This open access book collects ten essays that look at intra-regional migration in the Southern Balkans from the late Ottoman period to the present. It examines forced as well as voluntary migrations and places these movements within their historical context, including ethnic cleansing, population exchanges, and demographic engineering in the service of nation-building as well as more recent labor migration due to globalization. Inside, readers will find the work of international experts that cuts across national and disciplinary lines. This cross-cultural, comparative approach fully captures the complexity of this highly fractured, yet interconnected, region. Coverage explores the role of population exchanges in the process of nation-building and irredentist policies in interwar Bulgaria, the story of Thracian refugees and their organizations in Bulgaria, the changing waves of migration from the Balkans to Turkey, Albanian immigrants in Greece, and the diminished importance of ethnic migration after the 1990s. In addition, the collection looks at such under-researched aspects of migration as memory, gender, and religion. The field of migration studies in the Southern Balkans is still fragmented along national and disciplinary lines. Moreover, the study of forced and voluntary migrations is often separate with few interconnections. The essays collected in this book bring these different traditions together. This complete portrait will help readers gain deep insight and better understanding into the diverse migration flows and intercultural exchanges that have occurred in the Southern Balkans in the last two centuries.

Migration in the Western Balkans rectifies the under-investigation by migration scholars of the Western Balkans region, by bringing together recent research at a time when migration is a hot topic for the future of Europe. The book explores issues such as the complex geopolitics of the region, the relationship between migration and development, diasporas, and refugees and humanitarianism. Expert contributors present new research on economic migration, forced migration, diaspora formation and return migration at a time when migration is of crucial relevance for the future of Europe. The chapters shed new light on the multiple migration dynamics of a region which has had a troubled past yet stands on the threshold of EU membership. As a theatre of multiple migration processes Migration in the Western Balkans reveals new information on the region, and will be of great interest to scholars of migration, the Balkans and geopolitics. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

Advancing public dialogue surrounding the issues of migrants and refugees, the volume explores the dynamic representations of the recent movement of people from and through the Balkans. It investigates how people within the Balkans view their others, how the West regards the Balkans, and how emigrants from the Balkans reflect upon their experiences as members of cosmopolitan diasporic communities. Highlighting latent tensions between center and periphery and furthering the discussion of racialization related to the Balkans, the collection exposes contradictions in social values, which give rise to national anxieties. Approaching mobility from multiple disciplines, the volume examines several instances of border flows in media, literature, and culture in general, flows of ideas and people. To analyze mobility to, from, and in the Balkans requires one to address the issue of difference, otherness, and race as it relates to South East Europe and as it is understood and reproduced in both transnational and local forms. The racialized category of “migrant” necessitates an understanding of how transnational concepts of race translate into constructs of whiteness and blackness and inform subject positions of the individual and motivate discourses of racialization within communities.

Explores the complex set of processes that determine the incorporation patterns of migrants from Balkan countries in Greece.

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. 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, neither able to go further nor back. The book will appeal to an international audience of academics of migration studies, social and political science, and the wider public interested in migration and social and political changes in Southeast Europe.

Countries of the Western Balkans constitute an important part of the contemporary system of migration. Three important factors shape the current migration flows in the region: the socialist legacy, existing migrant networks, and migration policies, mainly of the receiving countries. This study focuses on three countries of the Western Balkans: Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo. Unlike nationals of Albania, whence exit was near impossible, citizens of Macedonia and Kosovo, being constituent parts of the former Yugoslavia, enjoyed relative freedom of movement across Europe and they have traditionally been source countries of labor migration. The collapse of the socio-economic and political order that attended upon the breakup of the former Yugoslavia was accompanied by ethnic conflicts of the 1990s, high unemployment, and general impoverishment of large sections of the population. These factors, coupled with the onset of transition to a market economy, further strengthened the networks of labor migration throughout Europe that were created by nationals of the Western Balkan. The refugee regimes and immigration policies of major destination countries of the OECD played a significant role in this process. Today, many of these countries contain the bulk of the diaspora from the Western Balkans, including the three countries under study. 1. 2 Objectives and Scope of the Study The overall objective of this research is to offer interested readers and policymakers an insight into the dynamics of skill migration and brain circulation within the Western Balkans-OCED corridor. The study focuses on three countries of the Western Balkans: Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo. To achieve the overall objective, we begin by offering a synopsis of the size, nature, and characteristics of the skilled diaspora from the three countries drawing upon all available information. The study then focuses upon two important subsets of the skilled population of each country: students and skilled returnees. Specifically, we target pre-final and final year students at the tertiary level as they are expected to be highly outwardly mobile and thus ideally suited to study the phenomenon of skill migration, and, a fortiori, as the number of students studying outside the countries of their origin has been increasing rapidly over the last quarter of a century -- from less than half a million in the mid-1980s to almost three million by 2011 (Rizvi, 2011). Consequently, international student mobility is increasingly recognized to be the most important vehicle of brain circulation between the developing south and the developed north. Similarly, given the interest of policy-makers in brain gain, the study targets the skilled subset of return migrants. Thus, the study seeks to answer two important research questions: 1. What motivates tertiary level students to migrate from the country of origin and what is the potential of migration from the selected countries of the Western Balkans? 2. Why do some highly skilled members of the Diasporas return home, and what obstacles and opportunities await them upon return? The study tackles the above questions utilizing all available information, and, more importantly, by collecting primary data using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The study further seeks to contribute to our cumulative knowledge in the field of brain drain/gain/circulation by identifying common patterns among the Albanian, the Macedonian, and the Kosovar skilled returnees and would-be student migrants. Finally, the study aims to discuss the policy implications of the observed patterns of emigration and return migration for leveraging the skilled diaspora for development.