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In this chapter I discuss border porosity as tourists in socialist Yugoslavia and the child refugees who had fled the Greek Civil War (1946–49) crossed the border between the two countries. Motivated by diametrically opposite reasons – some crossing the border for leisure and some fleeing war – the people who crossed the border have caused an enduring porosity that has persisted despite the rigid national policies of the two countries and the extraordinary conditions when these movements took place. I call this sedimentary porosity because
This book is a theoretical and ethnographic study of the shifting border between the Republic of North Macedonia and Greece. The central argument is that political borders between states not only restrict or regulate the movement of people and things but are also always porous and permeable, exceeding state governmentality. To support this argument the book draws on scholarship from geology that describes and classifies different kinds of rock porosity. Just as seemingly solid rock is often laden with pores that allow the passage of liquids and gases, so too are ostensibly impenetrable borders laden with forms and infrastructures of passage. This metaphor is theoretically powerful, as it facilitates the idea of border porosities through a varied set of case studies centered on the Greek–Macedonian border. The case studies include: the history of railways in the region, border-town beauty tourism, child refugees during the Greek Civil War, transnational mining corporations and environmental activism, and, finally, a massive, highly politicized urban renewal project. Using interdisciplinary frameworks combining anthropology, history, philosophy, and geology, the book analyzes permeations triggered by the border and its porous nature that underline the empirical, political, and philosophical processes with all their emancipatory or restrictive effects.
Introduction In this chapter, we will analyse how specific transnational care practices are reflected in the personal life trajectories of women with migration and refugee experience in a postsocialist context in the contemporary Czech Republic. Our aim is to investigate the influence of gendered norms and expectations on women's transnational care practices and their feelings of care obligation, and to explore specific coping strategies for dealing with practical and emotional challenges arising from contradictory
over borders and citizenship. Incidents of migrants and refugees dying in their efforts to cross the Aegean border and enter Greece and the EU have become a tragic consequence of contemporary EU border policy, as they have in many other parts of the Mediterranean. In October 2013 a shipwreck of unprecedented magnitude near the Italian island of Lampedusa left approximately 364 immigrants dead (Shenker 2013). Deadly incidents have also taken place in the Spanish coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, where migrants and refugees try to reach the EU border (Morcillo
-analysed the dyad of Us and Them in the context of migration, showing that the ‘Us’ category covers successful citizens, while the ‘Them’ encompasses both non-citizens (migrants, refugees, asylum seekers) and failed citizens (welfare recipients, ‘scroungers’). These classifications create the basis for the processes of governmentality and regulation of persons and bodies and the reproduction of ‘communities of value’ (Anderson 2013 ; see also Morris 2018 ). In this book we follow a similar trajectory, focusing not only on migration but also on gendered
twentieth century, thus enabling much better mobility and speed. The rebels and revolutionaries, on the other hand, made the railways and bridges targets of their attacks, thus affecting the military potency of the Ottomans. The importance of the railway has endured until contemporary times, although the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation in 1991, and the ensuing financial crisis of Greece and RN Macedonia, have gravely affected the railway transport and infrastructure. The most striking recent porosity took place during the migrant and refugee
Schüßler 2015 ). Bochum has undergone different phases of receiving migrants and is today characterised by a highly diverse urban population. Among the first significant groups of migrants were Poles, who came in the late nineteenth century as labour migrants. Further migrants from Southern Europe followed (1960–1970s), whereas in the 1990s, the migrant population predominantly consisted of refugees and asylum seekers. In 2015, the migrant rate reached 19%; the number of refugees received rose to 4,962 but decreased again to 2,588 in 2018 (Stadt Bochum 2018a
. Fieldwork I travelled with my interpreter around Jordan to meet the thirty-nine Syrian participants, who had originally come from Daraa, Homs, Damascus (including Eastern Ghouta), and Aleppo. All of them now lived in Jordan as refugees, but many had resettled from the refugee camps to private accommodation. The majority received us in rented apartments, mostly in suburbs of Amman, or in
the border for a visit to the beauty parlor or the casino. Crossing the border during socialism created among many vacationers the desire, and since 2012 a possibility, to purchase seaside property. For the child refugees from the Greek Civil War, however, the border has created a life-long longing for the lost childhood home. These, which I call sediments, albeit different, leave visible traces that not only affect people's lives but have also transformed the social fabric of both Greece and RN Macedonia. The open-pit mines and the ensuing protests against the
consider what constitutes a moral community or a community of value (Anderson 2013 ), who is considered to belong, and who is excluded. As we show, these notions of morality or value rest on shifting sands; people who are included for long periods may become excluded, as different economies and political ideologies emerge (for instance, in many European countries following the acceleration of migration globally leading up to the 2015 refugee crisis). For some of the world's population, in and outside Europe, established safety nets, based on state benefits, healthcare