Thinking Like a Route

This timely book posits the idea of a 'route perspective' as a multi-scalar methodology for studying informal migration. Claudio Minca, Yolanda Weima and their contributors draw on their rich multi-sited, multi-temporal ethnographic research along the Balkan Route, the most important informal overland migration route in Europe, to better understand how it is continuously formed through an ever-changing assemblage of spatialities, trajectories, materialities and actors. Presenting a novel approach to researching the complex spaces of the Balkan Route, chapters first trace the key elements of the route's formal infrastructure from a state perspective, including camps, border walls, and asylum systems, which highlights, in-turn, what is made invisible by the official state gaze. The authors then use their empirical findings at key sites to underscore the tenacious counter-geographies of people-on-the-move.