Games, push-backs and the everyday violence at the Bosnian-Croatian border

This thesis explores violence against migrants at the Croatian-Bosnian border, with the focus on migrants’ everyday sites and practices. Whilst the rich literature discusses structural violence against migrants at the EU’s borders, it omits to consider direct and concrete daily acts of violence. We also know little about violence against migrant men and violence at the latest transit spot at the Croatian-Bosnian border. This thesis addresses this research lacunae while drawing upon eight months of participant observations in makeshift camps in Velika Kladuša (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and 68 interviews with migrants. It questions diverse forms of violence against migrants and seeks to what degree and in which ways this violence impacts their everyday practices. In addition, it asks whether and how the dominant assumptions about race and gender impact migrant men’s experiences of violence and how this violence is circumscribed by the historico-political context of the Bosnian-Croatian border. The findings suggest that direct border violence against migrants – border attacks, takes place alongside more structural violence - border administrations and withdrawal of aid in makeshift camps. Yet border violence is also at work in migrants’ everyday practices where violence is least expected; in private sites, where violence is routinised and leaves no visible marks, but has power to harm or kill. This thesis also argues that Arab Muslim men, in this context at least, are most commonly subjected to border violence due to the dominant racialized and gendered assumptions about (migrant) men of colour as dangerous and in need of violent interventions. Yet violence against migrants is also enforced and concealed by the Western dominant imagination of the Croatian-Bosnian border as a line between peaceful Europe and the violent Balkans. However, migrants challenge such assumptions by their own meaning makings of this geographical location upon their experiences of solidarities and violence here. This thesis nuances knowledge on border violence as a complex phenomenon that functions as an ongoing daily process across months or years rather than singular episodes that come and pass. By doing so, it demonstrates the importance of bringing direct but also taken-for-granted practices in research analysis of violence to develop an understanding of how violence is experienced and made meaning of by diverse people exposed to it

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post‐racial self‐image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings

Push and back: The ripple effect of EU border externalisation from Croatia to Iran

Pushbacks have become a key feature of EU migration controls since 2015. As this article argues, practices of pushbacks stretch from EU spaces, such as Croatia, to its external borders and neighbouring countries, reaching as far as Iran. Although pushback tactics and their consequences are widely discussed in public, activist, policy debates, and by refugees themselves; academic literature has a limited engagement with pushbacks and their effects. To address this gap, we set up the concepts of “push” and “back” to question the ripple effect of informal and violent border controls that occurs transversely in multiple geopolitical contexts and timelines of migratory journeys. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two border locations: the Croatian border with Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Turkey-Iran border. We argue that the EU’s governance of its external border encourages identical practices of “push” to different locations. We show that “pushes” generate multi-layered violence enmeshed in the local security (and at times militarized) contexts when people are “back”; or forcibly returned to their starting locations. The analysis of “push” and “back” contributes to the literature on the EU externalisation of migration governance and border violence, which we examine through informal and violent border practices inside and outside of the EU

Becoming a Smuggler: Migration and Violence at EU External Borders

Migrants’ involvement in smuggling increases alongside restricted cross-border movement and violent borders, yet this dynamic is usually examined from migrants’ position as clients. In this article, we move away from migrants and smugglers as two separate roles and question migrants’ aspirations to and experiences of resorting to smuggling networks as workers in the context of EU land borders, where direct violence is used daily to fight cross-border crime. By doing so, we move further the examination of fluid relations in smuggling provisions and the way they are intertwined with care and exploitation, as shaped and circumscribed by violent borders. The article illustrates the intersections between border violence and migrants’ active involvement in smuggling by drawing on the case study of an anonymised Border Town and multi-site, multi-author fieldwork from Serbia and Bosnia. By questioning migrants’ experiences of shifting roles from clients to service providers, and by taking into account their work in smuggling provision, we show that, in a situation of protracted vulnerability orchestrated by border violence, state and law enforcement, the categories–“migrant” and “smugglers”–can blur

