Contesting the EU border: lessons and challenges from the Bosnian frontier

ABSTRACT Since 2018, the Bosnian Canton of Una-Sana became the bottleneck of the Western Balkan Route and the last frontier before the EU border. These events illustrate the logic through which the EU border performs in the Balkans, by containing and excluding both those inhabiting and those crossing the region. This study theorizes the Balkans as a liminal space, where the EU border is produced through a colonial logic diffusing dichotomized and hierarchical relations of subordination. It zooms in on the Bosnian frontier as a site where the EU border is simultaneously sustained and contested, drawing attention to tensions and initiatives enacted thorough the assemblage of those gathering beyond it. The paper is written in dialogue with people on the move, activists, volunteers, scholars and practitioners met during fieldwork in the Una-Sana Canton. Their lived experiences of connectivity, cultivated in spaces where the border simultaneously contains and assembles them, compose the central data of this study. Bringing scholarship on borders and migration in conversation with Balkan studies, the paper engages with liminality as an opportunity to rethink transversally about local, regional and global trajectories of coloniality assembling histories and bodies in the Balkans.


Introduction
Since 2018, a Bosnian region called Una-Sana Canton witnessed the arrival and forced permanence of thousands of people on the move 1 travelling across the so-called Western Balkan Route. 2 The Canton is part of an area called Bosanska Krajina, which translates as the Bosnian frontier. It expands through the north-western margin of the country, to the border with Croatia and with the European Union (EU). This land marked a frontier in-between different substances of Europe: Ottoman and Hapsburg, socialist and liberal, Balkan and Western, Christian and Muslim. In the 1990s, it was devastated by the war that tore apart Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In the last 4 years, it became the bottleneck of one of the central migratory routes connecting people on the

The EU border and its colonial logic
In one of her most famous works, entitled EU/Others, Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić puts side by side two photos of an airport corridor. 8 The first photo portrays the blurred silhouettes of passengers walking towards a sign that says EU citizens. The second photo portrays the blurred silhouettes of passengers walking past a sign that says Others. Signs like this are displayed in all EU member states airports. There are always two queues. It is very clear who EU citizens are. Less clear is who are the others. The two signs establish an EU border. Within the EU border, other means anything that is not EU. In its indefinability, it includes multitudes. It does not care about the singularities that compose them. It just cares about what these multitudes are not. They are not EU citizens. In the past decades, scholarly attention to borders and mobility encouraged debate concerning what borders are, how they function and their potential to reinforce differentiation, stratification and control of bodies and movements. 9 Scholars in critical border studies refuse the assumption that borders are linear and homogeneous objects. Conversely, they converge on theorizing them as performative, porous, and constituted through different material and cognitive practices. 10 Reading on this premise, many have turned their gaze to the EU border and examined its attempt to create a 'new privileged European space and identity' 11 to be distinguished from the rest of European and non-European spaces and identities, and securitized from those claiming their right to reach it. 12 The EU border creates what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson describe as 'a qualitative distinction between European space (…) and those extra-European spaces which were, by definition, open to conquest'. 13 These spaces, the two scholars argue, are not territorially nor epistemically fixed. Conversely, they are defined by their subordinate position to the compact body of Europe, which today identifies its values and norms in the project of the European Union. 14 The Balkans are included among these epistemically and territorially ambiguous spaces. In 2005, the Stabilization and Association Process coordinating EU enlargement in Eastern Europe identified a region called Western Balkans as gathering those Eastern European states that were still in the process of harmonizing with EU standards. 15 The Western Balkans include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo. Citizens living in these countries are European citizens, but they are not EU citizens. The EU border with the Western Balkans inscribes a dichotomized relationship between one singular entity and a multitude of undefined ones. On the one side, it holds together European peoples whose histories were at some point connected into the project of a compact body of values and norms. On the other side, it leaves out those peoples, European or not, who have been excluded or subordinated to it. This dichotomized relation between one singularity and an undefined plural group of multiplicities unfolds through the enforcement and diffusion of a colonial logic.
