Dorian Brandon Juric

ince 2018, a number of migrants and refugees from Asia, the Near East, and Africa have been blocked from entry into the European Union at a small border region, the Bosanska Krajina, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This research explores how traditional, right-wing, and conservative citizens in the region use the area’s history and folklore to inform and justify their engagement in anti-migrant sentiments and actions (protesting their presence, spreading rumours, enacting violence). I seek to understand the moral and political logics by which this hate or resentment is formulated in culturally-specific and historically-conceptualized terms and how those sentiments are generated, circulated, and contested among groups in the form of songs, rumours, jokes, conspiracy theories and other folklore. Unlike most research on anti-migrant violence, this project takes seriously the oft-maligned worldview of nativist groups in order to understand the appeal of these attitudes and thus better inform productive responses to them.