Ripensare i rifugiati. Interconnessioni di mobilità e solidarietà lungo la rotta bosniaca

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) was a place of departure of refugees in the 1990s and is today a crossroads of various forms of mobility. Based on ethnographic research, the paper employs “the refugee” as an analytical category, thick and rooted in local history, to explore the dynamics of identification and categorization by Bosnians who support migrants transiting along the Balkan Route. In this peculiar context, solidarity becomes a site of criticism of the state failing to guarantee rights and protection both to its citizens and to migrants and/or asylum seekers on its territory. The categories of citizens and refugees, usually constructed as opposites, thus tend to become entangled from the perspective of the interlocutors. Against this background, Bosnians acting in solidarity make visible to the public opinion the temporal continuum between the condition of political refugees and economic migrants, blend differences between local (legalized) emigration and transnational (illegalized) migration. By drawing connections among mobilities and marginalization processes that affect both locals and refugees, our interlocutors invite us to challenge the pre-established categories informing the national asylum policies and the externalization of the EU’s eastern borders.