With the expression colonial logic, I refer to a logic enforcing relations of subordinations between one singular entity and a plurality of fragmented and undefined 'others'. I argue that this logic diffuses with the EU border, to disempower those inhabiting non-EU European space and those crossing it. On the one hand, the policies of EU intervention and EU enlargement participate in the decades-long attempt to essentialise the Balkans into fragmented semi-developed, semi-modernised and semi-European others. 16 On the other, with the increasing presence of people on the move crossing the region, the EU border exploits Balkan space to contain those others arriving from formerly colonized territories and turns it into something that highly resembles a colonial frontier. 17 The EU border is not new or unexpected, nor homogeneous. It sustains a complex relation that traps the Balkans into a liminal position, simultaneously inside Europe and subordinated to it. This liminality is part of a century-long historical process that has seen the proliferation of a compact body of Europe distancing itself from the Ottoman Empire, from the experience of Socialist Yugoslavia and from the wars that followed its disruption. 18 Looking at European interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, Etienne Balibar observes how the Balkans were considered an exterior space 'in which an entity called Europe felt compelled to intervene', and, simultaneously, 'European soil' where to intervening was mandatory 'in defence of the principles of Western civilisation'. 19 Balibar reflects on how the contradictory relation between distance and proximity evolves with borders securitization, implying again a colonial logic where 'one part of Europe is transforming another part into an internal post-colony'. 20 These aspects have been furtherly explored in the context of the EU enlargement into Eastern Europe. 21 Scholars such as Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac Tanja Petrović, Merje Kuus, Vjosa Musliu observe how the expansion of the EU in the Balkans translates the moral duty of intervention into an inescapable destiny of transition, marked by slogans such as from Balkan to Europe, or from Dayton to Brussels. 22 This marketization, they argue, sets up a timeline where the past is made of socialism and war; the present is a permanent condition of being 'never quite there yet' 23 and in the future, there is only Europe. In both the narrative of intervention and in that of transition, there is the premise of a fragmented and plural substance, that chaotically collides in the Balkans the Orientalist shade of the Ottoman heritage, the socialist shade of the Yugoslavian one and the genocidal shade of the 1990s wars. 24 This substance is simultaneously part of, and incompatible with the coherent and compact body of Europe. While Balkan is in Europe, it is also far away from it. While Europe is one, Balkans is many. While Balkan is easy to essentialise, it is difficult to unpack. This complex relation permits the EU border to diffuse, dematerialize and rematerialize across an undefinable, fragmented, and heterogeneous space. The Balkans remain in a permanent condition of liminality; in the words of Sarah Green, 'too Western to be cast as being entirely Eastern; too European to be cast as entirely non-European; never fully colonized enough to permit a distinction between colonial and postcolonial; and geographically too close to be somewhere else'. 25 Since 2015, the liminal relation between the Balkans and Europe has been furtherly complicated, as the European space became 'troubled by the presence and the spatial claims' 26 of thousands of people walking across its borders. Scholars such as Nicholas De Genova, Martina Tazzioli, Glenda Garelli, and Maribel Casas-Cortes 27 have been looking at people on the move 'trekking across the Balkans' 28 and implicitly remapping 'the growing differential between EU-ropean and non-EU-ropean land'. 29 As noted by De Genova, by aiming to western EU countries and refusing to stop earlier, they participate in the downgrading discourse that deems some parts of Europe to not 'fulfil their idea of Europe as an obscure object of desire'. 30 The containment of people on the move beyond the EU border inevitably complicates the debate on Balkan liminality, creating in the Balkans an unprecedented geopolitical configuration of European coloniality: one where the borders between European others blurred, as these other gathers in the same frontiers in Serbia, Macedonia, and BiH. This new geopolitical configuration is remapped along with the patterns of the so-called Western Balkan Route. 31 Between June 2015 and March 2016, a formalized humanitarian corridor temporally legalized transit migration across Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, first predominantly towards Hungary and, successively, towards Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. 32 In March 2016, the European Council reached an agreement with the Turkish government to stop the flow of irregular migration via Turkey to Europe. 33 Far from being closed, the route was re-routed on another EU border, between BiH and Croatia. In the last four years, thousands of people managed to reach BiH. 34 They entered the country from the Serbian border and crossed it to the Croatian one. BiH is a signatory member of the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol. The country formally applied to EU membership in 2016 but it is still recognized as a potential candidate. About 18.56% of the population is still living in absolute poverty and approximately 50% is vulnerable to becoming poor. 35 From the end of the war, in 1996, BiH has been dealing with repatriating the thousands of refugees that had fled the country during the conflict. 32,000 returned in 1999 followed by another 19,000 in 2000. 36 BiH is a recovering country, still experiencing unstable governmental transition, tensions between ethnonationalist parties and widespread corruption and unemployment. 37 All of these obstacles prevent it from reaching the standards to become an EU member and trap it, with the Western Balkans, into this state of permanent political transition. 38 In the last three decades, the EU border interfered in the Balkans through the practices of intervention, transition and securitizations. But these practices can be read in continuity with an older history, which become more complex with the consolidation of the European Union and with the appearance of people on the move travelling on the Western Balkan Route.

