Webinar: The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration, and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces

MRG Webinar: Book discussion - The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration, and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces?

Speaker: Robert Rydzewski, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.

This book is an ethnography of the people migrating through the Balkan route and the reaction of the local communities who witnessed their struggle to reach the European Union (EU). Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in North Macedonia and Serbia, it pays special attention to the “refugee crisis” that gave birth to a new border regime based on a permanent suspension of laws, normalisation of violence and the entrapment of migrants stranded in a liminal space at the gates to the EU, able to go neither further nor back.

Bio: Robert Rydzewski is a cultural anthropologist. He currently works as an assistant professor at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is also a researcher at the Center for Migration Studies at the same university. His research interests oscillate around migration at the external EU borders, the transition of post-Yugoslav cities, and grassroots movements. Recently, he published a book titled The Balkan Route: Hope, Migration, and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces with Routledge in 2024.