The Game: Ritualized Exhaustion and Subversion on the Western Balkan Route

ABSTRACT

The expression to go game is widely used among migrants transiting across the Western Balkan route to describe the attempt to cross a border irregularly. In the Bosnian canton of Una Sana, one of the crucial transit spaces across the route, migrants who go game are repeatedly and violently pushed back from the Croatian side of the border. They return to precarious managed facilities and makeshift camps, where they endure constant evictions, mistreatments, and neglect, while planning their next attempt to cross. This paper takes the vantage point of the game to propose a Bourdieusian reading of exhaustion and subversion on the route. It theorises the game as the sum of ritualised practices (habitus) through which migrants endure and subvert a politics of exhaustion diffusing across EUrope’s transit spaces; and situates it as a collective imperative exemplifying the generative and enduring force of autonomy of migration. Written almost a decade after the year of the so-called migration crisis that opened the political imaginary of the route, this article provides necessary reflections on how dynamics of exhaustion and subversion which developed within EUrope’s border regime sedimented into ritualised and relational practices complicating the already contested geographies of Europe’s transit spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Balkan route
• migration crisis
• autonomy of migration
• European border regime

Prologue: Hey Lady, Do You Want to Play a Game with Me?

The Temporary Reception Centre (TCR) of Borići appears at the upper edge of a dirt road that cuts across the green pines of the homonymous park, opposite a stadium called Pod Borićima. We are in Bihać, the capital of the Bosnian canton of Una Sana. The canton stretches across the north-western border between the EU and Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). Since 2018, it witnessed the increased transit of thousands of migrants traveling on the so-called Western Balkan route¹ (Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Bužinkić and Hameršak 2018; Hameršak et al. 2020). As migrants attempt to continue their journeys across the mountains that divide the canton from Croatia, their trekking is often brutally interrupted by the illegal captures of the Croatian border police, who systematically deport their captives back to the Bosnian side (Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Pushback Collective 2020). The building hosting Borići TCR used to be a student house. In the 1990s, the edifice was left abandoned and unfinished. Since 2018, it is managed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to host those who are temporarily stuck in this transit space.

On the left side of the stadium, a few meters from the main road, there is a playground where, in March 2019, during one of my fieldtrips to the canton, I encountered Manoush,² an Iranian woman of 24 years old, who was temporarily living in the TCR with her son and husband. Manoush was sitting on a bench and watching her seven-year-old son Kaveh running in-between the slide and the swings of the playground. Together with her family, she had been trying to cross the border with Croatia four times from Bihać and seven times from the close town of Velika Kladuša. Their journey had started five years before our encounter, when Kaveh was two years old. While Manoush was telling me how they have been repeatedly captured, robbed, and pushed back by border police in Turkey, in Greece, in Serbia and in Croatia, we were interrupted by Kaveh, who came close to us and tried to get our attention. He addressed me:

Hey lady, do you want to play a game with me?

I accepted the offer and asked him which game he wanted to play:

This is the game we play in the border: I teach you the rules. You are the Croatian police, and you want to catch me and send me back to Bosnia. I am a refugee and want to be free and go to Europe. If you catch me, you win. If I fall into the jungle, you win. If I reach Europe (he points to the EU flag standing next to the gate at the end of the dirt road that leads to Borići camp) I win the game.

We started playing and he was very fast. While he ran, he screamed: you don't catch me police! Croatian police big problem! Free refugees! Like many children, Kaveh was creating a playful interaction inspired by a situation of everyday life. This interaction was replicated within a field of action determined by precise objects: Europe, represented by the EU flag, was where the game was won. The jungle was the field in which the game was played. In my role as a Croatian police officer, I represented the obstacle. In this ludic interaction, Kaveh was not simply playing a game with me. He was playing the game.

The expression to go game echoes across (and beyond) the so-called Western Balkan route. Migrants refer to the game as an attempt to informally cross a national border. In its simpler meaning, the game is precisely the one we reproduced with Kaveh: it is played against the police, and against the natural obstacles one can find on the way (rivers, rocks, mountains, rain, snow). The game is played in Turkey, Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia, BiH, Croatia, Italy, Austria, Germany, and France, and across the channel toward the UK. During the game, migrants are stopped, captured, beaten, detained, robbed, and tortured (Minca and Collins 2021; Pushback Collective 2020). After every capture, migrants are deported to the opposite side of the border they attempted to cross, and forced to walk back and find shelter, either in a managed facility or in a makeshift camp, until they are ready to go game again. The game is often repetitive. Few can cross on the first attempt. Many migrants remain stuck in transit spaces for an unpredictable time. While waiting to cross again, they are constantly moved across precarious reception facilities, removed from makeshift camps, isolated from local inhabitants, and often abused by local police and security guards (Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Hameršak et al. 2020; Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019).

For years, these practices have taken place in continuity with border police deportations; diffusing and ritualizing what De Vries and Guild (2019) describe as a politics of exhaustion on Europe's migratory routes and transit spaces. With this expression, the two scholars refer to the “felt effects of the stretching over time of a combination of fractured mobility, daily violence and fundamental uncertainty” (De Vries and Guild 2019, 2057) resulting from EUrope's attempt to keep migrants at its eastern and southern borders.³ Day after day, week after week, month after month, migrants who play the game endure this politics of exhaustion, while attempting to escape and subvert the practices of deportation, isolation and organized neglect through which such politics operates.

Bringing attention to how these practices are simultaneously exercised and subverted in the Una Sana canton, the paper wishes to contribute to a body of recent yet substantial scholarship focused on migrants’ autonomy, assemblages and struggles across the so-called Western Balkan route (Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Beznec and Kurnik 2020; Jordan and Moser 2020; Kurnik and Razsa 2020; Minca and Collins 2021; Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019; Hameršak et al. 2020; Rexhepi 2018, 2022; De Vries and Guild 2019). Building on conversations with migrants encountered in the canton, it takes the vantage point of the game to situate experiences of subversion and exhaustion through which migrants endure prolonged and undesired transits and (im)mobilities.