Sustaining the EU border: the Bosnian frontier
Crossing into the EU from the Bosnian frontier in the Una-Sana Canton is far from simple. Besides the natural obstacles that the journey entails, people attempting to cross are systematically pushed back by the Croatian police which captures them, robs them, tortures them and sends them back to BiH. 39 Here they are forced to remain for an unlimited amount of time, living in Temporary Reception Centres (TCR), emergency tent camps, or squatting in abandoned factories and houses across the Canton. The towns of Bihać and Velika Kladuša are the biggest urban centres of the Canton and became the main gathering points for those attempting to reach or being deported from the Croatian border. 40 From 2018, the International Organization of Migration set up four TCRs, two of which, closed in 2020. In the summer of 2021, most people were staying in an emergency tent camp in the upland of Lipa or in abandoned buildings and cities in the towns and villages of the Canton. 41 Until the early twentieth century, the Canton was a commercial stronghold of the Ottoman empire. 42 In the 1940s, it was occupied by Croatian Fascists and successively reclaimed by Yugoslav Partisans. It has witnessed Muslims and Serbs fighting on the same front and against one another. It experienced the industrial renaissance of the first decades of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and the destruction brought with the war that succeeded Bosnian independence. In 1942 Bihać hosted the first meeting of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ). 43 In the 1970s and 1980s, Bihać and Velika Kladuša became industrial centres of textile and manufacturing production supplying the whole Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 44 From 1992 to 1995, Bihać was held in a siege by the Serbian army. At the end of the war, the city had been devastated. Most industries in the Canton went bankrupt, and the factories had been left empty and abandoned. 45 Today some of them function as shelters for people on the move. Some others have been acquired by the IOM and turned into TCRs. Since the late 1990s, people inhabiting the Canton have slowly attempted to overcome the trauma of the war and its socio-economic impacts. With the closure of many factories, several people lost their job. Many of those who managed to escape during the war did not come back. Others decided to leave after. In 2013, 41.7% of the population of the Una-Sana Canton was unemployed. 46 Entire families have been moving to Austria, where, following a Double Taxation convention signed between Bosnia and Austria, it is easier to obtain working visas. 47 According to J. a social worker who has lived in Bihać since the late 1990s, the number of young people living in the Canton has dramatically decreased in the last 10 years. Many of those who remain do not finish school and struggle to find a job: There is a huge drug problem here. Young people are bored, aimless. They live knowing already that their potential is wasted, and their future is uncertain. There is no attention to politics, no attempt to change the structure. Just boredom and resignation.
J. tells me that psychological support for those suffering from PTSD caused by the war has been almost non-existent. N. is 19 years old. He lives in Bihać and works in a pub in the city centre: PTSD is part of our everyday life. Our parents have it, their parents have it. We grew up surrounded by traumatised people so it's obvious that we are traumatised as well.
