Countering the norms within Europe’s colonial durabilities. Notes from fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina across the Balkan Route

This contribution examines how coloniality and racialization shape the European border regime, drawing on fieldwork in Bihać, Bosnia-Herzegovina, across the Balkan Route. The route has become a key corridor for illegalized mobility, marked by systemic violence and racialized bordering practices that reflect both biopolitical and necropolitical forms of governmentality. Using militant and decolonial methodologies, the study foregrounds the embodied experiences of people on the move as they confront pushbacks, dispossession, and confinement. Situating these experiences within broader dynamics of coloniality and racial capitalism, the article shows how the European border regime reproduces racial hierarchies through balkanist and colonial discourses that position Bosnia as a subordinate European borderland. By centering race within European migration governmentality, the article reframes illegalized mobility not merely as an object of control, but as a productive and contested force. Ethnographic insights highlight how people on the move strategically appropriate state categories and enact practices of refusal and subtraction disrupting the racialized logics of border regime and exposing both its violent dimension and the enduring colonial durabilities shaping Europe’s peripheries, as well as the fugitive, everyday politics through which illegalized mobility becomes a site of political and epistemic innovation.