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, able to go neither further nor back.

The book will appeal to an international audience of academics of migration studies, social and political science, and the wider public interested in migration and social and political changes in Southeast Europe.