Migration and Flight as a Research Field within Globalization StudiesM igration and flight movements constitute a relatively new field of research in social and cultural anthropology, which has developed within studies on globalization. Our current world is characterized by transnational interconnections rather than homogeneous, clearly bounded and locally defined research spaces, making more complex research questions and methodologies relevant for social and cultural anthropology. Ethnologists investigate modes of dealing with the new and the different, questions of incorporation of unfamiliar things and ideas, as well as with the issue of cultural interpretation and reinterpretation (Hauser-Schäublin and Braukäm-per, 2002: 10-11).Research on modes of dealing with cultural and ethnic diversity in times of increasing globalization lies within the present focus of social and cultural anthropology. Anthropological approaches in migration and globalization studies offer ways to capture effects of migration and flight movements. The research process must address juxtapositions of changing social, territorial and cultural forms of the reproduction of group identities. When groups migrate, they recompose in new settings, they reconstruct their histories and their ethnic concepts. In this way, the 'ethnic' in the group context is endowed with a non-localized, harder to define quality, which ethnographic praxis needs to tune into. The landscapes of

In this special section we rethink the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalization from an existential perspective. We suggest that this theoretical avenue is particularly well suited to move beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixating movement and stasis into two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to productively work with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them “stuck” in continuous loops of “motion”. By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualize both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.

This special issue investigates contemporary transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. We put forward the concept of localized Islam as an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith. By adopting an agent-based approach that is sensitive to relevant actors’ choices and the contexts where they operate, we explore how various groups negotiate and ultimately localize the grand Islamic tradition, depending on where they are situated along the hierarchy of power. Specifically, we outline three sets of actors and narratives related to revival of Islamic faith: (1) political elites, mainstream intellectuals, and religious hierarchies often unite in safeguarding a nation-centric understanding of religion, (2) foreign networks and missionaries make use of open channels of communication to propagate their specific interpretations and agendas, and (3) lay believers tend to choose among different offers and rally around the living dimension of religious practice. Contributions in this issue bring ample evidence of multiple actors’ strategies, related perspectives, and contingent choices of being a Muslim. Case studies include political debates on mosque construction in Athens; political narratives that underpin the construction of the museum of the father of Ataturk in Western Macedonia; politicians’ and imams’ competing interpretations of the Syrian war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania; the emergence of practice communities that perform Muslim identity in Bulgaria; the particular codes of sharia dating in post-war Sarajevo; and veneration of saints among Muslim Roma in different urban areas in the Balkans.

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