university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

I have shown in my thesis how the delineation of the state border in 1913 has affected local
peoples’ lives only when borders were finally closed 32 years later. The period of
communism was important for the people of Dhërmi/Drimades. The power of the autarchic
leader and his state redirected all outside movements to movements within the country and
changed their tactics and dynamics. The villagers’ movements or lack of movements were no
longer based so much on economical relations, but more on enforced homogenization of
population and the spread of the idea of one nation and one nation-state. When 1990 brought a
reopening of the borders, movements and migrations reappeared again, especially over the
land border with Greece and across the sea border with Italy. Dynamics of migrations in this
area has changed too, with massive migrations leaving desolated villages behind them.
Transnationalism, globalisation and regionalism, promoted by the model of supra-states –
such as the European Union – are now inseparable from the understanding of the processes of
construction of space and place in Dhërmi/Drimades. Emigrants keep their ties with their
natal places and influence the construction of “whereness” of the village every time they
return to the village. This “whereness” is defined according to spatial hierarchy, which in the
present times gives priority to economical influences. The “Greekness” is in this view related
to modernity and “Albanianess” with modernisation (with yet absent modernity but with
discussions about the need to modernise) (cf. Green 2005: 230). As Kiqos’ example shows,
the configuration of power is changeable and contextually contingent.
It has already passed 123 years since Nietzsche (1884) wrote the famous statement that “God
is dead”. This was supposed to signify a break from traditional structures and laws to a
process of (be)coming. In this kind of flow of change power is no longer established
according to a principle of stable centres and peripheries, but changes according to the
principle of fractals. The main principle, which underlies the relations of power and
configurations of spatial hierarchy in today’s villages, towns, and cities across Albania,
Europe, and many other parts of the world, is probably the principle of economical well-being
and the capital that precedes the logic of the nation-states.
My thesis has attempted to show how the “where” and the “who” of Dhërmi/Drimades vary
according to the historically, politically and economically shaped context. The period of postcommunism
and its socio-economic changes with mass migrations have exerted a significant
influence on the reconstruction of people’s sense of “home”, their belonging, locality and
locatedness in relation to Dhërmi/Drimades. Individuals on the one hand manage and
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