Racial capitalism, digitalities and activism at the border

This thesis examines the material practices shaping routes and borders of “external EUrope,” focusing on Serbia, Bosnia, and surrounding transit zones. Using racial capitalism as its central framework, it interrogates the political economies that sustain illegalised mobility and argues that human smuggling economies are best understood as outgrowths of racialised labour and capital, rather than isolated criminal phenomena. The research is based on nine months of multi-sited traditional and digital ethnography conducted near the Schengen border in Serbia and Bosnia. Fieldwork combined semi-structured and informal interviews with people on the move, migrant “border workers,” and international activists, alongside digital analysis of how routes and border life are visually communicated. This mixed approach captures both the lived material conditions of border economies and their mediated representations. The first set of findings demonstrates that illicit transit economies are productive for border regimes and deeply entangled with European capital. Drawing on the concept of relative surplus populations, the thesis reframes smuggling and survival economies as structurally embedded forms of labour shaped by securitisation, governance, and uneven accumulation. The second set of findings explores the cultural scripts of the borderland, showing how migrant youth transform everyday bordering into choreographed digital performances that construct collective identities tied to work, place, and constrained mobility. The final findings examine grassroots organisations operating within criminalised border spaces, highlighting how solidarity practices are reshaped by the commodification of social relations and the contradictions of political care under conditions of border violence. Overall, the thesis reconceptualises borderwork as productive labour within a broader European political economy, revealing how survival, culture, and solidarity are reorganised through the shadow economies of the Balkan route.