Anti-Muslim Racism at the European Periphery: Race in the Balkans

My proposal discusses critical underpinnings of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant violence reflective of race politics in the Balkans, particularly nowadays when the prolonged refugee crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic call for a closer examination of the politics and methodologies of social distancing and bordering against targeted populations and their flattening. Through the methods of critical discourse analysis and political ethnography, I look into the politics of race and racialization in the Balkans while tracing localized genealogies of ethno-racial hierarchies, and the impact of the global, more specifically, European racial discourse inscribed in its border politics.

I situate my analysis within the entanglement of the continual anti-Muslim politics in the Balkans, accounting for visceral, cultural, and epistemic erasures, and the recent migration politics enforcing restriction of movement and keeping away Muslims and populations of color outside of European borders. I examine the entangled deployment of the domestic anti-Muslim violence as the politics of racialization where second-hand whiteness inconveniently fit Christian and civilized Europe, and the violence against brown and Black, Muslim, and looking-like Muslim populations, refugees and migrants arriving from the so-called Muslim countries within the recent migratory flows - deployed for preservation of white, Christian, and civilized Europe. I argue that the convergence between anti-Muslim violence and anti-migrant violence is a complex representation and manifestation of ethnic tensions and the pervasive logic of racial formation in the Balkans, layered with the racialized designations traveling along with migrants and refugees, pronounced explicitly during and after the so-called refugee crisis.