Young people with posters declaring, ‘I want to stay in Bulgaria’. Young people who complain that state policies force them to leave the county and threaten to emigrate as part of their protest tactics. This is one of the persistent tropes that Bulgarian civil society has been producing over the last two decades: that the flight of young, educated people from Bulgaria serves as an indicator for the failure of state policies. Brain-drain, a common theme for states outside the list of the ‘developed Western countries’, is omnipresent in public space, reappearing in the statements of politicians, sta ..