According to F, a history teacher working at Bihać local high school, there is a widespread resignation towards the political future of the country and of its new generations, which is nourished by a general sense of abandonment: It never changed. During the war, we were left alone. Now we are left alone again. There has always been a sort of detachment between Sarajevo and the Una-Sana Canton. We don't hold them accountable for anything because they have only managed to hurt us. And with Europe relations are even worse. We are second-hand Europeans. That's how they have always treated us.
With the unexpected arrival of people on the move, the precarious and superficial intervention on behalf of the European Union, and the systematisation of pushbacks and deportation from Croatia to BiH, inhabitants of the Canton began to draw connections between this situation and the historical legacy of marginalization that links the Canton to the Croatian border. D., a 35-year-old woman who moved from Bihać to Austria, comes back to Bihać to spend the summer with her family: This place has turned into the dump of Europe. To them, Europeans in Austria, or Germany, we are just some Slavs. Balkan people, Muslim people and now also Arab People. They don't see a difference between us and them. We don't matter. So, we are all here and no one cares.
In the last three years, inhabitants of the Canton have seen their depopulated land being repopulated by people who come and pass through. Many of those I have been in conversation with have told me they do not feel safe. M. lives close to Bira, an abandoned factory that until 2020 was the biggest TCR in the Canton.
I was afraid to go home alone. There are too many of them. They don't have first names, last names, they don't have data about them. Maybe they all are good but some percentage of them can have a criminal record.
Because of the protests of the local community and the lack of response of the EU and national authorities, the local cantonal government has taken the autonomous initiative to deal with the situation. In the summers of 2019 and 2020, it opened tent camps in remote rural areas outside Bihać, where people were deported to and forced to live without electricity and hot water. 48 When the COVID 19 pandemic started, people were confined inside the camps and prohibited from even shopping for their groceries. From April 2021, the Canton had officially prohibited people from circulating beyond the perimeter of the camps. In the summer of 2021, most of the people on the move I spoke to told me they did not want to live in the camps. B. a Kurdish man who has been living in Lipa camp for two months told me: Camp is so far away. They want to keep us away from the city. There is no electricity and only cold water, and we cannot even go to a supermarket because the towns are too far. I prefer to stay close to the cities and close to the border, at least I am not controlled and watched all the time.
At the time, B. was living in an abandoned house with his and two other families, in the village of Bojina. Lots of people on the move have left the camps and now squat in houses in Bojina, in the nearby village of Šturlić and along the road connecting Bihać to Velika Kladuša. After they are confined away from the EU border; they are also confined away from the urban centres. In this way, the border replicates itself, acquires layers and diffuses.
This is not new in the Balkans. In a paper interrogating tension between Arab and Balkan Muslims, Piro Rexhepi notes that the politics of EU securitization results in forcing states at the 'EU periphery' to 'assert their European-ness by mobilizing the war on terror language'. 49 This narrative resonates with what Milika Bakik Hyden has previously called nesting orientalism i.e. the tendency in Balkan societies to 'view cultures and religions to the South and East of it as more primitive and conservative'. 50 In the Una-Sana Canton, a similar tension is replicated at the local level. P. is a woman working at Velika Kladuša's post office. She tells me: We are Muslims as well, but we are different Muslims. We are liberal, modern Muslims. We are more European than Muslim, I think.
The EU border stratifies its colonial logic and reactivates in creating tensions between inhabitants and people on the move. It replicates the compartmentalized logic that simultaneously confines people in the Bosnian frontier and keeps them apart from each other, in bordered spaces that are remapped along new lines of segregation: the camps, the parks, the squats, the hills. When describing people on the move, inhabitants of the frontier often impersonate that European identity against which the migrant/Arab/ colonial other is posing a threat. But the frontier is not a homogeneous space. Interactions between people on the move and inhabitants on the Canton cannot be simplified through a simple us/other dichotomy, as the border attempts to do. While the EU border enforces strategies to divide, those who are bordered encounter and manage to find ways to tease them out, manipulating the liminal space in which they are confined and transforming it.

