Arab others at European borders: racializing religion and refugees along the Balkan Route

Abstract

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.

Double burden of representation: how ethnic and refugee categorisation shapes Syrian migrants’ artistic practices in Austria

“…Second, religion visibly conflates with race, when the refugees' religion becomes racialised. This is most visible in the differentiation between 'white European' and 'dark Arabic' Islam, the latter being seen as threat and danger for European societies (for a discussion of how Balkan Muslims were distinguished from Syrian Muslims during the 2015 migration flow see Rexhepi 2018). These symbolic and social boundaries along religion (and race) significantly impact Syrian refugees' lives, including opportunities to find recognition in the artistic field.…”

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

“…However, the relationship between that displacement and the current migration through the region is complex and, as Hromad zi c (2019:128) highlights, contradictory: in Bosnia, for instance, local populations both "embraced" the new migrants and "wished them gone"; a point that resonated in our own fieldwork encounters. More broadly, as Rexhepi (2018Rexhepi ( :2218 notes, the region came to be seen as a "zone of vulnerability requiring constant surveillance", which necessitated the increased securitisation of borders at multiple geopolitical scales. Border security is sometimes explicitly supported through racialised discourses and practices (see e.g.…”

“…More broadly, as Rexhepi (2018:2218) notes, the region came to be seen as a “zone of vulnerability requiring constant surveillance”, which necessitated the increased securitisation of borders at multiple geopolitical scales. Border security is sometimes explicitly supported through racialised discourses and practices (see e.g.…”

“…Border security is sometimes explicitly supported through racialised discourses and practices (see e.g. Rexhepi 2018), as well as implicitly through the racialised segregation of refugees into isolated and enclosed spaces (Bird et al 2020). For example, the “closure” of the Hungarian border with barbed wire fences and increased violence—the original exit point of the early iteration of the Balkan Route—was supported by Viktor Orban’s narratives about “defending Christianity” from the “virus of terrorism” and “mixed‐race nations” (Fekete 2018).…”

“…The racialising of Muslim migrants as unwanted “Others” within a white Europe (Fekete 2018; Rexhepi 2018) is explicit in these testimonies—but as with Calais, the racial violence is elided, and obscured through both displacement and denial. It would be inaccurate to see this violence as grounded in some form of perceived “Balkan exceptionalism and the perceived “criminality” of the region and the “Balkan Route” (El‐Sharaawi and Razsa 2019), outside the sphere of “liberal Europe”.…”