The central scope of this paper is to shed light on how such experiences become ritualized. In turn, the paper exposes the no-longer exceptional nature of violent, illegal, and dehumanizing measures of border management; and of strategies that migrants develop to endure and subvert them, suggesting new grammars to complicate agencies and struggles transforming the informal geography of the route.

I expand on Claudio Minca and Jessica Collins's recent theorization of the game, as a “gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities” (2021, 2) to unravel the game's ambivalence as a product of and a response to EUrope's politics of exhaustion. Reading the route as a relational field of contestation, I mobilize Pierre Bourdieu's (1998a) articulation of Field Theory to theorize a set of ritualized, repetitive, and relational practices (habitus) embodied within the politics of exhaustion and the game played against and within it; their respective objectives to sustain and push against the unquestioned belief (doxa) of a migration crisis at EUrope's borders; and the sense of collective struggle that turns the game into an imperative (feel for the game).

Finding vernacular synergies between the complex and liminal spatialities of Europe’s transit spaces and Bourdieu’s Field Theory, I contend that a Bourdieusian perspective allows us to bring attention to overlooked relational and ritualized dynamics shaping migrants’ struggles agencies and (im)mobilities, unveiling the game ambivalent articulation of the tension between exhaustion and subversion that characterize the informal geography of the route.

The paper is organized into five sections. In the first section, I situate my work within the premises of the Autonomy of Migration scholarly agenda and enter into dialogue with recent debates exploring migrants’ agencies and resistances across transit spaces in the so-called Western Balkan route. In the second one, I provide a Bourdieusian reading of the route, engaging with the analytical tools of doxa, habitus and feel for the game developed within Field Theory. I successively mobilize these tools to explore the transit space that emerged in the Una Sana canton. First, I explore habitus that develops as part of the politics of exhaustion, with particular attention to ritualized practices of pushbacks and to the temporary reception/detention system that is established in the canton. Successively, I turn to habitus which develops as part of the game. There, I engage with ritualized practices of escape, sheltering and strategising through which migrants endure and respond to the politics of exhaustion in which they are caught. In the last section, I bring Bourdieu's concept of feel for the game in connection with migrants’ articulation of the game as an imperative: a do-or-die situation. I contend that such imperative can be read in continuity with the historical precedent of the 2015 long summer of migration (Kasparek and Speer 2015) and contextualize it as a resilient and subversive motion against the doxa of a migration crisis at EUrope's borders.

Autonomy, Mobilities and Games on the So-called Western Balkan Route

In the last three decades, debates and contributions exploring the complex agencies, spatialities and subjectivities produced across (and beyond) contemporary migratory routes have multiplied exponentially (Moulier-Boutang 1998; Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2015b; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015a; Cremonesi et al. 2016; De Genova 2017; Hess 2017; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Metcalfe 2022; Scheel 2013a, 2013b, 2019; Scheel et al. 2016; Scheel and Tazzioli 2022; Tazzioli 2020, 2015). Predominantly informed by a critique of methodological nationalism (Anderson 2019; Scheel et al. 2016; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003), the perspective of AoM developed within these debates as an interdisciplinary scholarly agenda bringing attention to migrants’ political subjectivity and their resistance to border regimes (De Genova 2017, 14).

Rooted in the premise that “there is an autonomy of emigration, which is averse to the politics of states” (Moulier-Boutang 1998, 38), AoM proposes an analytical motion from “the apparatuses of control” enacted through borders, “to the multiple and diverse ways in which migration responds to, operates independently from and in turns shapes those apparatuses and their corresponding institutions and practices” (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2015b, 895). Through nuanced and political understandings of contemporary mobilities and border regimes, AoM scholars understand migration as a constitutive force of social change and explore spatial and relational categories through which border regimes are constituted, challenged, and governed (New Keywords Collective 2016; Tazzioli 2020). Far from proposing a mere romanticization of migrants’ self-determination through mobility (Metcalfe 2022, 52), AoM is based on a “relational understanding of autonomy” that acknowledges migrants practices of appropriation, the irreducible ambivalence of these practices and (…) the embodied encounter with actors, means and methods of mobility control (Scheel 2019, 8).

The language of autonomy, agency and relationality developed within AoM strongly influenced an empirically rich, and critically oriented scholarship investigating border struggles and mobilities in the specific context of the so-called Western Balkan route. Scholars within these debates have pointed out to the tension between formal and informal geographies across the route (Abikova and Piotrowicz 2021; Bužinkić and Hameršak 2018; Jordan and Minca 2022; Jordan and Moser 2020; Minca 2015; Minca, Šantić, and Umek 2019); to the connection between local and mobile agencies across transit spaces (Beznec and Kurnik 2020; El-Shaarawi and Razsa 2019; Kurnik and Razsa 2020; Hromadžić 2020; Rexhepi 2018, 2022); and the complex positioning of the Balkans as gatekeepers of EUropean borders integration (Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Bello 2020; Cocco 2017; Collantes-Celador and Juncos 2012; Kogovšek 2016; Hameršak et al. 2020; Hess and Kasparek 2017; Hills 2004; Majstorović and Vučkovac 2016; Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019).

Complicating debates on social, political, and spatial dynamics emerging across the route, these contributions raise crucial questions on how migratory escape paths across the Balkans “are not enacted in empty spaces” (Kurnik and Razsa 2020) and produced autonomous and mobile geographies through interactions with different actors, institutions, and practices (Squire 2010; Tazzioli 2015; 2020). Extending on AoM, scholars in these debates opened up space to reflect on both the epistemic and the material potential of migrant transits across Western Balkan states, connecting mobile and local resistances as the co-articulation of mobility struggles and local anti-nationalist struggles, in ex-Yugoslavia (Beznec and Kurnik 2020; Gržinić, Kancler, and Rexhepi 2020; Kurnik and Razsa 2020; Rexhepi 2018, 2022).

