Abstract
This chapter introduces a second dimension of ethnicisation: the interdependency between markers of identity and migration behaviour and how it has resulted in new (ethnic) communities of fate and the dismantling of many multi-ethnic locations. The authors hypothesise that specific structures of constraints and opportunities emerge at both the macro- and micro-sociological levels and that individual as well as collective characteristics exert a specific influence on candidates for moving and on the choice of destination. They also ask which populations’ members are more likely to change residence in specific contexts of collective violence and threat. In most areas of the former Yugoslavia, religious affiliation was an important marker of ethnic identity. The authors compare its impact with that of actual religious practice and wonder how it may combine with markers of other social affiliations—sex, level of education or birth cohort—to influence the timing, duration and destination of residential mobility, given the demographic composition and the occurrence of violent conflict in the considered areas. They also ask to what extent migrations from one region of former Yugoslavia to another followed complementary or symmetrical dynamics (e.g. resulting from ethnic cleansing). Are there alternative patterns, as for instance international migration, associated with specific sub-populations? To deal with these issues, they report analyses of residential trajectories on the basis of the life calendars of TRACES in three targeted areas: Slavonia and Dalmatia in Croatia; Bosnia-Herzegovina; and Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Complementary analyses of the socio-demographic characteristics of movers show that religious affiliation was an important factor of migration, whereas religious practice had almost no effect. This suggests that the pressure to emigrate temporarily or definitely was based on external identity labelling processes, rather than intrinsic individual motivations. Individuals belonging to the cohort 1957–1973 (those being between 18 and 35 years old at the beginning of the war) were also more likely to migrate than the others.
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Notes
- 1.
Bonifazi and Mamolo (2004) state that three internal migration streams occurred within the former Yugoslavia during the nineties. According to their data, 287,000 Bosnians were displaced to Croatia in 1993, 349,000 Bosnians lived in Yugoslavia in 1992 and 299,000 individuals were forced to migrate from Croatia to Yugoslavia in 1999. In addition, during the same period, more than one million people from these regions applied for asylum in foreign industrialised countries. Note that the assessment of migrations during wartime varies greatly depending on the methodology used and the institutions in charge of the assessment.
- 2.
According to Parrillo (2006), a minority may be defined by its low access to social power (i.e., as a position on a hierarchical scale). However, other factors such as size (numerical minority), cultural (or physical) traits and group consciousness are also important.
- 3.
Optimal matching analysis (OMA) emerged in the 1990s and has become a main methodological innovation in the social sciences for finding patterns in life sequences from a quantitative perspective. OMA is based on the assumption that a succession of social statuses or events constitutes stories throughout the course of life that can be measured in a set of data. The usual measures of distance, such as the Euclidean distance, are ineffective for many types of sequential data if, for example, the lengths of these measures differ from one another. Therefore, multivariate statistical methods falling within the framework of dynamic programming procedures have been applied to the study of such data (Needleman and Wunsch 1970; Kruskal 1983). Since the 1980s, some social scientists (Abbott 1983; Abbott and Hrycak 1990; Erzberger and Prein 1997; Levy et al. 2006; Aisenbray and Fasang 2007; Gauthier 2007) have stressed the potential of such methods to address social science issues in which the problem is comparing chronological sequences of various types (e.g., residential, family or occupational statuses).
- 4.
To allow interregional comparisons, all of the computations made for the analyses presented in this chapter use the population and design weights specifically defined for the TRACES data.
- 5.
In this last case, further investigation by cluster analysis revealed another division into two sides: (1) Serbia and (2) Montenegro, Kosovo, Eastern Macedonia, and Albania, which presented slightly different patterns. This distinction was disregarded in this chapter to keep a reasonable number of cases in each cluster.
- 6.
When analysing all of the individual trajectories from the three regions together, the optimal matching analysis produced unconvincing results. All of the stable trajectories (i.e., the trajectories that took place in one region only) made their own clusters, and mixed trajectories (with individuals spending some years in several regions) were gathered in meaningless “garbage” clusters. Splitting the analysis among the three regions described above allowed us to overcome this difficulty.
- 7.
Short-term movements and/or movements within the region cannot be assessed with the TRACES questionnaire.
- 8.
To provide a more detailed view of the migration patterns at a local level, we keep the different regions that each case study is specifically focused on distinct from one another.
- 9.
We consider an individual to be victimised if he or she has faced at least one specific instance of victimisation during the period of observation. War, economic victimisation and political victimisation are assessed using questions w1 to w7, n1 to n4 and n5 to n8, respectively, of the TRACES calendar questionnaire.
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Gauthier, JA., Widmer, E. (2014). The Destruction of Multiethnic Locations: Markers of Identity and the Determinants of Residential Trajectories. In: Spini, D., Elcheroth, G., Corkalo Biruski, D. (eds) War, Community, and Social Change. Peace Psychology Book Series, vol 17. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7491-3_5
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