This book is an ethnography of the people migrating through the Balkan route and the reaction of the local communities who witnessed their struggle to reach the European Union (EU). Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in North Macedonia and Serbia, it pays special attention to the “refugee crisis” that gave birth to a new border regime based on a permanent suspension of laws, normalisation of violence and the entrapment of migrants stranded in a liminal space at the gates to the EU, abl...

Drug discovery increasingly requires a common understanding by researchers of the many and diverse factors that go into the making of new medicines. The scientist entering the field will immediately face important issues for which his education may not have prepared him: project teams, patent law, consultants, target product profiles, industry trends, Gantt charts, target validation, pharmacokinetics, proteomics, phenotype assays, biomarkers, and many other unfamiliar topics for which a ba...

Less than two decades after the Yugoslav Wars ended, the edifice of parliamentary government in the Western Balkans is crumbling. This collapse sets into sharp relief the unreformed authoritarian tendencies of the region's entrenched elites, many of whom have held power since the early 1990s, and the hollowness of the West's "democratization" agenda. There is a widely held assumption that institutional collapse will precipitate a new bout of ethnic conflict, but Mujanovic argues instead th...

This open access book contributes new theoretical and comparative insights on migrant agency, undocumentedness and informality in non-Western, non-democratic migration regimes. The book is conceived as a critical reflection on the contemporary migration regime scholarship, and, more generally, on comparative migration studies, which primarily focus on migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe. Addressing this ga...

Under the impact of accelerated globalization, transnational integration and international security concerns, the geopolitics of Europe's borders and border regions has become an area of critical interest. The progressive enlargement of the EU has positioned its borders at the heart of recent discussions on the changing nature of the EU, the meaning of 'Europe' and what constitutional shape a more politically unified Europe might take.With enlargement, the EU must elaborate strateg...

This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China's contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China's special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China's emerging technology ind...

With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provid...

This book explores the daily survival strategies of people within the context of failed states, flourishing informal economies, legal uncertainty, increased mobility, and globalization, where many people, who are forced by the circumstances to be innovative and transnational, have found their niches outside formal processes and structures. The book provides a thorough theoretical introduction to the link between labour mobility and informality and comprises convincing case studies from a w...

The Routledge Handbook on the European Neighbourhood Policy provides a comprehensive overview of the EU’s most important foreign policy instrument, provided by leading experts in the field.Coherently structured and adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this handbook covers the most important themes, developments and dynamics in the EU’s neighbourhood policy framework through a series of cutting-edge contributions. With chapters from a substantial number of scholars who ha...

A compelling examination of how secondary states are preserving their strategic autonomy and are resisting spheres of influenceRussia's invasion of Ukraine and the deteriorating United States–China relationship signify the onset of the New Cold War. Unlike the original Cold War, this competition is multipolar and "multiplex," with secondary powers, small states, and even nonstate actors pragmatically selecting which of their interests intersect with those of the gr...

This open access book examines the EU’s and Russia’s policies in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus through the prism of hegemony, a concept that it applies to both regional actors. The study cross fertilises the literatures on the EU neighbourhood policy, Russia’s foreign policy, and the scholarship on power in international relations to arrive at an innovative conceptualisation of the mechanisms of hegemonic power. The comparative lens of the analysis leads to novel findings that adva...

In this pioneering study of contemporary Chinese urban form, Duanfang Lu provides an analysis of how Chinese society constructed itself through the making and remaking of its built environment. She shows that as China’s quest for modernity created a perpetual scarcity as both a social reality and a national imagination, the realization of planning ideals was postponed. The work unit – the socialist enterprise or institute – gradually developed from workplace to social institution which int...