Engaging with critical border literature, this article examines how racial and religious categories are mobilized in materializing EU borders in the Balkans. Exploring the tensions that emerge in Muslim communities in post-Socialist and post-conflict Macedonia during the Syrian "refugee crisis" in 2015, it looks at how racialized categorizations of difference are deployed along the Balkan Route to differentiate local, white European Muslims from refugee Arab Others. Through policy analysis and fieldwork, the article questions the standard, colour-blind and equal-to-all European integration by highlighting political divisions that emerge within Muslim communities. While these tensions were present long before the ongoing refugee crisis, this article argues that the current geopolitical context allows for these tensions to be utilized in the surveillance and securitization of EU border regimes.

Engaging with critical border literature, this article examines how racial and religious categories are mobilized in materializing EU borders in the Balkans. Exploring the tensions that emerge in Muslim communities in post-Socialist and post-conflict Macedonia during the Syrian "refugee crisis" in 2015, it looks at how racialized categorizations of difference are deployed along the Balkan Route to differentiate local, white European Muslims from refugee Arab Others. Through policy analysis and fieldwork, the article questions the standard, colour-blind and equal-to-all European integration by highlighting political divisions that emerge within Muslim communities. While these tensions were present long before the ongoing refugee crisis, this article argues that the current geopolitical context allows for these tensions to be utilized in the surveillance and securitization of EU border regimes.

This paper investigates the convergence of European Union enlargement strategies and queer politics in the production of Islamophobia in Kosovo. Through a reading of recent homophobic attacks in Kosovo, it examines how the incorporation of lgbti politics into the eu enlargement assemblages generate a representational praxis of queer communities in Kosovo under threat by Muslim extremists. This paper proposes that the Europeanization of lgbti rights depoliticizes queer communities and singles them out for protection as victims of Islamic fundamentalism by creating binary and exclusionary Queer/Islam divisions that prevent the emergence of intersectional solidarities and subjectivities such as queer and Muslim. In this context, European financed ‘coming out’ projects gain a new meaning in Kosovo, one where the promotion of visibility for certain queer subjects works simultaneously to expose Muslim ‘extremists’. Queer acceptance in Islamophobic times, then, becomes the ultimate test of who can and cannot become European citizen.

This paper investigates the convergence of European Union enlargement strategies and queer politics in the production of Islamophobia in Kosovo. Through a reading of recent homophobic attacks in Kosovo, it examines how the incorporation of lgbti politics into the eu enlargement assemblages generate a representational praxis of queer communities in Kosovo under threat by Muslim extremists. This paper proposes that the Europeanization of lgbti rights depoliticizes queer communities and singles them out for protection as victims of Islamic fundamentalism by creating binary and exclusionary Queer/Islam divisions that prevent the emergence of intersectional solidarities and subjectivities such as queer and Muslim. In this context, European financed 'coming out' projects gain a new meaning in Kosovo, one where the promotion of visibility for certain queer subjects works simultaneously to expose Muslim 'extremists'. Queer acceptance in Islamophobic times, then, becomes the ultimate test of who can and cannot become European citizen.