While bringing attention to the overall political and relational potential of migrant agencies across the so-called Western Balkan route, a majority of contributions within these debates have given relatively marginal attention to the game, which is often described as a simple vernacular expression through which migrants denote the repeated act of crossing a border (Ahmetašević et al. 2020). Notably, an exception to descriptive characterizations of the game is offered in a recent paper published by Claudio Minca and Jessica Collins, entitled “The Game or the Making of Migration along the Balkan route” (2021). The paper offers perhaps one of the richest articulations of the concept,⁴ tackling both its empirical and theoretical validity. Minca and Collins describe the game as “a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a way of engaging with the impossibility of legally travelling to their desired destination” (2021, 2). Interpreting the game through the theoretical approach offered in Martina Tazzioli's “The Making of Migration” (2020), Minca and Collins highlight the ambivalent nature of the game, which they qualify as “both the result of specific strategies of forced mobility by the authorities and as a powerful manifestation of the conditions and the fields of possibilities for thousands of refugees along the Balkan route” (Minca and Collins 2021, 2).

Their paper analytically engages with the game, unveiling its ambivalent articulation as something that on the one hand keeps “troubling configuration of EU border politics” and on the other, keeps revealing how migrants “create interstices, invisible networks and holes in the walls that allow them to challenge” such politics (Minca and Collins 2021, 2). Bringing attention to the ambivalent and complex nature of the game as “the result of the combination of broader politics of migrant dispersal (…) and of the resilience and determination of the refugees themselves” (Minca and Collins 2021, 9), the two scholars theorize the game as “a gray spatiality resulting from the interplay between the intended and the unintended consequences of migration policies but also from the tactical responses of refugees and those who help them” (Minca and Collins 2021, 2).

Minca and Collins open-up a long-needed debate into the production of a politics of exhaustion across the route, urging to zoom in on practices through which such politics is simultaneously delivered and subverted and how such practices shape the route into a specific field of contestation. This paper considers such questions and address them providing a Bourdieusian reading of exhaustion and subversion across the route.

Remaining aware of substantial scholarly debates on migrant struggles and resistances across the so-called Western Balkan route, I situate my analysis of the game and of the politics of exhaustion within which the game emerges through theoretical engagement with Pierre Bourideu's Field Theory. I engage with Bourdieusian concepts of field, habitus, doxa and feel for the game as useful analytical instruments to interpret and theorize ritualized and relational practices that delivers a politics of exhaustion in the Una Sana canton, and the game that is played within and against it.

Habitus, Doxa and Feel for the Game

Bourdieu's Field Theory postulates a relational understanding of society and has gained attention across and beyond sociological research for its provision of analytical tools to unpack how these relations work in practice (see among others: Ancelovici 2021; Bathmaker 2015; Bourke et al. 2009; Lizardo 2004; McCormick 2006; Robbins 2019; Vakalopoulos 2022; Wacquant 2016; Wimalasena and Marks 2019). Reading on Bourdieu's original work as well as on its interpreters, I contend that the analytical tools of field, habitus, doxa and feel for the game encountered across Field Theory can offer unprecedented and useful insight to complicate the ritualized relational practices developed as part of the politics of exhaustion and of the game through which migrants endure and oppose it.

Bourdieu understands fields as “structured spaces of positions” constructed and transformed through the interaction of differently positioned actors (Bourdieu 1984, 114). Fields are presented as deeply relational and competitive sites, constantly reproduced through the interaction of competing actors, fighting to keep or change their positions through the acquisition of capital. Capital distribution is what establishes “relational order(s) and unequal relation(s) between actors” (Ancelovici 2021, 25). Capital, in turn, constitutes “the specialised knowledge of the field” (Bourdieu 1998a, 25). It has multiple forms and changes value depending on the specific field in which actors are playing. Within the field, actors develop habitus, which represents a set of structuring dispositions, or strategies through which they interact and mobilize to either improve or maintain their positions. Habitus captures modes of being in the world (Allen 2008, 59; Bourdieu 2000, 141; Vakalopoulos 2022, 2) or “our habitual relation with our everyday” (Vakalopoulos 2022, 2) and constitute “a kind of practical sense” through which actors understand “what is to be done in any given situation” (Bourdieu 1998a, 25).

The ritualized strategies exemplified by habitus are always oriented by a specific set of motivations, which Bourdieu defines feel for the game (Bourdieu, 1998b). In Bourdieu, the metaphor of the game can be often encountered when describing the dynamic, relational and competitive nature of the field (Bourdieu 1993; 1998b; 2000). Actors in the field are often portrayed as players in a game who, having unequal access to capital, compete to maximize their positions (McCormick 2006). Players in the game must have an interest in playing. This means that they must ensure the exposure to the risk of losing the game is “worth the candle” (Bourdieu 1998b, 77). Feel for the game delineates this interest, grounding habitus into a specific set of motivations that make a game interesting, and worth being played. It represents, Bourdieu argues, “what gives the game (…) a meaning and a raison d’etre, but also a direction, an orientation, an impeding outcome, for those who take part and therefore acknowledge what is at stake” (Bourdieu 1990, 66).

Another important element in Field Theory is constituted by Doxa. Doxa represents “a set of unquestioned beliefs’ that contribute to reinforcing relations of dominance within the field (Vakalopoulos 2022, 8). Perceived as a natural and self-evident reality, and often accepted as unproblematic, doxa is instrumental for dominant actors to maintain their relative positions of vantage (Bourdieu 1990; Charlesworth 2000).

