Migrant entrepreneurs and the nexus of migration and development in Kosovo

Few places in Europe are shaped so consistently by migration like the former Yugoslavia. Zooming in on Kosovo, my project explores socio-economic effects of emigration and return migration on local communities within their broader socio-political context. Focusing on entrepreneurial activities, I apply an intersectional approach, relating migrant agency to social status, state policies, family and kinship, gender, and value orientations. My approach is multidisciplinary, non-normative, context-sensitive, and actor-centered: which economic strategies do (did) migrants, and their families, develop by exploiting the multi-faceted resources gained by migration? How do they respond to government initiatives to influence their (investment) behaviour, how do they relate to expert discourses? By that, I explain persistent homeland oriented migrant engagement in Kosovo and its impact on the home society. I furthermore de-construct visions of “development” underpinning state efforts to channel migrant investment by exploring their ideological framings and trace bottom-up the effects of entrepreneurial activities of (return) migrants. In my lecture, I would focus on methodologies and I would like to invite

Carolin Leutloff-Grandits, PD Dr. phil., is a social anthropologist and a senior researcher at the interdisciplinary Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION at the European University Viadrina. She received her PhD from the Martin-Luther University in Halle (Saale) and her habilitation (Venia legendi) in social anthropology from the University of Vienna and conducts research on migration, borders, social security, care and family and is particularly concerned with the countries of the former Yugoslavia and with Germany, including the former inner-German border region.
Next to her monograph “Translocal Care Across Kosovo's Borders. Reconfiguring Kinship Along Gender and Generational Lines” (Berghahn 2023), she published “Claiming Ownership in Postwar Croatia. The Dynamics of Property Relations and Ethnic Conflict in the Knin Region” (Lit 2007) and recently edited the special section “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” in the Journal for Borderlands Studies (2023).
Currently, Carolin works on a Leibniz-funded project on migrant entrepreneurs and the nexus of migration and development in Kosovo.