Friday, June 27, 2025

Bridges and borders as sites of resistance: The case of Mitrovica

By Neve Clements

In 

In Mitrovica, Kosovo, the Ibar River bridge does not merely connect the north and south, it embodies the weight of history, tension and unhealed wounds. Guarded and watched, it is seen less as a passage and more as a boundary. When we spoke with Community Building Mitrovica, the spokesperson Milica stated, “The bridge is seen as a place of division rather than connection… Everything depends on the space on the bridge where they stand.” These words expose how even within a shared structure, people remain locked in an either/or ideology: always standing on one side or the other.

While listening to Milica, I was struck by how a single structure could hold so much pain and political weight. I felt a kind of heaviness just imagining the bridge, a place where movement is watched, where crossing is a declaration. It made me reflect on how borders like this one don’t just divide land, they shape identity, language and belonging. I kept thinking about a book I recently read by Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa reminds us that such borders are not only geopolitical but psychic and linguistic. “A border is a dividing line,” she writes, “a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” (Anzaldúa, 1987). The Mitrovica bridge, in its silence and tension, becomes this undetermined place. A space of fear, but also of radical potential. 

Anzaldúa speaks of borderlands as spaces where resistance is born through hybridity, ambiguity and identity. She writes, “I am my language… Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (Anzaldúa, 1987). She gestures toward the everyday resistances that take place in Mitrovica: speaking one’s native tongue across the divide, reclaiming space through art, storytelling and simply remaining. While resistance is not always loud, it can be the quiet insistence on presence in a place designed to separate. 

The bridge, then, is more than infrastructure, it is a metaphorical site of struggle, possibility, and reimagination. As Anzaldúa says, “it is in the margins that I grow strong.” (Anzaldúa, 1987). In standing on the bridge, anywhere on it, there is the potential to challenge the narrative of division. By refusing to be confined to one side, communities in Mitrovica embody the borderland consciousness: resisting not by retreating from difference, but by learning to live within it.






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