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.

Thinking Like a Route is a vital read for students and researchers of human geography, especially political geography, interested in informal migration. It is also an important reference for academics in interdisciplinary migration, refugee and camp studies, as well as those with a focus on Balkan and Eastern European studies.