These Bourdieusian analytical instruments come to hand for theorizing the route as a field of contestation, where differently positioned actors (migrants, inhabitants, policymakers, police forces, guards, researchers, journalists) develop different habitus while competing to maintain or improve their positions across relational spatialities of transit spaces, makeshift camps, temporary reception facilities and border passages. The route, I argue, is governed through a particular doxa: the assumption that an unmanageable and overwhelming migration crisis threatens the borders of EUrope and must be contained at all costs.

As widely noted by AoM scholars, since 2015, the narration of the crisis established, within EUrope, a permanent state of exception that mobilized equally permanent exceptional measures to keep the EUropean border securitized (Almustafa 2022; Bhambra 2017; Bello 2020; Cocco 2017; De Genova 2013; Minca, Šantić, and Umek 2019; New Keywords Collective 2016; Pallister-Wilkins 2016; Snow 2020). The doxic assumption embedded in the threatening fabric of a crisis at EUrope's border reflected, as De Genova points out, “a permanent epistemic instability” which ritualized habitus in the form of “the exercise of power over classifying, naming and patronizing, and partitioning migrants/refugees” (De Genova 2017, 9). In the field of contestation established on the so-called Western Balkan route, the doxic assumption of a crisis justifies habitus of exhaustion ritualized through practices of deportation, detention, and organized neglect. Emerging simultaneously as a product and as a response to this politics of exhaustion, the game exemplifies a competing habitus through which migrants endure and attempt to subvert their positions in the field.

To make sense of this theoretical understanding of the ritualized dynamics that shape the relational field of contestation established across the route, it is useful to observe habitus developed within and against the politics of exhaustion in practice. In the following sections, I mobilize this Bourdieusian reading of the route to give an account of how habitus deployed as part of this politics of exhaustion and habitus deployed as part of the game interact in the transit space of the Una Sana canton, unveiling the complex geography established across makeshift camps, temporary reception centers and border pushbacks.

The Politics of Exhaustion in the Una Sana Canton

Stuck in a limbo where they cannot go back, nor move further, migrants transiting across the so-called Western Balkan route struggle against an increasingly sophisticated system of capture and deportation and are forced to unplanned and prolonged stays in transit spaces across Serbia, Macedonia and BiH (Hameršak et al. 2020; Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019). Since 2018 and following the increasing inaccessibility and securitization of several border passages to EUrope (Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019), thousands of them have crossed BiH from east to west, attempting to reach EUrope from the Una Sana canton. The canton encounters the Croatian border on the edges of the mountains named Plješivica. The majority of migrants try the game from the towns of Bihać and Velika Kladuša, around which the majority of TCRs and makeshift camps are concentrated. Others attempt from the close villages of Cazin, Šturlić and Bosanska Bojina.

Illegally captured by border police, migrants are repeatedly tortured and robbed by police forces to be eventually pushed back to the opposite sides of the borders they attempt to cross, and forced to prolonged stays (Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019). After each attempt, both their bodies and their spirits are weakened. Simultaneously positioned as prisoners and as fugitives; unable to leave and yet permanently on the run, they are stuck into fractured and prolonged (im)mobilities that stretch over time and space, trapping them into a de-facto politics of exhaustion. Developed in the work of De Vrier and Guilt, this expression brings attention to the production and reproduction of a “range of practices of obstructing, containing and circulating movement, which prevents, fracture, complicate and prolong people's journeys to and across Europe” (De Vries and Guild 2019, 2157).

Interpreted through a Bourdieusian lens, this range of practices ritualized a particular habitus sustaining the doxic assumption that a migration crisis must be fought and stopped at EUrope's borders. In the Una Sana canton, I observed this habitus across ritualized practices of deportation, isolation and organized neglect deployed during pushbacks, and in the system of temporary reception/detention. These practices are aimed at maintaining migrants in their positions, while admitting violent and illegal behaviors on behalf of those enforcing border control (Maillet, Mountz, and Williams 2018; Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019; Mountz and Hiemstra 2014; Squire 2010).

During a pushback, migrants are forced back over a border, generally immediately after they crossed it, without consideration of their circumstances and without any possibility to apply for asylum or to put forward arguments against the measures taken (Pushback Collective 2020). Once they are captured by the police, the level of violence is at the discretion of the police individual teams.⁵ Migrants who experience pushback are often robbed and tortured. Some of those I have been in conversation with have reported that, on rare occasions, police officers are nice to them and do not use violence. The majority, however, are not. Most migrants report being beaten up, detained without food and water, and deprived of their belongings. Abdel, a Syrian 20-year-old man I met in 2021, had tried the game nine times. He described police violence:

When you run, they start shooting with their guns and you never know if it is against you or just to scare you. When they catch you, they beat you and give you electric shocks with Tasers even if you surrender. They insult you and your country. They insult your religion and if you are travelling with your wife, they will also insult her.

By physically and verbally abusing migrants, and denying their legitimate right to request asylum, border police use exhaustion as the technique to disincentivize a further crossing attempt. Pushbacks justify violence to maintain the doxic status quo of the politics of exhaustion: a migration crisis that must be kept at EUrope's external borders. Performed every day and well-known by local inhabitants and authorities, pushbacks normalize deportation into a habitus that re-positions migrants within the hostile spatiality of the transit space.

After every pushback, migrants returning from a game gather in fragmented and temporary groups scattered across the towns, villages, and woods of the Una Sana canton. Everyday, they can be spotted while returning from a border, sometimes only covered in blankets, as police officers often confiscate their jackets. They can be spotted sitting on the grass of a park, waiting for their phones to be charged in a local China Shop, or moving from one makeshift camp to another. Following a pushback, their bodies often show the scars and bruises of police beating. Their phones, their shoes, and their backpacks are often destroyed, and they might experience health problems, due, for example, to long exposure to cold temperatures (MSF 2018; Walker 2019).

