In this lecture, I present an intersectional approach to protracted (internal) displacement by focusing on oscillations of belonging in the biographical narratives of Kosovo Serb IDPs who fled Kosovo in 1999 after NATO bombing and Kosovo Albanian paramilitary reprisal. I will discuss what it means for these people to lose their place in Kosovo – physical, social and symbolic – and not find it (or at least not to have it in the same way) in Serbia. The conceptualisation of belonging as fluctuating between spatial and temporal nonbelonging and unbelonging – ‘there’/’then’, ‘here’/’now’ questions assumptions about homeliness of national belonging by focusing on the positions of ‘co-ethnics’ and how they are being seen (by others and themselves) as the Other/ different.
Marija Grujić is a sociologist of gender and migration with an interdisciplinary academic background and cross-sectoral professional experience in the EU and Western Balkans. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Goethe University Frankfurt and has obtained degrees in philosophy (BA, Belgrade University) and religious studies (MSc, Sarajevo University). Her expertise is in questions about oscillations of belonging in internal (protracted) displacement, intersectionality, irregular migration decision-making and the role of gender norms in conflict-induced displacements/emplacements. Currently, she is a Researcher at the ICMPD, an international organisation focusing on evidence-based research and migration policy. Prior to this post, she was a Lecturer at the Chair for Women and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt.