Workshop: Uneven Temporalities in Kosovo and Beyond: Waiting, Moving, and Future-Making at Europe’s Semi-Periphery

June 10-11, 2026
HG 104

The uncertainties of our time are manifold: wars and geopolitical shifts disrupt existing orders; digital transformation and artificial intelligence reshape labour markets and knowledge regimes; changing border and migration regimes create unequal mobilities and decide who is left to die; the ageing of European societies and the shrinking of welfare regimes pose insecurities to our livelihoods; and environmental crises threaten the present and future of our planet. These dynamics not only transform political and economic structures but also profoundly impact on temporal regimes – meaning the way time is perceived and measured. After the age of modernity based on the imagination of progress and a better future, the future now is often seen as scary, and possibly even as a movement backwards. The rapid transformations and uncertainties impact on how people relate to the past, experience the present, and imagine possible future. Based on their individual positions in relation to certain societal contexts, people may experience their own life as moving forward, standing still, or even breaking apart. This workshop takes temporality at the center of analysis and asks how uneven temporal regimes shape political imaginaries, institutional arrangements, and everyday life trajectories in Kosovo and beyond. This is especially relevant in contexts where political, institutional, or historical contingencies produce prolonged waiting, suspension, stuckedness, uncertainty, and delayed or conditional access to futures as socially and politically recognisable horizons of possibility.

Looking at Kosovo as central empirical focus - and more generally the region of South-Eastern Europe - enables us to make these uneven and often externally structured temporal regimes become particularly visible, as that region has been often perceived as a semi-periphery of Europe, as a region which is "lagging behind” or “catching up”. Processes such as the slow progress in EU accession, the enduring post-war image of countries such as Kosovo or Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which the violent past still dominates the present, the EU migration governance according to which the young and able bodied strata of the population of the countries of South-Eastern Europe often leave to the EU, while these countries become at the same time transit and immigration countries, the ageing of these societies which is not only based on shrinking fertility rates but also fostered by outmigration, and environmental transformation. On the other hand, Kosovo is increasingly branded like a place with a young, dynamic and mobile population, a place in becoming, with a bright future. These often juxtaposed dynamics are based on distinct temporal imaginaries and narratives, as well as political-institutional temporal regimes such as time frames offered by administrations and policy institutions, including border regimes. Individuals, families, and communities navigate these temporalities and live them, e.g. through experiences of acceleration and delay or stagnation, movement and waiting, progress and future-making or lingering in the past.

We invite contributions that are empirically grounded and theoretically reflective and explicitly engage with temporality as an analytical lens, examining how relations between past, present, and future are imagined, negotiated, and contested. We are particularly interested in contributions that analyse the entanglement of (1) temporal imaginaries and narratives, (2) political-institutional temporal regimes, (3) lived and embodied temporal experiences, and 4) those that link temporal imaginaries and narratives, and/or macro-level temporal regimes with everyday life trajectories. Contributions may explore these dynamics across different empirical fields, including but not limited to Kosovo or the Western Balkans, focussing on the geopolitical positioning within an increasingly multipolar world; migration processes in countries that are simultaneously sites of emigration, transit, and immigration; coming to terms with violent pasts in post-war societies; environmental sustainability; responsibility towards elderly and future generations; and individual future-making in relation to family trajectories, generational relations, and working lives which shape both collective transformations and individual life paths.

Bei Interesse an der Teilmahme bitte wenden Sie an leutloff@europa-uni.de .