While waiting to re-attempt the crossing, migrants are caught in a precarious temporary reception system where they face “repeated evictions, below-standard living conditions, the continuous threat and reality of violence, and the uncertainty of their daily lives’ (De Vries and Guild 2019, 2163). Since 2018, local and international authorities had different objectives in mind when intervening in the canton and generally disagreed on priorities. International authorities, such as IOM, wanted to keep migrants away from the EUropean border and rented huge facilities (factories, abandoned hotels, abandoned student houses) that could contain large numbers of people. On the contrary, local authorities wanted to keep migrants away from inhabited centers in the canton. They lobbied to move reception facilities away from inhabited centers, preferring migrants to be hosted closer to semi-inhabited villages on the hills (Caritas Ambrosiana 2021; DRC 2021).

During their temporary yet indefinitely prolonged transits, migrants have been constantly moved across facilities, evicted from makeshift camps, and neglected by competent authorities. These two competing objectives, one to keep in and the other to move away, replicate and ritualize exhaustion as migrants are constantly moved against their will, evicted, deported, and forced to live in horrible conditions.

Since 2018, a majority of TCRs have been set up in abandoned facilities.⁶ Like Borići TCR, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article, many of these have been left in disuse or never completed following the Yugoslavian wars (Hromadžić 2018; 2020). Migrants hosted in TCRs have often reported these facilities being overcrowded, with poor sanitary conditions, and often lacking access to electricity or hot water (Ahmetašević et al. 2020). In 2020, with the closure of multiple TCRs, the COVID-19 lockdowns, and the opening of a remote open-air camp in an area called Lipa, cantonal authorities issued an order that forbid migrants from circulating in Bihać city center. While the number of arrivals and deportations did not fall, migrants have been forced to hide away from inhabited centers to prevent being deported (Ahmetašević and Mlinarević 2020).

In the summer of 2019, I encountered Jaabili, a twenty-one-year-old man from Afghanistan, who had been stuck in Bihać for seven months. When I met him, Jaabili had spent three weeks in a makeshift camp that he called No Camp, set up in an abandoned factory called Kraji Inamet. To reach No Camp together, Jabili and I had to pass in front of the TCR sited in Bira factory and walk a few minutes in the direction of the city center. As we transited in front of the edifice, we were stopped by a police patrol. The police officer asked me for my documents and told me that I could proceed. On the contrary, Jaabili had to return to Bira. When we explained that Jaabili was not registered in Bira and was staying somewhere else, the police officer did not listen. Police officers had orders to keep migrants away from the city center. From there, it was IOM's responsibility to keep migrants away from town. You just speak with IOM, he kept saying. After we had to separate, Jaabili and I reconvened on an adjacent road, a few hundred meters from Bira. He noted that:

It seems like they don't want to see me. They hide me. It's like for them, when they don't see me, I am not a problem. They treat us as we should not exist and, when they see us, they take us somewhere else, so we are somebody else's problem.

While TCRs have continued to open up and close in the last five years, local authorities have incrementally pushed for moving facilities away from the canton's inhabited center and into the woods and hills surrounding them. In 2020, local authorities decided to close Bira and started deporting migrants in the still unfinished open-air camp in an area called Lipa. Inspired by previously failed attempts to bring migrants away from inhabited centers,⁷ Lipa was located hours of walking from Bihać, and chaotically co-managed by IOM and the Bosnian government. During the whole winter, migrants in Lipa camp have been living without water or electricity. The camp was temporarily closed in December of the same year, after a huge fire destroyed it (Caritas Ambrosiana 2021; Global Detention Project 2020).

The reception/detention system that waits for migrants after a pushback reinforces habitus of exhaustion through ritualized practices of eviction, isolation, and organized neglect. Migrants are expelled twice: first, from Croatia, and second, from the facilities where they are supposed to find support. Stuck in the canton, they endure precarious livelihoods while planning the next game.

The Game

As noted by Minca and Collins, “the game is based on a specific informal geography comprised of information travelling through social media, smuggling networks, makeshift and institutional refugee camps, and informal routes” (Minca and Collins 2021, 2). This specific informal geography extends across the Una Sana canton, where the edges of the mountains of Plješivica provide a passage to Croatia via several trekking routes. The game can last hours, days or weeks. Pushbacks can take place at any point across the way and the length of the game cannot be predicted. On the paths of Plješivica, it is not unusual to find empty energy drinks cans, chocolate wrapping, clothes, shoes, and rubbish. During the game, migrants rely on smartphones and power banks to communicate and orientate themselves in the woods. Afraid of being robbed by border police, they remain careful, hide cash and leave less valuable items behind to run faster.

Jaabili explained to me:

The game takes a lot of energy, so we bring with us a lot of energy drinks and chocolate to keep us moving. You can see so many on the street because some people prefer to travel lighter. They leave behind everything, even their whole backpacks if they need to run from the police.

Migrants in the game carefully ration food and map where they can find water. As noted by Jaabili:

After several times you go game, you learn to know the jungle and you also learn how you can survive in the jungle. I know now that I can stay some days without food. But I need water. I know where to find water on the way.

The majority of migrants I met tried to go game in small groups, often guided through smuggling networks that diffuse across the road, managed by characters they refer to as bosses. During the game migrants solidify relations of mutual trust. Jaabili continued:

When you go game, you learn the value of water. It's more important to share water with your companions than to have it all for yourself. Your game companions are your brothers and sisters. You cannot win the game by yourself. It's something we do together. We play together, maybe we lose together, but we never give up.

