Border Porosities: Movements of People, Objects, and Ideas in the Southern Balkans

Description

This book documents border porosities that have developed and persisted between Greece and North Macedonia over different temporalities and at different localities. By drawing on geology's approaches to studying porosity, the book takes an innovative approach arguing that similarly to rocks and minerals that only appear solid and impermeable, seemingly impenetrable borders are inevitably traversed by different forms of passage. The rich ethnographic case studies spanning between the history of railroads in the region, border town beauty tourism, child refugees during the Greek Civil War, mining and environmental activism, and the urban renovation project in Skopje, show that the political borders between states do not only restrict or regulate the movement of people and things but are also always permeable in ways that exceed state governmentality.

Rozita Dimova is a social anthropologist. She has served as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Associate Professor in Southeast European Studies at Ghent University, and Scientific Member at the Center for Advanced and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. -- .