Contesting the EU border: lessons from the Una-Sana Canton
Velečevo is a village in the municipality of Ključ, 90 kms away from Bihać. It stands on the western side of the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) that divides the country into two entities: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. Every day, buses coming from Sarajevo and Tuzla cross Ključ to reach Bihać. After crossing the IEBL into the Federation, the buses enter the Una-Sana Canton. The first stop in the Canton is precisely in Velečevo, on a country road that interrupts the blue and green harmony between the Bosnian hills and the river Sana. Velecevo is a required passage for people on the move going towards the EU border. In October 2018, the cantonal government issued a decision to establish a checkpoint. Since then, a police patrol waits for the buses. As they stop, police officers get on and command passengers to show their documents. At first look, Velečevo's checkpoint appears as a replica of the EU border, a few km away from where the institutional border between BiH and Croatia is placed. The police car is parked on the side of a shelter built and managed by a team of Red Cross volunteers, led by S. I met S. on a Thursday in March 2020, and she let me shadow her during her shift in Velečevo. We parked the car close to the police and she warmly greeted the two police officers sitting inside. One of them was in his late 50s, the other in his early 20s. There were 25 people on the move who spent the night there. Most of them were young men in their 30s, but there was also a woman travelling with her husband and two 10years-old sons and a 15-years-old daughter. They came from Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. S. has lived in Velečevo her whole life but was forced to leave the country when the war in Bosnia started, in 1992. During that period, she and her family were refugees in Switzerland. Her experience as a refugee, she told me, brought her closer to that of people on the move and encouraged her to bring them help. During the day, three buses arrived. Each of them was stopped and searched by the two police officers. On the first bus, five people were ordered to get off. On the second, 15. The third one brought an additional eight. At 7.30pm there were at least 50 people at the checkpoint. Some of them decided to move forward on foot. Others choose to spend the night. We were in the middle of a Bosnian countryside road. Forty-three people on the move, six Red Cross volunteers, one researcher and two police officers. All of us arrived here for different reasons. Some voluntarily, some for duty, some forcefully. Velečevo establishes a border, but people gathering at the border do not align with the colonial logic that produces the border. Arrived at the bus stop, I expected the policemen to enforce the orders they had been given, I expected the people on the move to despise and resent them and I expected the volunteers to keep them separated. What I saw instead was a suspension of bordered relations. We all sat in group. The more we talked, the more we bonded. At sunset, we knew most of each other's names and we cooked a meal together on a bonfire next to the shelter. The police officers brought their dinner, but they also sat with us. S. explained to me that she has seen them changing a lot.
Before, the police were not very nice to the migrants, but then, they started listening. It's hard not to listen to people crying and fearing for their life, especially if you see that every day. And these police officers, they are not bad guys. They are just exhausted, like everyone in this country. N., the younger police officer sat next to me. He told me: Do you think I have fun staying here getting people off the bus? No, I don't. I don't have a problem with these guys wanting to go to Europe. I don't really care. I have a problem with Europe using Bosnia as a dump for human garbage. We, here are all human garbage to them. They did it during the war and they are doing it now. F., one of the guys who has been removed from the bus intervened:

S. stepped in:
You see? They both have a point. It is not us; it is not migrants. Its Europe. Europe does not do anything. They say they welcome refugees, but they don't. Politicians don't want migrants to arrive there, so they let them here with us, and we don't have the resources to help them, so people get nervous with them. But it is not their fault. It is Europe.
Since that Thursday in 2019, I kept coming to Velečevo and seeing similar dynamics. Very often, the police officers themselves were providing suggestions to people on the move, of easier routes to arrive in Bihać on foot, telling them which sides were less surveiled.
In Velečevo the EU border is constructed every day and every day is contested. It is itself a liminal space, where law enforcers and lawbreakers interact in a peculiar harmony which the border would not admit. By refusing to play the roles that the EU border imposes on them, those encountering in the bus stop are contesting the colonial logic that wants them divided and questioning the us/other relation through which they are expected to interact.
Rethinking the experience of Velečevo, I began reflecting on liminal sites of interaction that are transversally created beyond the EU border and researching the literature that had articulated them.
