Movements upon movements: Refugee and activist struggles to open the Balkan route to Europe

ABSTRACT

In 2015–2016, 1.2 million refugees sought safety in Europe via the Balkan Route. How, in an era of securitized borders, did this unprecedented movement of people from the global south reach the global north? Ethnographic research from two post-Yugoslav nodes along the Route—Preshevë, Serbia and Ljubljana, Slovenia—offers answers that diverge from state-centric accounts, revealing that the relationships between movements, in the sense of both migration and activism, were integral to the dynamics of the Route.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• migration
• postsocialism
• activism
• Slovenia
• Serbia
• Yugoslavia
• Europe

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Larisa Kurtović, Nelli Sargsyan, and David Henig for their tireless efforts on this special issue. We humbly acknowledge Marta Stojić Mitrović, whose contacts, expertise, and analysis were crucial to this project. Dušan Bjelić, Andrej Kurnik, Piro Rexhepi, and four anonymous reviewers offered insights that improved this article dramatically. Above all, we are indebted to our interlocutors along the Balkan Route.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The terms refugee and migrant, among others (e.g. asylum-seeker, irregular migrant, undocumented migrant, etc.), carry moral, legal, and political meanings and the choice of terminology has consequences for how people on the move are received, treated, and understood. To stay true to studying the route from below, we use terms most used by activists and travellers along the route: refugee or, in an effort to move beyond state-centric legal terminology, simply ‘people on the move.’ We use different terms only when directly quoting others.

2 We use Preshevë, the Albanian name of the town—rather than the Serbian Preševo—because we spoke primarily with Albanians and focus on Albanian initiatives in this majority Albanian municipality.

3 We refer here to the wars of Yugoslav succession, which were often called ‘Balkan’ in media representations that re-animated a dormant Balkanist discourse, rather than to the earlier Balkan Wars of 1912–1913.

4 See Kingsley’s The New Odyssey (2016) for an exemplary journalistic account of the ‘refugee crisis.’

5 See Tazzioli (2017) on migrant multiplicities and their policing and segmentation.

6 See Cabot (2014) for the social and institutional consequences of these rules in Greece.

7 For a time, the Route also travelled through Croatian territory to its border with Hungary until that too was fenced.

8 These hierarchical relationships with the EU range from Slovenia’s full membership in the EU and Eurozone, through Croatia’s acceptance with pending accession to the Schengen zone of borderless travel, and Serbia and Montenegro’s applicant status, with no accession on the horizon, to Kosovo and Macedonia which have yet to achieve even recognition of their statehood from all member-states of the EU. Bosnia has perhaps the most contradictory relationship to the EU. On the one hand, the ethnically divided state is an international protectorate over which the EU holds decisive power. On the other hand, its citizens are treated as ‘third country nationals’—as if they are from states with no relationship with the European Union—affording them no freedom to live and work within the EU itself.

9 For more on Serbian state practices of managing this unusual transit status, including its 72-hour permit, see Beznec, Speer, and Stojić Mitrović (2016).

10 All pseudonyms are introduced in quotation marks. Those who preferred we use their real names are introduced without quotation marks.

11 For more on Youth for Refugees as well as a more detailed account of the migrant crossings into Serbia, see Stojić Mitrović (2016, 200–211).

12 Kosovo with its Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia in 2008 but enjoys only partial international recognition.

13 While many Albanians in the Preshevë area were unable or unwilling to speak Serbian with us, not surprisingly given the long and repressive history of Serbian domination in Southern Serbia and neighbouring Kosovo, Altin spoke with us in both Serbian and English.

14 Rexhepi cites similar questions about hospitality among ethnic Albanians in Macedonia toward Kosovar Albanians in 1999 as compared to refugees in 2015 (2018, 14).

15 For more on this closure see Beznec, Speer, and Stojić Mitrović (2016,19–20) or for comprehensive coverage for the border struggles at the Idomeni/Gevgelija border crossing see Anastasiadou et al’s From Transit Hub to Dead End: A Chronicle of Idomeni, (2017).

16 In March-April 2016, Turkey reportedly killed five Syrians attempting to flee the war for Turkish territory, including a child. https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/05/10/turkey-border-guards-kill-and-injure-asylum-seekers

17 Others had made their way to Slovenia by a dozen other paths and methods and they embodied almost every possible migration status.

18 Aigul conceded that she made a ‘brutal’ argument for why refugees deserved the space more than the anarchist-led urban gardening collective. This initial conflict over space played a part in subsequent conflicts that eventually saw Second Home evicted by other Rog activists in the spring of 2018. Clearly relations between refugees and activists cannot be romanticized and often also involve conflicts, just as there are conflicts within refugee and activist communities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1719421 and Colby College.