Care Extractivism Beyond Households: Migration and Care for Older People in the Post‐Yugoslav Semi‐Periphery

Majda Hrženjak
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Majda Hrženjak: Peace Institute, Slovenia

Social Inclusion, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: This article examines care‐labour mobility between Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) within the state‐organised system of residential care for older people, situating it on Europe’s semi‐periphery. Addressing gaps in European research, largely focused on private households and East–West intra‐EU mobility, it shifts attention to welfare states as employers embedded in asymmetric geopolitical relations. Drawing on interviews with migrant care workers and institutional actors in Slovenia and BiH, the analysis conceptualises this mobility through the lens of care extractivism, understood as the structured over‐extraction of labour, time, and skills through the interaction of migration regimes, labour market segmentation, and welfare arrangements. The article shows how the interplay between Slovenia’s care deficits and BiH’s position within postwar state formation and uneven European integration, both shaped by broader political and economic transformations over the past three decades, produces a relational field of labour mobility rooted in the shared post‐Yugoslav space. It identifies key mechanisms of extraction, including employer‐tied migration regimes, family‐based recruitment, dequalification and skill extraction, temporal over‐availability, and the externalisation of social reproduction onto migrant networks. The article contributes to existing scholarship by demonstrating how welfare states actively organise transnational care extraction and by advancing care extractivism as a conceptual framework for analysing hierarchical relations across multiple Europes.

Keywords: care extractivism; care for older people; residential care; Eastern Europe; Balkans; postwar context (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v14:y:2026:a:11975

DOI: 10.17645/si.11975

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