Of Werewolves, Jungles, and Refugees: More-than-human Figures along the Balkan Route

ABSTRACT

Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of the werewolf as a more-than-human figure, this article investigates how this figure may help in analysing the ‘animalisation’ of the refugees banned to the forest along the so-called Balkan Route. After briefly discussing how the werewolf has historically been a recurrent motif in European folkloric accounts and popular narratives depicting the stranger and the abnormal, the article examines how the werewolf has been presented by Agamben as a key figure in his conceptualisation of the sovereign ban. The article then proposed a reading of the Balkan Route and its informal refugee mobilities focussed on their unruly spatialities, made of makeshift camps but also forests and bushes converted into temporarily inhabited ‘jungles’ by banned individuals-on-the-move. The final section illustrates the violence at the border by engaging with Rita Sakr’s analysis of two shorts stories written by Iraqi former refugee Hassan Blasim and based on a more-than-human refugee journey across the Balkan Route. The article concludes by suggesting that the figure of the werewolf-refugee may help in understanding the condition of refugees along the Balkan Route and the violence they are exposed to during their more-than-human journeys across this corner of Europe.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jessica Collins, Joanna Jordan, Umuc Ozguc and Maartje Roelofsen for their much appreciated comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Homo sacer (sacred man), is for Agamben an ‘obscure figure of archaic Roman law’, a figure whose bare life (nuda vita) ‘is included in the juridical order […] solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred tests of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries (1998, 12).

2. For an analysis of the process of repression or even erasure of the refugees’ bare life and of their exposure to violence and eventual death from public memory or record see in Bargu’s reflections on ‘Sovereignty as erasure’ (Bargu 2014) and Bradley’s recent ‘genealogy of political erasure’ (2019).

3. For an original reflection on the constitution of heterotopic space see Foucault’s 1967 path-breaking intervention entitled Of other spaces.