Everyday Violence at the EU’s External Borders: Games and Push-backs

Combining conflict studies and feminist perspectives on everyday violence, this book analyses games and push-back which are vectors to migrants' border-crossing attempts and violence that aims to deter their journeys at the Bosnian-Croatian border. It questions how these diverse forms of violence are experienced, not treating violence as singular episodes but rather paying attention to how migrants make meaning of it across months and years. The author examines direct violence and its symbiosis with structural harms and questions how these turn into everyday, concrete, and intimate processes at the border. She also questions who this violence targets and where it takes place and asks whether and how the dominant assumptions about race and gender impact men's migration journeys. The book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students interested in issues of migration, violence, masculinities, racialization, the European Union’s border governance, and scholar activism

Photovoice as a Research Tool of the "Game" Along the "Balkan Route"

Migratory pathways across the borders of South Eastern Europe have been commonly recognised within public and policy discourses as the ‘Balkan Route’ (Frontex, 2018; UNHCR, 2019). Yet those pathways do not follow one linear route across the official border checkpoints of former Yugoslav states – Serbia and Bosnia, to the European Union – Croatia and Hungary (Obradovic-Wochnik & Bird, 2019; Stojić & Vilenica, 2019). As often encountered by displaced populations, the journeys consist of perpetually moving onward and being pushed backward across diverse European towns, highways, mountains, forests, rivers, minefields, and camps, necessary to cross to reach western or northern Europe. Displaced people stranded in Serbia and Bosnia generally call their border crossing attempts the ‘game’; the term that conveys the daily mobility struggles, violence and deaths

The Kurdish kaçakçı on the Iran-Turkey border: corruption and survival as EU sponsored counter-smuggling effects

This article examines people smuggling in the Kurdish borders between Turkey and Iran, and describes how members of local Kurdish border communities use their roles as kaçakçı (smuggler in Turkish) to navigate externalised EU border controls amid internal displacement and poverty. It draws upon ethnographic data collection between 2020 and 2022 in the Turkey-Iran border that has not been considered in studies on the EU-supported external counter-smuggling. This article specifically narrows down on corruption, an often mentioned yet understudied element of smuggling, and discusses the payment of bribes to border officials, and the creation of riskier routes to facilitate border crossing. We show how unequal access to corruption allow some people smuggling attempts to result in relatively uneventful passages while others are permeated by risks and death. While vilified by governments, corruption is also widely known and accepted as a social equalizer: as a safety valve that allows marginalized Kurds – both kaçakçı and border and security guards – to navigate precarity and survive borderland enforcement regimes. Our analysis from the perspectives of Kurds working as kaçakçı in the context of conflict and internal displacement seeks to move away from the dominant lens used in the analysis of people smuggling, which has almost solely examined it as a form of transnational organized crime and/or as an element of externalised border governance

Border Violence as Border Deterrence Condensed Analysis of Violent Push-Backs from the Ground

Thousands of people on the move, travelling through the Balkan route to Europe, are caught in a cycle of structural violence marked by repeated denials of access to asylum procedures, physical attacks from EU border authorities, and collective expulsions. Since May 2017, the grass root organization No Name Kitchen has been collecting testimonies of border abuse in informal transit camps in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. While being present along the Balkan route, we have observed an increase in the deployment of police forces and violent practices, making legal and safe transit to Europe impossible. We have received consistent reports from men, women and children, of abuses that remain either uncovered or denied, leading to a lack of real prosecution of the perpetrators and continued border violence. This research report, derived from 338 interviews with people on the move, communicates the diverse practices of violence communicated through an increasingly securitized EU border apparatus. We focus on the lived experiences of border abuses, as narrated by the people on the move, by exploring who the victims and perpetrators of this violence are. We argue that violent push-backs demonstrate a flagrant violation of international, European and national laws by EU border authorities, leading to slow destruction of lives of people searching for safety