POST-SOCIALIST REGIMES OF MOBILITY

Abstract

This paper, based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Macedonia and Italy (2008-2014),, aims at showing two patterns of mobility observed after the collapse of Yugoslavia. They are both connected to contemporary political and economic situation in post-Yugoslav Macedonia, as well as refer to the situation back in Yugoslavia. The first one is labour migration of Macedonian-speaking Muslims from the western part of the country to northern Italy. The second kind of mobility is immigration of Catholic women from northern Albania to central Macedonia, in order to get married. In the context of these two kinds of mobility I will contemplate the concepts of regimes of mobility and post-socialism.
I argue that in order to understand various movement of people, we cannot separate international from internal as well as spatial from social mobility.