Already in the 1990s, the complex relation between the Balkans and Europe has raised the question of whether the Balkans, materially and intellectually, can or should be understood as a postcolonial space. This question has inevitably raised a new level of complexity with the process of EU enlargement and the consolidation of the EU border gathering people on the move in BiH. Until recently, the debate interrogating Balkan postcoloniality has been either concerned with disturbing and stretching the analytical frame of Orientalism, 51 or bridging postsocialist and postcolonial critiques of Western neoliberalism. 52 These attempts have now been substantially criticized.
A decolonial awakening has interested several scholars such as Madina Tlostanova, Marina Gržinić, Tjaša Kancler and Piro Rexhepi. 53 These scholars articulate decolonial critique in the Balkans with the premise that most postcolonial theorizations of the Balkan condition have not challenged the colonial logic dichotomizing spaces and subjectivities into us/other relations. In fact, they have reinforced it. 54 The danger of orientalizing or post-colonizing the Balkans into a subaltern entity, they argue, is twofold. On the one hand, it risks undermining local histories and identities. On the other, it prevents these histories from entering into dialogue with other histories that rise from the global matrix of coloniality. 55 Decolonial scholars in the Balkans propose to reappropriate the theoretical and political potential of Balkan liminality to delink from the Eurocentric temptation of binarism and reframe the Balkans into an intellectual and material opportunity to explore and embrace knowledges and lives surviving in hybridity and ambiguity. 56 By attacking the colonial logic sustaining a global matrix of coloniality, they re-theorize Balkan liminality as an occasion to contest the border.
Velečevo is a site where this liminality is expressed in the everyday suspension of bordered relations between people gathering in the bus stop. By rejecting the role that the EU border gives them, those everyday encounters at the bus stop contest the logic that the border imposes.
Recently, scholars theorizing decoloniality in the Balkans have drawn attention to the dynamics through which the EU border is contested, in the context of the Western Balkan Route. 57 These reflections emerge from field research in several sites across the Balkans including Serbia and BiH. In each of these sites, scholars such as Azra Hromadžić, Nadia El-Shaarawi, Andrej Kurnik, Maple Razsa, Barbara Beznec, Marta Stojić Mitrović, and Nidžara Ahmetašević have drawn connections between local histories of displacement and the global trajectories of coloniality. As noted by Beznec and Kurnik, 'theorizations of border and migration regimes' reinforce decolonial critique that could connect migrant mobilities and immobilities in the Balkans to the 'historical presence and perpetuation of colonial power relations in the Balkan region'. 58 This does not only entail naming the colonial logic at work in the Balkans but also revealing the 'affirmative aspect' of those assembling to 'counter violent imposition of homogenization characteristic of colonial modernity'. 59 Razsa and Kurnik look at the specific case of the Bosnian frontier to situate the encounter between people on the move and Bosnians as an opportunity to amplify 'global and local critiques of Europeanization as an imposition of (neo)colonial domination'. 60 In a detailed report entitled The Dark Sides of Europeanisation, Mitrović, Ahmetašević, Beznec, and Kurnik highlight the opportunity of mobility struggles, in becoming a 'double agent of Europe's decolonization'. 61 'By claiming freedom of movement', they argue, mobility struggles 'criticise the global division of labour and power that is the legacy of colonialism and simultaneously reanimate local epistemological traditions based on diversity, heterogeneity and the refusal of homogenization which resides in post-Yugoslavian societies'. 62 These theorizations find material articulation in the Bosnian frontier. In the past four years, the Una-Sana Canton has not only seen the sustained and heterogeneous performance of the EU border, but also the proliferation of collective initiatives aimed at teasing it out and challenging it. I conclude this paper by outlining two of these initiatives, emerging with the requalification of two abandoned spaces in Bihać. The first one is a local NGO called U-Pokretu and the other is a Centre for Contemporary Culture called KRAK.