The more games one attempt, the more the game is ritualized into a set of repeated practices: counting and sharing resources, rationing food, finding water sources, lighting a fire, packing lighter and smarter backpacks, finding reliable bosses and travel companions, learning which noises might anticipate an encounter with the police. During the game, the felt effects of exhaustion increase alongside the urgency to fight them. Once they forcibly return to the Una Sana canton, migrants endure in the reception/detention system while planning the next attempt.

Abas, an Iraqi man I met in 2020 in a makeshift camp near the village of Cazin, had tried the game 15 times. He explained the game is always unpredictable:

It really depends on too many factors. If you are travelling with families, for example, kids and old people might slow you down. If the weather is not good, it might also take more time. Sometimes you need to spend time hidden in silence. You hide from animals, and you hide from the Croatian police. If all goes well, it takes one day and one night to get to Croatia but then to cross the country it can take even 10 days. Then you need to cross Slovenia. If you are not captured, you are in Italy after 2 weeks.

Before every attempt to go game and after a pushback, migrants rethink their steps, what they did wrong, and what they can do to improve their chances to avoid encountering border police. While waiting in the Una Sana canton, the game is not really paused. Migrants are constantly strategizing to gather energy, resources, and information to prepare for a new attempt. They calculate how much food they need, how to respond to an unforeseen weather forecast, which route is safer, which one is more controlled, and which boss have had a better reputation. They share this information through word of mouth and learn from the experiences of others.

Caught into the system of reception/detention, a large proportion of migrants in the Una Sana canton endure moments of waiting, resting, and preparing for the next attempt to go game away from managed facilities, gathering in informal makeshift camps. The latter consists of “temporary, informal settlements, established by refugees within cities, near institutional camps, along border zones, or in abandoned buildings’ (Jordan and Minca 2022, 483; see also Agier 2018; Davies and Isakjee 2015; Jordan and Moser 2020; Katz, Minca, and Martin 2022; Minca 2015, 2021; Minca, Šantić, and Umek 2019; Obradovic-Wochnik 2018). While remaining incredibly dehumanizing, unequipped, and precarious sites, makeshift camps ritualize migrants’ endurance and preference for autonomy over temporary reception. Self-managed and unruly, makeshift camps become crucial sites for game preparation. While waiting, migrants can reorganize, seek information, meet bosses, and team up to plan the next game together (Jordan and Minca 2022).

The ritualized practices that emerge within makeshift camps are inevitably threatening for the politics of exhaustion. In turn, makeshift camps are often evicted, and migrants who stayed there are moved, kicked out, chased, and brought to managed facilities. But after every eviction, makeshift camps reappear, either in the same place or other localities. In Bihać, two of the most resilient makeshift camps have endured for years in two abandoned buildings.

The edifice of Dom Penzionera is a wrecked building with an astonishing view of Bihać's valley. The walls are not painted, the floor is full of cracks and the glassless frames of the windows pierce the aged gray cement walls. In front of it, the Una River flows, bringing its course away from Bihać city center, toward the hills. The dunes of the hills surround the red roofs of the houses agglomerates that appear on the opposite shore of the river. A few meters from the building, there are restaurants and hotels that in summer fill up with tourists. Bihać is mostly composed of low houses and buildings and, during the summer, the Plješivica embraces them into a green hug.

Dom Penzionera, with its five floors of gray and aged steel, cuts across the green of the valley, brutally interrupting what would otherwise be a peaceful natural landscape. Entering the building, one immediately gets captured by the extensive graffiti on the wall. Some are in Bosnian, some in Arabic, Urdu and Farsi, and others are in English. Migrants called it Bihać Camp.

Close to the abandoned factory of Bira, which until 2020 was the larger TCR in the canton, on the provincial road that connects Bihać to Velika Kladuša, there is another former factory called Kraj Inamet. When I visited it, in March 2020, a sign with the writing No Camp had been placed at the entrance of the factory, which, similarly to Dom Penzionera, is covered with graffiti in different languages. Both Kraj Inamet and Don Penzionera had remained empty for decades and represented a very visible symbol of the architectural stasis that characterized the post-war period in BiH (Hromadžić 2020; Zocchi 2022). No Camp and Bihać Camp, as migrants grew to call them, were, for a long time, the two biggest makeshift camps in Bihać. They reappropriated unruly and abandoned sites reclaiming their potential as shelters. Interestingly, this is exactly how the IOM camp of Borići, the one where I met Manoush and her son Kaveh, came into existence. Until 2018, Borići was an abandoned student house. In that year, the first groups of migrants who began to reach Bihać found shelter in the building, which offered partial repair from the Bosnian winter. A year later, IOM decided to rent the facility and turned it into a TCR for families and minors (Ahmetašević et al. 2020). As a result, several single-man migrants had to find another location, either in the two TCRs of Bira and Miral, or creating new makeshift camps. In 2020, following the closure of Bira and the opening of Lipa, the number of makeshift camps began to grow extensively.

When I visited Lipa, after its reopening in August 2021, there were several small makeshift camps and groups of migrants going in and out of the woods that surround the main road leading to the camp. I stopped on the road to talk with a group of migrants who were walking in Bihać's direction. Among them, I met Syed, a twenty-two-year-old man from Pakistan. Syed had been pushed back from Croatia the day before, handed to Bosnian authorities and then taken to Lipa. He was now walking back to Bihać (which is approximately six hours’ walk) to meet with some friends who lived in a makeshift camp close to the town. He told me:

Lipa is not good. The food is terrible. You cannot take a shower and you do not have heating. I was there before the fire. We almost froze to death. It seems like you are in the game, fighting against nature, even if you are not.

Migrants mistreated and neglected in managed facilities are forced to create shelters elsewhere. In the Una Sana canton, they find dozens of wrecked houses, abandoned buildings, and entire villages that have remained empty after the Yugoslav war. These sites, marked by histories of abandonment and violence; left to grow old and wreck for decades, now become visible, notable, and nominable as a result of migrants’ presence.

