Conflicting conviviality: Ethnic forms of resistance to border-making at the bottom of the US embassy of Skopje, Macedonia

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of ethnicity as resistance in Skopje, Macedonia. I interrogate the presence of the American embassy in Skopje as a physical manifestation of US hegemonic power in the Balkans. I show that the American embassy and the discourse that legitimize its existence constitute a form of border-making that fragments the built environment of the city. I then analyze how the US embassy's border-making discourses are reverberated in my interlocutors' words. The ethnic repertoire they resort to for describing the embassy both re-inscribe the US hegemonic power and yet displace it: I show how the process of border-making is appropriated, negotiated and resisted or displaced ..