U-Pokretu
When the first groups of people on the move reached Bihać in 2018, they found shelter in a huge, abandoned building near the city centre, overlooking the Una River at the end of Granki Park. The building is called Dom Penzionera. It was supposed to be a hospice but was never completed. In the summer of 2021, the building has been evacuated by the police and surrounded by yellow tape and warnings not to enter. People on the move kept camping with tents and sleeping bags in the surroundings of the huge construction that hides them from the police. In front of Dom Penzionera, there is another building called Dom USAOJ, one of the two venues of Bihać Cultural Centre. The building is named after the United Alliance of Anti-Fascist Youth of Yugoslavia (USAOJ), whose first congress was held precisely in Bihać in 1942. During the siege, the building functioned as a military base. In 1994, the Assembly of the Municipality of Bihać included it in a state-owned public institution called House of Culture, which in 1999 was renamed Bihać Cultural Centre. In the last decade, the building has sporadically hosted cultural events but has never been redeemed as a centre for youth and cultural aggregation, A. told me. A. is a 20-year-old student. He studies in the University of Sarajevo but has lived most of his life in Bihać: There is nothing for young people here. We are living a generational exodus. there is no future, no infrastructure, no investment, no perspective. We were here before the migrants and we will be here after them, but nobody cares.
In 2018, A. was one of the many Bihać citizens involved in supporting people on the move, working with the Red Cross to provide meals, blankets, and clothes. He had successively become sceptical of this kind of work: We gave them food and blankets, yes, but that was it. They kept coming and going but there was no real attempt to know each other, to learn from each other. I have seen them all coming and going. Migrants, volunteers, researchers, organisations, journalists. They have no idea of what this place is, they just leave it behind.
A. is one of the co-founders of U-Pokretu, a local association that, since 2020, has worked towards the goal of opening a youth centre in Dom USAOJ. U-Pokretu means on the move, referring to the different flows of mobilities that have brought peoples from different backgrounds, cultures and experiences in and out of Bihać. The main purpose of the organization is that of promoting active youth engagement and 'sensitizing the local population to current problems including migration, sustainable development and civic awareness'. 63 M. is also one of the co-founders of U-Pokretu.
Migration from Pakistan, Iran and Iraq is just one of the problems here. In the last 10 years, Bihać lost half of its population. They all moved to Austria and Germany. This Canton is one of the poorest areas of the Federation, we don't want to just support migrants, we want to create a space of mutual learning where everyone is included and where everybody learns.
M. is not from Bihać. She arrived in 2019, for an experience of international volunteering with an organization called IPSIA and she has worked for 2 years in Bira. M. decided to remain in Bihać embracing the challenge of changing the emergency-driven narrative through which the migration 'crisis' has been dealt with.
It is so depressing when you live here and you see that nothing changes. There has been no attempt to connect people. There is no protest, no engagement and people don't understand that it is not just about the migrants. The fact that the migrants are deported here is just a consequence of a rotten system that is Europe.
U-Pokretu organizes several activities including international volunteer exchanges and environmental action in the Una-Sana Canton. One of the first projects, in connection with an Italian activist network called Rivolti ai Balcani is named 'local reality in north- Thus, the subversive force of U-Pokretu stays in using the most recent performance of the EU border, the containment of people on the move, to draw attention to a larger set of issues that interest the region, including its own history of migration and depopulation. The new tensions in the border bring the older ones to the surface. U-Pokretu proposes to connect them, empowering all of those who permanently and temporarily inhabit the frontier.

KRAK
There is a huge industrial complex in Bihać neighbourhood of Hatinac. In the 1950s, the complex hosted the factory of a textile industry named Kombiteks. In 1991, Kombiteks stopped the production. From 1992 to 1995, during Bihać's siege, some parts of the factory were used to supply the military. After the war, like many other industries in the Canton, Kombiteks went bankrupt. From 2018, the edifice of the factory's workers club has found new life thanks to a group of activists, scholars and artists who have transformed it into a space for cultural aggregation and art. The space is called KRAK, after the workers club name and is Bihać Centre for Contemporary Culture. Irfan Hošić is KRAK's founder and artistic director: We are still not sure about what we are doing but we are connected by the idea that this city, this country is not without hope. There are some things to be preserved. We are very fluid.