Migrants reposition themselves outside the reception system and into autonomous and self-managed informal and unruly spatialities where they develop additional ritualized practices (gathering resources, planning routes, finding information, and teaming up with travel companions). The habitus embodied in the game doesn't pause after a pushback. It keeps being played in-between transit spaces, TCRs, and makeshift camps. As Jaabili once told me:

If they catch me on the border, I will try again to cross it. They take me back to Lipa, I will escape once more. My body might be wounded and tortured but my soul remains free.

Epilogue: They Say the Border It's Open Like in 2015

Is it true that they have re-opened the border?

When he asked me this question, Junayd, a twenty-three-year-old Pakistani man, and I was sitting on the benches that look toward the riverwalk of the Una, in Bihać downtown park. With us, there was also his friend and travel companion, Tariq, 19 years old, also from Pakistan. It was August 2021 and that was the third time the three of us met. The first time was three days earlier, near the village of Šturlić, while they were returning to Bihać after having been pushed back by the Croatian police, near the Croatian town of Korenica. The second time was the day after, when they invited me to visit the makeshift camp where they had spent the night. Tariq intervened to clarify:

There is this rumour that they re-opened the border like they did in 2015. They say it is a good time now to cross. They say the border is open, look.

Tariq showed me his phone and pointed his finger at a Telegram chat in Urdu. After realising that I was not able to understand his native language, he copied and pasted a long text from the chat to Google Translate and let me read it. The text's translation said that the European Union had decided to welcome refugees and that the border was open like in 2015 for three days. It encouraged refugees to share the news and get on the move altogether. These types of message chains go around periodically across Telegram and Facebook chats in the online communities of migrants traveling on the route, always leading to false hopes. I had to tell Junayd and Tariq that, unfortunately, that was a piece of false news and that nothing had changed in relation to EU policymaking. The two men looked at me in disappointment. Tariq started describing the different experience of his brother, who walked the route in 2015, and arrived safely in Germany:

He (his brother) arrived in 2015. When the border was open for everyone. Not like now. Can you imagine? There were people taking care of refugees then. He told me that humanitarian volunteers were giving them food and water. This is the opposite of today. Here they push you back to the opposite side.

In the message chains that encourage migrants to get on the move, there is often a reference to a moment in which the border was open. This refers to a specific phase in the history of the route, which AoM scholars have named the long summer of migration (Kasparek and Speer 2015; Yurdakul, Römhild, and Schwanhäußer 2017). This expression describes the first season of mass and visible mobilization of migrants from EUrope's eastern frontiers, which culminated with the so-called “March of Hope”, where thousands of refugees marched from Budapest toward Austria and Germany, autonomously opening the border (Kasparek and Speer 2015). As noted by Hameršak, the long summer of migration exemplifies the very idea of autonomy of migration by pointing out to the process through which “borders, ideas and positions within the European migration regime, and the EU itself were collapsing and reshaping under the force of human mobility” (Hameršak 2022). Notwithstanding the brevity of this moment, and the successive consolidation of a still-ongoing phase of border closure and border externalization, almost a decade later, migrants traveling across the route often refer to this moment as the historical precedent that makes the game a risk worth of being taken.

In Bourdieusian terms, it can be argued that the collective memory of the long summer of migration diffused a specific feel for the game that keeps migrants motivated after every failure and toward another attempt. In his articulation of feel for the game, Bourdieu stresses that the game has its own history “that gives the game its sense” (1998b, 82). Relatedly, by keep playing the game, migrants traveling on the route build up on a historical and collective legacy rooted in the glorious experience of “freed mobility and broad social solidarity (…) relative suspension of controls along the routes of mass migrant movement and (…) relatively free crossing of external, internal and externalized borders of the EU on these routes”(Hameršak 2022) that solidified, even though only temporarily, in the long summer of migration.

The habitus that migrants develop while going game and in the unruly spatialities of makeshift camps situates migrants’ continuous and ambivalent struggle to endure in their positions and reposition their actions in continuity with the legacy of the long summer of migration. The feel for the game then motivates the game as a collective imperative and solidifies a continuous, collective, and unstoppable exercise of autonomy along the route. As noted by Tariq:

All these migrants you see here. They are either returning from a game, preparing for a game, or waiting to go game. All of us think about the game. It is the only thing that matters. When we will be in Europe, we can think of other things.

When preparing for the game, migrants experience the felt effects of the politics of exhaustion and keep fighting against them. The game becomes an imperative. Several migrants I have been in conversation with have described the logic behind the expression game claiming that there are “no other options” and describing it as a do-or-die situation. Bahman, a twenty-five-years-old from Iran spoke about the game as:

A game that we play with our lives. If you reach Europe, you are safe. If you encounter problems and you must go back, you need to retry. There is no other option. We live in the game until we win it. We cannot surrender.

Faizam, a twenty-three-year-old man from Pakistan that I met in 2019 had a similar view:

We take risks. When we are in this situation, we do not longer care about what happens to us. Our mindset is do-or- die. They send us back and we will try again. We will never stop until we reach safety.

The words used by Bahman and Faizam have been repeated among dozens of migrants I have interviewed. The do-or-die articulation of the game precisely reflects the feel of for game guiding them to another attempt. Like Bourdieu's players, migrants acquire capital through experimentation and movement which include multiple attempts, exposure to danger and several failures. Through capital acquisition, they get to know the hostile environment surrounding them. They learn from those who made it to the other side, and from those returning. They become aware of what expects them during pushbacks, within managed facilities and in makeshift camps. The feel for the game expressed into the do-or-die representation of the game, allows them, at least temporarily, to remain motivated to another attempt. What makes the game an imperative; a do-or-die situation, is that there is no other alternative. It follows that the game exemplifies the ambivalent fabric of autonomy of migration. If autonomy is understood as a relational concept entangling “efforts to control and efforts to contest and subvert this control” (Scheel 2019; Metcalfe 2022), the game simultaneously exposes the violent and exhausting nature of these forms of control and sustains migrants’ struggles to subvert them.

