White enclosures: Racial capitalism and coloniality along the Balkan route

In this presentation Piro Rexhepi explores how overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes along the Balkan Route reinforce regional racialized relations of power. By bringing the Balkans into the complex interlacing of global racial borders and coloniality, he argues that the spatial integration of post-socialist territories and people in the last three decades into the Euro-Atlantic enclosure serves to both secure its borderlands while also recruiting Eastern European workers as means of tackling the demands for cheap labour and the decline of white demographics. These transformations raise fundamental questions about the nature of enclosures, not only as a contemporary coagulation of a white world walling of colonial-capitalist accumulated wealth within Euro-American spaces through sprawling and inter-connected border carceral regimes around the US/Mexico crossing, EU/Mediterranean passage and the Balkan Route, but also as continuities of colonial formations of race bent on bolstering white demographics at its edges.

The respondent will be Zora Kostadinova, UCL SSEES

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