Dimitris Dalakoglou

• PhD
• Chair at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokastër with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The phys...

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants' house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequentl...

This introduction provides an initial approach to the conceptual framework of infrastructural harm. It draws upon existing scholarship to discuss infrastructures as relational arrangements co-formative of harm. By approaching infrastructures as sites of ongoing socio-political and environmental antagonism, we pay attention to the ways in which infr...

This paper investigates the entanglements of waste infrastructures and harm in the wider Athens region. It focuses on Fyli landfill, which is currently the only formal waste management facility to serve the entire region. Associated with pollution, privatization, and allegations of corruption, the landfill has been formative of differential modes o...

The author remembers the figure of David Graeber recalling his anthropological career and his political commitment. He also tells of his friendship with Graeber, sketching a vivid portrait of his personality.

The concept of crisis has frequently been used to characterize seismic historical events of the 21st century, and many scholars have interpreted it according to Agamben’s elaboration of the state of exception. Following this paradigm, the crisis period in Greece is often perceived as a violent rupture from the previous state of relative stability t...

This article explores the genealogy of the relationship between the discourses promoted in the heavy metal music press and neo-Nazi publications in Greece since the 1980s. It aims to show that the proliferation of neo-Nazi ideologies and practices in Greece after 2008 was not simply a result of the ‐ on-going ‐ financial crisis; rather, its seeds h...

The last decade infrastructure systems have been under strain around the globe. The 2008 financial crisis, the so-called fourth industrial revolution, ongoing urbanisation and climate change have contributed to the emergence of an infrastructural crisis that has been labelled as infrastructural gap. During this period, infrastructure systems have i...

Wasting the West is an infra-demos short documentary focusing on the Fyli landfill. It describes how the governance of waste in the Attica region goes hand in hand with environmental degradation, corporate power and socio-spatial marginalization. Infra-demos is an anthropological project based at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam that studies the inter...

The Crisis behind the Eurocrisis - edited by Eva Nanopoulos August 2019

Η περιοχή της Ηπείρου έχει έρθει στο προσκήνιο της επικαιρότητας τόσο στην Ελλάδα όσο και πανευρωπαϊκά τον τελευταίο καιρό λόγω της έναρξης ερευνών για υδρογονάνθρακες στο πλαίσιο συμβάσεων έρευνας και εξόρυξης που υπέγραψε το ελληνικό δημόσιο με ιδιωτικές εταιρείες εξόρυξης υδρογονανθράκων. Μεγάλο μέρος των κατοίκων διαμαρτύρεται και δραστηριοποιε...

This entry aims to briefly review the position of roads and their ethnographic study within the history of sociocultural anthropology since the emergence of the discipline. It reveals the paradoxical relationship that anthropology had with roads for most of its history and it touches upon the turn toward roads and more generally the study of infras...

The Road Dimitris Dalakoglou talks to Debbie Humphry about his recent book The Road: An Ethnography of (im) mobility, Space, and Cross-border Infrastructures in the Balkans. Oxford University Press. Debbie: I wondered how this work related to the research you did in Greece for film Future Suspended that we discussed in a previous CITY interview? Di...

This chapter departs from the first highways built in Albania during WWI and passing through the Italian fascist’s regime’s road project of the 1930s, focuses on the socialist period. I propose a view of socialism from the aspect of infrastructure construction and usage and an understanding of notions of manual labour as a measure of creating socia...

This chapter locates the importance of the anthropology of road and infrastructures at this stage of European history in order to understand the phenomena that are ongoing in the region and the importance of studying roads but also postsocialist migration and flows in the case of Albanian-Greek borders.

This is the key ethnographic chapter of the book: According to local mythology, danger influxes via the road and wealth outflux. It is by no coincidence that all these oral discourses in Gjirokastër locate their action on this particular road section. In postsocialism the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër road section has become a material and physical continua...

This final chapter summarises the previous work suggesting some links between the mass contraction projects that took place in Europe after the end of Cold War and the border securitisation processes that the book described and how these are linked with contemporary phenomena.

This city which centralizes spatially inland mobility infrastructure it also centralizes spatial mobility socially as almost one third of its pre-1990 population lives in Greece. So unsurprisingly in the city and on the road one hears many narrations which locate their action is the 29km cross-border highway. Some of these stories are well known to...

The urban topography of Gjirokastër city, where part of the current ethnography was based, is under a continuous process of change during the last two decades. The city has in fact been relocated around the traffic infrastructure, centralising the road which leads to the Albanian-Greek border since the borders opened, in 1990. This appears to be a...

This is a discussion of the relationships between roads and their links to notions of culture and material culture in anthropology and other social sciences today. Theoretically, departing from Boas’ spatially fixed cultural areas and reaching Auge’s ‘non-places’; passing through Lefebvre’s, Situationists’ and Virilio’s critiques of motorways to Ba...

The flows of remittances and artefacts are centred upon the material entity of the house. New or totally refurbished houses in Albania emerge as the major materialisation of migratory remittances in the country of origin. The Albanian houses under research are perpetually undergoing construction, while their building materials are brought gradually...