While the long summer of migration situates the feel for the game that gives the game its motivation, it also establishes a precedent to solidify the doxic assumption of a crisis caused by the uncontrollable, overwhelming, and unmanageable mass of migrants attempting to reach EUropean borders (Almustafa 2022; Snow 2020). Since 2015, this doxa materialized through the multiplication of racialized visa regimes, processes of offshoring, deportations to so-called safe countries, biometrics technologies of border controls, pushbacks, bilateral agreements, local deportations, mobilizing and ritualizing the politics of exhaustion as a mode of migration management (De Vries and Guild 2019). If the crisis exemplifies the epistemic and material positioning of migrants at the margins of EUrope, the game pushes against it, articulating the irreducible force and will of migrants against and despite increasingly violent and hostile conditions encountered along the route. Playing the game, migrants reclaim the right to describe their positions and complicate both the politics and the geography of their exhausting situations.

In conclusion, this article proposed a Bourdieusian understanding of the politics of exhaustion diffusing across the so-called Western Balkan route and of the game that is mobilized within and against it. It attempted to contribute to AoM scholarly and political agenda exploring the nature and fabric of fractured and obstructed (im)mobilities across the route; and situated the game as an expression of the ambivalence and resilience of autonomy of migration. Interpreting the game as simultaneously a product of and a response to the politics of exhaustion, I focused on habitus that ritualizes the relation between exhaustion and subversion and observed it empirically across one of Europe's densest transit spaces. Finally, I situated the game as an imperative generated through the collective legacy of autonomy across the route.

Almost a decade has passed since the long summer of migration. The crisis and the game are no longer the result of an exceptional state of emergency. They represent competing narrations of the complex, yet normalized spatialities and temporalities of the route. Envisioning the route as a relational field of contestation, this article offered nuanced empirical, vernacular, and theoretical grammars to complicate and problematize what are still too often described as exceptional practices, reframing the ritualized, protracted, and ambivalent fabric of exhaustion and subversion across Europe's frontiers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Queen Mary University of London Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarships (QMUL-LTDS) programme.

Notes

1 The expression “Western Balkan Route” was originally deployed by Frontex to map migrants trekking across the territories of ex-Yugoslavia, now questionably clustered as Western Balkans states. Nonetheless, scholars observing migrants struggles across these territories have reconsidered both the language and the politics envisioned by the route, bringing attention to “the role of migrant agency, expressed in the carving of unruly itineraries across the Balkans and temporarily suspending the EUropean migration regime” (Kurnik and Razsa 2020, 8; see also among others Ahmetašević et al. 2020; Bužinkić and Hameršak 2018; Beznec and Kurnik 2020; Kurnik and Razsa 2020; Rexhepi 2022). Reading on this literature, across this article I refer to Western Balkan Route to trace an informal geography constituted through migrants’ transit and forced (im)mobilities across Western Balkan territories.

2 Across the article, I use pseudonyms to protect participants’ anonymity.

3 In this article, I refer to EUrope and Europe as distinct spatial configurations. I use EUrope to complicate uneven geographies of European space beyond the binary Europe/Other (Stierl 2018; Vianelli 2017). EUrope, across this article, is understood as a bordered and exclusionary geography whose margin have consistently transformed across histories of colonialism, integration, and border externalization, while politically excluding, marginalising or oppressing Southern and Eastern European identities, agencies and spaces (Balibar 2009; Bjelić and Savic 2005; Isin 2014; Gržinić, Kancler, and Rexhepi 2020; Petrović 2014).

4 It must be noted that, already since 2017, the expression game had been noted by journalists and humanitarian practitioners working with and writing about migrants travelling on the Western Balkan route. For example, a report from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) titled “Games of Violence” (2017) focused on EU state border authorities’ abuse of unaccompanied children in Serbia. The report described the game as the “endless cycle of border crossing” in which migrants are “over and over again pushed back from EU borders” (Drobnjakovic 2017). In the same year, another report from Oxfam (2017) titled 'A Dangerous Game' defines the expression game as the outcome of a cynical humour through which migrants describe their effort to continue their dangerous journey. In 2021, two journalists, Eefje Blankevoort and Els van Driel, titled their documentary on minors displaced on the Balkan route, 'Shadow Games,' (Van Driel and Blankewoort 2021), and this subsequently evolved into a transmedia project, advocating for the rights of unaccompanied migrants displaced and lost in the EU border regime.

5 Data collected by the Border Violence Monitoring recorder testimonies of violence including: “beating (with batons or hands), kicking, theft or destruction of personal belonging, insulting, reckless driving, forcing to undress, pushing people on the ground, exposure to air-conditioning and extreme temperature during car rides, threatening with guns, gunshots, dog attacks, water immersions and electric shots” (Border Violence Monitoring Network 2022). For more info see: https://www.borderviolence.eu/annual-torture-report-2020/.

6 Until 2020, there were four IOM TCRs in the Una-Sana canton. Two of them hosted single men and were set up respectively in two abandoned factories: Bira in Bihać, and Miral in Velika Kladuša. The remaining two camps hosted families and unaccompanied migrants. One of them was set up in a formed student house named Borići. The other is in an abandoned hotel named Sedra.

7 In the summer of 2019, Bihać local government had already opened a tent camp outside of Bihac, in the locality of Vučjak. The tent camp closed in September of the same year after pressure from international Human Rights organizations on the poor living conditions of migrants hosted in the camp.