We are experimenting with ideas and flows around visual art and urban space, but we also look around us.
Majda Piralić is KRAK's project coordinator: Our community is socialised into thinking that in Europe everything is good and better. We are not talking about Europe. We are talking about this place. We are not talking about leaving the country, but we want to make our community better. this is a very positive story, one of the few in Bihać.
By contesting the assumption that the best option for people in Bihać is going to Europe, KRAK turns the gaze away from Europe and into uncomfortable places in the present and the past. There, it recovers the positive stories, those that are worthy to be preserved. As noted by Hošić: It is not just the war that choked this country. It is also the idea that you have to leave in order to be happy. There is this assumption that the past is just blood and violence and the future is just Europe. Well, here we want to propose an alternative.
KRAK's first exhibition was precisely centred on the factory where it is settled. The exhibition was called Kombiteks: Space and Time and exposed photographic and film material that KRAK inherited from the Kombiteks administration. Its main purpose was to celebrate Bihać industrial past, 'seeing processes of rich social and cultural substantiality which reflected on the wider community'. 64 In September 2021, Bosnian Artist Aida Šehović was invited by KRAK to explore her artistic project on home and refuge.
Šehović was a refugee in the United States during the Bosnian war and became interested in exploring the different declination that home had for her, for her generation and the new generations of refugees. The exhibition she held at KRAK was titled 'Returning Home' and proposed a visual dialogue between Šehović personal experience as a refugee in the 1990s and that of people on the move blocked in Bihać. 65 The dialogue orbited around different idealisations of home as a site of multiple contradictions: belonging and displacement, aspiration and nostalgia, returning and escaping. As part of her research, Šehović spent days in the camp of Lipa, interviewing people on the move and organizing workshops. Those who voluntarily participated in the workshops were completing drawings about the concept of home, the one they left and the one they aspired to. The drawings were exposed in the exhibition in a section titled 'drawings towards home'. Šehović's exhibition put people on the move and local experiences of looking for refuge together in the same space, contesting the border that wants them separated and incompatible. In its still young experience, KRAK has transformed a semiabandoned industrial complex in a semi-depopulated area of a semi-depopulated town into a space for cultural and artistic activity, where the EU border only appears to be contested, teased and mocked. It disengages with the border and the history of subordination that it sustains and celebrates histories memories and bodies that assemble and collide in the frontier. Acknowledging the heterogeneous composition of peoples in the frontier, KRAK and U-Pokretu unsettle the logic of division and tension that the border imposes. By turning their gaze from the border to the frontier, they manage to bring together the purposes of enacting local solidarity and building solidarity with people on the move.

Conclusion
Reflecting on the unequal and racialised hierarchies that have been perpetuated across histories of colonialism and white supremacy, Sarah Ahmed reminds us that these histories can be overlooked nor forgotten: 'bodies remember such histories even when we forget them'. 66 Today, in the Una-Sana Canton, a few kilometres away from a border that inscribes the division between the EU and its others, bodies remembering these histories encounter. One is the centuries-long history of European imperialism, which gathers racialised bodies escaping from the same misery Europe left, and to whom that same Europe denies refuge. 67 The other is the history of a liminal space in-between Europe and its East, where violence, depopulation and trauma have been let on and ignored. A space that remains in-between the compulsory destiny of an EU future and the spectre of an undefined and unresolved past. What unites these histories is that Europe decides how to tell them, it holds them beyond a border, so they do not disturb the histories on the other side. This study has zoomed in on the Bosnian frontier to intersect local and global dynamics sustaining, diffusing, and contesting the EU border. I have argued that the border is not homogeneous. It performs through a colonial logic and diffuses in a liminal space. In this liminal space, the border is constantly contested through the assemblage of those that are confined and contained beyond it. The Bosnian frontier becomes a site where Europe's compact body is destabilized, and its multiple substances and contradictions are revealed and questioned. It also becomes a space that tests the potentiality of Balkan liminality to reframe and resist the heterogeneous tensions emerging from the global matrix of coloniality and performed through the EU border.