ENDURING SOLIDARITIES. SPACES, PRACTICES, AND RELATIONS OF MIGRANT SUPPORT ALONG THE BALKAN ROUTES.

This thesis examines grassroots solidarity practices along the Balkan migration routes in the context of increasingly restrictive European border regimes. Focusing on Greece, Bulgaria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the study investigates how bordering processes shape migrants’ trajectories and lived experiences, and how diverse forms of solidarity emerge in response to border violence, institutional abandonment, and everyday precarity. Since the so-called “long summer of migration” of 2015, the Balkan region has become a key site for the experimentation and consolidation of European migration control policies. Borders in this context extend far beyond official checkpoints, permeating forests, urban spaces, detention facilities, and informal camps, and operating through a combination of physical violence, bureaucratic obstruction, legal uncertainty, and temporal exhaustion. At the same time, these borders are continuously negotiated and contested through everyday practices of care, support, and collective action enacted by migrants, activists, volunteers, and local communities. The thesis is grounded in a multi-sited ethnography conducted between October 2023 and November 2024 across the three research sites. The empirical material is based on prolonged participant observation and 56 semi-structured interviews with a heterogeneous range of actors engaged in grassroots solidarity initiatives, including activists, volunteers, local residents, and people on the move. The research is also informed by the author’s direct involvement in solidarity practices, which enables a reflexive engagement with the field while maintaining analytical distance. Methodologically, the study emphasizes ethnography as a key tool for capturing the relational, affective, and situational dimensions of both migration experiences and solidaristic practices. Analytically, the thesis explores grassroots solidarity through three interrelated dimensions: spaces, practices, and relations. First, it examines the creation and transformation of collective and community spaces in both border zones and urban settings. In contexts characterized by organized institutional abandonment, grassroots actors respond by building informal and semi-formal infrastructures of reception, care, and exchange. These spaces - including community centers, informal shelters, kitchens, and meeting points - function not only as sites of material support, but also as social infrastructures where alternative forms of belonging, recognition, and political imagination are tentatively enacted. Second, the thesis analyzes the practices that unfold within these spaces, ranging from the distribution of food and basic necessities to legal and medical support, educational activities, and mutual aid networks. While many of these practices are not explicitly framed as political by those who enact them, the analysis highlights their political and transformative potential. By addressing immediate needs neglected or actively produced by border regimes, such practices challenge criminalizing and dehumanizing logics and disrupt dominant narratives that portray migrants solely as victims or threats. At the same time, the study critically examines the ambivalences of these practices, showing how they may reproduce hierarchies, dependencies, or assistentialist dynamics even as they contest structural violence. Third, the thesis foregrounds the relational dynamics that constitute and sustain solidarity over time. It investigates how relationships among migrants, volunteers, activists, and local actors are formed, negotiated, and sometimes fractured within the constraints imposed by border regimes. Particular attention is paid to power asymmetries, internal conflicts, emotional labour, and the tensions between humanitarian and political orientations. These relations are conceptualized as forms of “odd kinship”: provisional, fragile, and often asymmetrical alliances that nonetheless create openings for alternative ways of caring, belonging, and acting together. Rather than romanticizing solidarity, the thesis emphasizes its precarious and contested nature, highlighting how solidaristic relations are continuously reshaped by exhaustion, legal risks, institutional pressures, and changing migration policies. By examining solidarity as a fluid and adaptive process, the thesis contributes to ongoing debates on the criminalization of solidarity, the limits and strengths of practical help, and the political significance of everyday practices of care. It shows how grassroots initiatives operate within, against, and beyond institutional frameworks, navigating legal ambiguity and surveillance while sustaining networks of support across local, national, and transnational scales. In doing so, the study challenges rigid distinctions between humanitarian aid and political action, legality and illegality, and between those who provide support and those who receive it. Overall, the thesis argues that grassroots solidarity along the Balkan routes constitutes a crucial site for understanding contemporary border regimes and their contestation. While solidaristic practices cannot undo the structural violence of borders, they expose its everyday workings and generate fragile yet meaningful spaces of resistance, recognition, and collective survival. By centering relationality, situated practices, and lived experience, the study offers a nuanced account of solidarity as an imperfect, negotiated, and deeply human response to the bordering processes that shape mobility in contemporary Europe.