Preface

People displacements, internal and external to the Balkans, provoked by wars as much as by economic hardship, have been one of the main features of the troubled post-communist transformation in the region and they are considered today one of the main obstacles to the integration of the region into the EU. Ethnic cleansing and political failures in the Balkans drastically overthrew the previous geopolitical and demographic structure without creating stability. Today the borders of nation-states are unequivocally under strain, experiencing in different ways the challenges of globalization. Written by a multinational team of senior and junior researchers, this book is a study of migrations and civil society across the Balkans and its EU neighbours. It focuses in particular on social organizations formed among refugees, displaced persons, and migrants that strive to emerge in the local and transnational public sphere. Their struggles for recognition, it is argued, display its fundamental role for democracy, both East and West. From different perspectives and in the various polities considered - Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, and Turkey - these innovative studies consider how, via people mobility, the intercultural relations of the Balkans meet the process of integration of the European Union.