Migrants, Refugees and Settlement Camps in the Rural and Urban Fringes of Serbia: Cultural Repertoires, Changing Understandings and Imaginings of the Other

Serbia has undergone massive changes related to the arrival of migrants and refugees. Since the closure of the Balkans corridor route in 2016, refugee camps sprang up in rural areas to cater for them. Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Branislav Radeljić and Marko Stojanović in this chapter demonstrate the ways in which these migrants are constructed to be ‘out of place’ in the rural fringes of Serbian towns and cities. The chapter reports on the mythologies that have grown up around rural change, migration and migrants themselves. Drawing on the accounts of NGO workers to report on narratives around these rural interlopers, findings illustrate how migrants are perceived through a lens of being out of place and represented as an insertion of an urban problem into rural locales.