, Bihać, northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina bordering Croatia, and the EU. We explore the racial and spatial entanglements of postsocialist transformations and EU bordering practices, calling them racialized urbanism – reconfigurations of the urban steeped in the race-making mechanisms of border regimes and postsocialist devolution. Inspired by critical scholarship from Eastern Europe, we see the urban as a contact zone between borders and transitions, arguing that raced urban conditions are emerging on the “Balkan Route” through three interrelated processes: (1) Racialized EU border practices that displace migrants are then reproduced within cities through everyday urban bordering. (2) The use of migrant immobility as a source of profit, where keeping people stuck in place is managed and justified through humanitarian migration systems. (3) Postsocialist urban changes that have produced white flight alongside the confinement of non-white migrants, reinforcing racial inequality and embedding racialized capitalism in the region’s cities.