Transnationalism, Diaspora and Migrants from the Former Yugoslavia in Britain

This book by Gayle Munro is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on migration studies. In it, Munro examines how the Yugoslav wars of 1990s changed and challenged diasporic and transnational experiences and identities of migrants from the former Yugoslavia who for diverse reasons reached Britain in the period 1953-2010. In particular the book focuses on (self)representations of the migrants in order to reflect on distinctions and overlap between economic and war-related population movements. Moreover, by stressing the importance of the individual rather than the collective dimension of transnationalism, Munro’s main aim is to help to overcome essentialist understandings of transnationalism by showing that nuances exist in migrants’ transnational belonging and practices. Those nuances are illustrated in five chapters which, the author explains, explore the variety of contexts and identities of individual migrants. They investigate the elaborations of the migrants’ relationships with their homelands as well as their sense of belonging to their home community abroad. In order to do so the author refers to a rich body of diverse sources and research methods: analysis of 179 surveys and 46 interviews with migrants resident in Britain; discourse analysis of media and parliamentary material; autobiographical contemporary fiction; material in cyberspace and ethnographic observation of events related to the former Yugoslavia but held mostly in London.

The first chapter deals with the context of departure. The author provides a list of key moments in the history of the region ‘which were foregrounded in the interviews’ to explore ‘how the history of the region of origin was portrayed by my participants and how such portrayals have affected the transnational relationship’ (13). By listing these events—the battle of Kosovo Polje, World War One, World War Two, the purge after the Croat spring of 1971, Tito’s death and the wars of the 1990s— Munro describes how historical ethnic antagonisms were vaguely referred to by male respondents from all regions and that historical consciousness was particularly firmly rooted in Serbs. Yet in the following pages she goes on to show how individual accounts reveal a variety of motives for the decision to emigrate. Commenting on extracts from interviews and surveys, Munro suggests that to her surprise migrants who left the former Yugoslavia could not be easily divided into examples of voluntary and forced migration. But there is no analysis of whether and how those nuances are related to diverse contexts of departure, or the individual experience of contexts—by looking, for example, at age, gender, socioeconomic background and civic status of individual migrants.

Chapter two, which examines contexts of arrival and reception, only partially unpacks this variety and complexity. Although the chapter starts by stressing the importance of understanding the context of reception as dynamic and varied, the author does not provide any information about where and how migrants from the former Yugoslavia live in Britain and how migration patterns have changed over time or space. Munro explains that it is difficult to obtain statistical data on migrants from the former Yugoslav area but that the majority of them live in London. She stresses that London represents a different context of reception from other places in Britain but whether and how the differences emerged in the author’s research and how they shape migrants’ transnationalism is not discussed further. Instead Munro focuses on representations in parliamentary discussions and newspaper articles of the former Yugoslavia and on the debate during the wars of the 1990s. Here, particular attention is given to Serb migrants who have a longer tradition of migration to Britain thanks to British support for Serbia during WWI and because of family relationships between the elites of the two countries. The author suggests that public discourse in Britain during the wars in Yugoslavia was prevalently Serbophile but that the perception of Serbian migrants was different. That was especially so after the NATO bombing, which the author defines as a transnational trigger for Serbian migrants, because after it a sense emerged among them of belonging to the home community, or even of previously absent Serbian pride. Accordingly, this chapter explains that ethnic belonging among Serbs changed during the 1990s’ wars. However, instead examination of parliamentary debates, consideration of migrants’ everyday interaction with their local contexts might have provided a more nuanced and challenging picture of how the wars of the 1990s affected the sense of belonging of individual migrants from the former Yugoslavia of whatever ethnic group.

Local context is absent too from Chapter three, entitled ‘The Lexicon of the Migration Experience’. Here the author presents extracts from surveys and interviews in which migrants reflect upon connotations associated with the terms ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’ and ‘exile’, as well as their belonging to an ethnic community and their sense of guilt for having left people behind. Finally, Chapters four and five examine other aspects in which nuances of transnationalism can be observed. Chapter four provides a useful overview of the literature on mental health and sleep disorders in migrants and uses that material to make valid observations on how the research respondents refer to dreams. Chapter five sheds light on specific aspects of both individual and collective migrants’ transnationalism such as the transmission of the mother language to the second generation and the recreation of ethnically-defined spaces of socialisation in London.

To conclude, the book offers useful insight into how the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s affected the sense of belonging of migrants from the former Yugoslavia in Britain. It also has the merit of giving pride of place to the complexity of individual identities, challenging prefabricated labels imposed by institutional actors to classify migrants. This is timely and relevant given the current migration crisis. However, the book does have certain regrettable shortcomings. Methodologically, it does not explain whether and how interviews and surveys differ, nor what questions were asked and how they were analysed. Moreover, the fact that extracts from survey participants and interviews are not contextualised and that ethnic identity received so much of the author’s attention makes the illustrated nuances less powerful in challenging and problematising essentialist visions of transnational ties and diasporas.