‘I’d Never Thought I Would Live in the Czech Republic’: Geopolitical Imaginaries of an Unlikely Destination Among Sub-Saharan African Immigrants

In this article, we examine how sub-Saharan African migrants navigate geopolitical imaginaries when making sense of migration to Czechia as an unlikely destination. We employ theories of everyday geopolitics to unpack how migrants from the Global South actively produce European geopolitical space. Drawing on 16 semi-structured and go-along interviews conducted in Brno, we show that immigrants’ pre-migratory imaginaries position Czechia as a vague and marginal European space shaped by Cold War legacies associating Eastern Europe with poverty and underdevelopment. These imaginaries are renegotiated through lived experience as immigrants reinterpret Czechia as a viable place of settlement. Through repertoires of comparison with more established destinations, Czechia’s liminal status as neither a part of the East nor the West is reframed ambivalently, as both a constraint, linked to the country’s perceived limits of ethnoracial and linguistic openness, and an advantage, grounded in safety, peacefulness, and opportunity. By foregrounding immigrants’ meaning-making practices, the article demonstrates how immigrants from the Global South actively participate in re-making European geopolitics through their meaning-making practices, engaging in the reproduction and contestation of geopolitical hierarchies from below.