Introduction

This chapter aims to explore the similarities between Albanian ‘street life’ (Jeta e Rrugës) with life on-road in the United Kingdom. The salience of this proposed comparison is that the young people who took part in the research in Albania discussed being literally ‘on the roads’ as they experience international migration in adolescence, much of which involved journeys on both sides of the law in the respective countries. In drawing the comparisons between the hustle of the international ‘street life’ experienced by Albanian young people and the life ‘on-road’, we propose that some live the translocal on-road hustle. This chapter draws on original research findings derived from life-story interviews based on music elicitation (Levell, 2021) in Albania. This research was conducted with translocal Albanian young men between 18 and 25 years old, who had been identified as previously involved with serious and organised crime by professional gatekeepers. Interviews took place in three Albanian prisons and with young men under community probation supervision in the local community in late 2021 and early 2022. Our analysis of the life stories told by research participants through music elicitation in their own words, however, suggest that the experiences and reactions of Albanian youth who participate ‘on-road’ differs from their UK counterparts only in terms of very specific, contextual factors. Relevant experiences were framed as being part of ‘street life’ (in Albanian, jeta e rrugës) which resonated with the way in which life ‘on-road’ was discussed by men in the UK in the author's previous research (Levell, 2022a).

The stories told by the research participants reveal criminalisation pathways which emerge as contextually, rather than culturally, specific. The most notable contextual difference between expressions of urban street life in Albania and the UK on-road experience discovered, was the translocality of life on-road for many of the young Albanians. Rather than their street hustling involving ‘county lines’, much discussed in the UK, participants remembered different forms of migration, some regular and others irregular (including internal, external and return migration), which for many defined their youth. These suggest a continuum of marginalisation experienced along internal and external migration flows.