An infrastructural gap (IG) emerged after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 and it refers to the difficulty of the state and the private sector in sustaining the level of infrastructural networks in the Western world. Yet, infrastructures comprise the realm where the state or the market materialize a great proportion of the social contract. Citize...

This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albanian-Greek cross-border highway. It is not merely an ethnography on the road but an anthropology of the road. Complex sociopolitical phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, transnational kinship, social–class divisions, or post–cold war capitalism, political trans...

In a series of raids on July 27, the Greek police arrested and moved on dozens of migrants and refugees living in squats in the city of Thessaloniki. The clampdown on these squats, which were run by refugees, volunteers and anti-authoritarian groups, is an example of how refugees are being criminalised at the hands of the authorities across Europe.

Questo Forum raccoglie brevi interventi di antropologi che con ruoli diversi lavorano in differenti contesti universitari, allo scopo di riflettere su recenti esperienze di riforme neoliberiste del sistema pubblico dell'istruzione superiore. I contributi esplorano processi di neoliberalizzazione dell'università e cambiamenti istituzionali in corso...

As neoliberalism takes over academia, there is struggle going on. This is a struggle to keep the academic institutions as free as possible from “idiotic” (i.e. self-interested) forms of behaviour and especially from reproducing socially and politically such practices.

The situation in Idomeni has been tense over the last weeks as rumors about the current operation spread. Protests and clashes became a daily phenomenon as the Greek police’s approach to the camp altered from one of tolerance towards refugees and the politicised independent volunteers to aggression.These ‘uncertified’ volunteers, have been carrying...

Referenda can be sad affairs. This time last year, I was in Greece discussing with friends their referendum. It was a difficult visit with many painful conversations. Most were about what the EU meant, what might Grexit have meant, and the way material security was rapidly vanishing: having a decent salary, a job, money in the bank, valuables in ba...

The overarching question of this article is how can we develop a critical understanding of the social place of highways and automobility in the case of a non-capitalist European context such as socialist Albania? Socialism was a period of modernisation for Albania. Part of this modernisation project was the production of a modern built environment,...

The current text locates the anthropological study of roads within the wider context of studies on mobility and modernity. Besides introducing the articles of this special issue of Mobilities on roads and anthropology, this introduction also addresses some of the broader theoretical and epistemological implications of the anthropological perspectiv...

The Post-Cold War period has brought forth new conditions for the dominant European spatialities. First, that period signified a new condition for real estate and land ownership, second a radical transformation and increase of the built environment and third the securitization of a privileged European territory. As the European economy slows and th...

Hardly any of the millions of euros given by UNHRC and EU for the refugees is visible on the island of Lesvos. At the arrival points, for example, until two months ago there were two camps operating. The first by a grassroots anarchist organization called ‘Platanos’ and the other by a small Swedish NGO-in-the-making called ´Lighthouse’. These group...

The cross-pollination made possible by bringing critical studies of mobility from different disciplines into conversation with one another is a goal of T2M and Mobility in History generally, and this special section on roadways in history and anthropology specifically. Anthropologists and historians of mobility, roads, and automobility have a great...

The European Union, one of the strongest economies in the world and home to some of the most advanced state apparatuses in human history, is preparing to shut down its borders, one after the other, because it can’t cope with the number of refugees arriving from war in the Middle East. These same institutions were of course able to find the resource...

Roads and the powerful sense of mobility that they promise carry us back and forth between the sweeping narratives of globalisation, and the specific, tangible materialities of particular times and places. Indeed, despite the fact that roads might, by comparison with the sparkling agility of virtual technologies, appear to be grounded in twentieth...

The paper discusses infrastructural flows enacted/activated in the context of the crisis in Athens, focusing on waste flows and treatment. The argument is that disorder and deregulation, which are reflected in the disruption of patterns and flows, are endemic characteristics of the neo-liberal governance, but also of the wider infrastructural exist...

This film is part of the research project crisis-scape.net The neo-?azi party Golden Dawn has been active in Greece since the mid-1980s. Through the years, GD has attacked migrants, antifascists and homosexuals, often with the tolerance or even the collaboration of parts of the Greek police force. In recent years, the party saw a largely unexplaine...

The so-called Greek crisis implies a rapid transition towards a regime of extreme neoliberalism, but it also implies the rise of the extreme Right. This article examines briefly the rise of Greek neo-Nazism and a genealogy of its violence. It emphasizes the links between formal and informal violent state apparatuses, focusing on the paradigmatic tu...

Since autumn 2010, the United Kingdom has witnessed various apparently disparate protests and movements against austerity. These include: a students’ movement, UK Uncut, a series of public-sector worker demonstrations and strikes, Occupy, and–arguably, for many commentators have insisted they were apolitical–four days of rioting across English citi...

The current text locates the anthropological study of roads within the wider context of studies on mobility and modernity. Besides introducing the articles of this special issue of Mobilities on roads and anthropology, this introduction also addresses some of the broader theoretical and epistemological implications of the anthropological perspectiv...

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and th...

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The late 1990s and early 2000s was the era of so-called "Strong Greece," or as another governmental slogan put it, the period of "Modernization." Under this banner, a project of neoliberal urban re-development prevailed for a decade or so. This was a period of economic growth powered by the emerging European Monetary Union and the linked neoliberal...