How can we think the interrelation of labor, migration, and authoritarianism in contemporary Europe in times of both increasing (post-pandemic) labor shortages and anti-migrant sentiments (fueled, primarily, by right-wing, populist political forces)? By working with two fragments from my on-going “patchwork” ethnography of the conjuncture of radically changing labor migration patterns and the anti-authoritarian struggle in Serbia, I want to extend the analytical lens of racial capitalism. I am especially interested in how a society in the grips of the authoritarian-populist regime of Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party/SNS, and marked by societal violence and ruination, as well as strong nationalist-racist^[1] and homophobic trends can (still) appear as a locus of “good” life and labor.

In July 2023 I was tracing gendered labor migration trajectories of a new cohort of Belgrade bus drivers. This group of men from Sri Lanka is one of several populations from the Global South which came to the Serbian capital and—together with the much larger-scale immigration from Russia—embodies Serbia’s ongoing transformation from an emigration to, one could say, an “also-immigration” society. I soon stumble upon a recent article on a conservative Serbian diaspora portal (interestingly, it cites an urban opposition activist’s X post) about “Belgrade’s new hero.” S, a middle-aged man from Colombo, is one of the first drivers from Sri Lanka a local bus company has employed with the assistance of a labor recruitment agency in Serbia and another one in Sri Lanka (despite initial opposition by the local workers’ unions). As I learn in an interview with Jovan, one of the company’s managers in charge of recruitment of workers from Sri Lanka, professional drivers in Serbia prefer to go abroad for higher salaries (a trend magnified by post-pandemic labor shortages in Western Europe). Such developments are not limited to Serbia or the public transport sector: the arrival of worker populations from the Global Souths and Easts across different labor sectors (construction, transport, care, services/tourism, IT, etc.) is a new trend across the Western Balkans and beyond (for example, Hungary and Bulgaria).

Like most of the other drivers from Sri Lanka working in Belgrade, S has worked as a driver in the Gulf and, after this experience, finds life in Belgrade very pleasant and the traffic easy to navigate. The drivers have two-year working permits, which some of them hope to extend, to potentially be joined by their families. S's salary, even though lower than those at the state public transport company, is the best basis he has ever had to provide for his family. Even though Jovan mentions the racist incidents some drivers have experienced (something the company directly addresses in job training), he downplays this salary-related manifestation of racial capitalism by comparing the drivers’ experiences in the Gulf states to their accounts of life and work in Serbia: “After their experiences elsewhere, Belgrade seems like a spa resort.”

After spontaneously cleaning his bus during a break, S was widely reported on social media as having performed an almost “heroic” act of care, and the company was inundated by journalists wanting to interview him. Jovan also remembers how they were overwhelmed with calls and emails from enthusiastic citizens urging them to no longer employ the “rude” local drivers—whom they perceived as driving carelessly and being unwilling to wait for people trying to catch the bus—but instead to hire drivers from Sri Lanka, who actually “care” for the passengers. As scholarship on care shows, the differential inclusion and exploitation of migrants caring for “foreign” places and people is a crucial element of the global unequal division of labor in the crisis of care. However, this fragment can also be read in terms of the interrelation of care and migration in a postsocialist-authoritarian context of ruination and neglect of both infrastructure—formerly the “common good”—and everyday relations in public space and society at large. Here the act of “cleaning” does not represent the quintessential image of devalued racialized labor. Rather, the new work migrants are (also) perceived as social agents who see the value of things and relations that are neglected, ruined and up for grabs by a predatory political-economic regime.

The regime is at the core of the second research fragment, related to the on-going student-led, anti-authoritarian, and anti-corruption protests in Serbia, which are mobilizing large parts of society across age, religion, political ideology,^[2] and urban/rural divides, etc. The protests were sparked by the tragic collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed sixteen people. In response, the protests are tirelessly commemorating the victims (16 minutes of silence) and invoking (state) institutions to (finally) start doing their work (for example, combating corruption and establishing conditions for fair elections). Interestingly, right before the first large-scale protest gathering at Belgrade’s Slavija Square on December 22, 2024, the regime’s “over-night policy” addressed the decaying and mismanaged urban mobility infrastructure: Belgrade’s mayor (an SNS politician) announced free public transport from 2025 and the swift replacement of all buses with new ones. However, this attempt to appease protesting citizens did not work.

“It’s fascinating what people can do here. This would never be possible in Moscow. In Russia on the one hand there is politics, and on the other there’s life,” says Pavel, an IT-worker from Moscow who came to Belgrade soon after the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Despite his fascination—but in line with how he learned to live under authoritarianism in Putin-Russia—Pavel does not join the protests. However, he (and many of his fellow-citizens migrating to Belgrade) sees the protests as part of why Belgrade (and Serbia) is a better and safer place worthy of longer-term settlement and even naturalization, as a place where people care for and are (still) able to fight for their society instead of leaving for good.

It is precisely non-migration that figures as an important element of the protesting students’ invocations of the state as represented in the (now well-known) protest motto: “Either we change the state, or we change the state.” In terms of the ability, rather than necessity, to migrate and labor “elsewhere” (ultimately becoming the “aunt from America” as voiced on one protest banner) non-migration appears as a societal value and even as a form of activism. Staying and laboring “at home” becomes part of the anti-authoritarian struggle to reclaim one’s society and as such unsettles the balkanizing commonsense image—in politics and scholarship—of (young) people from southeastern Europe as exploitable cheap labor and migrants “per-default.”

What do these fieldwork fragments from Serbia point at? Apart from exemplifying new (post-pandemic) patterns of (work) migration in Europe that are calling for ethnographic attention, they show how zooming in on European regions “balkanized” as merely non-inhabitable transit zones to “actual” Europe can complexify our understanding of the shifting imaginaries of Europe from a migratory perspective—also as “deserving” of (migrant) labor and as spaces “worth inhabiting” in the first place. In terms of the epistemological concern of “locating” labor and workers, the fragments suggest that a combined-comparative perspective on very different (prospective) worker populations deepens and diversifies our understanding of labor (migration). Especially when thinking about labor (migration) and authoritarianism, it is important to explore the ambiguous valuation of (non-)migration amidst the shortage of both local labor and societal hope. Apart from the well-studied (political) role of diasporas in sustaining or contesting authoritarian regimes, both non-migration and the arrival of work migrant populations with diverse experiences of authoritarianism are important elements in the picture. Turning to this series’ guiding question (“Where have all the workers gone?”), a critical post-Yugoslav perspective on understanding authoritarianism in Europe can prompt us to also ask, “Where do they (still) want to stay, under which conditions, and with which societal effects?”

Notes

[1] Primarily Anti-Muslim, Anti-Roma, and Anti-Albanian racism.

[2] As critical commentators, such as the feminist human rights activist Aida Ćorović, point out, the last large-scale protest, on June 28, 2025, however, showed the problematic trend of increasing nationalist and clero-fascist voices within the student-led protests.