The Balkans as “Double Transit Space”: Boundary Demarcations and Boundary Transgressions Between Local Inhabitants and “Transit Migrants” in the Shadow of the EU Border Regime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To introduce the special section, this article presents an analysis of the dynamics of border closures and openings in the countries of the “Western Balkans.” It examines the interconnections between the situation of so-called “transit migrants” on their way through these countries to the EU and the particular position of these countries in the protracted EU accession process, which also affects the situation of the local population. Highlighting the dual nature of – often simultaneous – border closures and border openings, the article first describes the changing mobility options for residents of various Balkan countries in the context of uneven EU accession processes, before outlining the relationship between EU migration management in the “Western Balkans” and the movements of “transit migrants” through and within the Balkans. The aim of the article is to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of the two perspectives on mobility and the different border and demarcation processes unfolding within the EU border and migration regime, which have spatial as well as temporal and social dimensions. These processes lead to various distinctions, but also to connections between migrants from the Global South and the local population in the various Balkan countries, which are further elaborated in the contributions to this special section.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".