Enforcing and disrupting circular movement in an EU Borderscape: housingscaping in Serbia

ABSTRACT

This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalization of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new ‘border variation’ can be seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organized squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilized ‘scape’ for the EU.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrations
• Serbia
• Western Balkans
• borderscape
• housing
• external border

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank to all the people that we had a chance to meet and talk to and to the collectives No Name Kitchen, Rigardu, Escuela con Alma and Collective aid for their trust. The authors thank to anonymous peer reviewers, and to our dear friends and colleagues Mirjana Morokvašić-Müller, Maple Razsa and Chloe Powers for their feedback and suggestions. The struggle goes on.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia; Croatia left this group in 2013, when it became an EU member-state.

2 We use the concept of dispositif as an apparatus as well as the image of a cross-section of current relations between institutions, practices, actors, technologies, knowledges and so on (compare Sverre, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning 2016).

3 Interview with NGO worker, Belgrade, Serbia, October 2018.

4 Interview with a migrant, Belgrade, Serbia, October 2018.

5 Interview with CRMRS worker, Belgrade, September 2018.

6 Interview with CRMRS worker, Belgrade, Serbia, September 2018.

7 Interview with former IOM trainer for CRMRS, conducted in Belgrade in December 2014. ‘We taught them that they could not use the phrase “illegal migrant” in official documents, but “irregular migrant” instead, because of all connotations it entails’.

8 Interviews with NGO workers in Belgrade and Subotica, Serbia, in January and May 2018.

9 No Name Kitchen and BelgrAid (now Collective aid), for example, spread activities from Serbia to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

10 Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is discursively framed as facing a ‘postponed migration crisis’, a kind of collateral damage, or secondary crisis deriving directly from the ‘solution’ of the primary one, is just at the beginning of this process.

11 Interview with NGO worker, Berkasovo, Serbia, September 2017.

12 Conversation with CRMRS worker, improvised settlement in Tompa-Roszke border-crossing, May 2016.

13 The stated reasons can vary significantly: ‘I come to (Belgrade) barracks to meet people, my friends. I got the camp, they did not. We meet here, they can’t come to the camp.’ (Belgrade, January 2017); ‘I come here, because these guys (volunteers from an NGO providing showers) are great. We play cards, smoke. We have fun. Girls are beautiful.’ (Sombor, May 2018); ‘We cook what we like here.’ (Sombor, May 2018) and so on.

14 ‘The game’ is a phrase used by migrants for the often risky and physically dangerous attempts to cross the borders in the ‘endles cycle of border-crossing’ (MSF 2017, 2).

15 Interview with CRMRS worker, Sandzak area, May 2014.

16 Interview with CRMRS worker, Belgrade, Serbia, May 2018.

17 No Name Kitchen violence reports are available at: https://www.nonamekitchen.org/en/violence-reports/

Additional information

Funding

This article has been conducted within the framework of the project No. 177027 Multiethnicity, multiculturalism, migrations – contemporary processes of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia as well as by European Comision’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant for the research project HOUSEREG, agreement No. 707848.

Notes on contributors

Marta Stojić Mitrović

Marta Stojić Mitrović is ethnologist and anthropologist working as an assistant research professor at the Institute of Ethnography SASA, Belgrade, Serbia, where she researches discourses, policies and practices related to the topics of migration, citizenship,  human rights and discrimination in Serbian, regional and the EU context.

Ana Vilenica

Ana Vilenica is urban and cultural researcher and an accomplice in housing and No Border struggles. Among her research interests are cultural and political action against dominant housing regimes and other 'urban regeneration' schemes, new mutations in functioning of migration regimes as well as potentials for organizing against neoliberal movement. She is a member of the Radical Housing Journal collective (https://radicalhousingjournal.org).