From Source to Corridor: Changing Geopolitical Narratives about Migration and EU-Western Balkans Relations

The entangled geographies of responsibility: Contested policy narratives of migration governance along the Balkan Route

“…Drawing upon data collected as part of a wider research project carried out between January and August 2020 (Author, 2020), we ground our analysis in Boswell et al.’s (2011) conceptualization of policy narratives as causal narratives, constitutive of three elements: (1) A set of claims related to the nature of the policy issue at stake; (2) A set of claims concerning the causes of said issue, which include questions like “whose fault is it?” “Whose responsibility is it?”; and (3) A set of claims concerning possible policy solutions, focusing in particular on the second aspect regarding the conferral of responsibility. Adopting Pastore’s (2019) inductive content analysis approach, our research was guided by the following empirical questions: (1) What is constructed as a failure in the management of migration along the Balkan Route? ; and (2) Who is to blame for the failures of migration management policy responses and thus bears responsibility for its resolution?…”

“…Internal migration was also very relevant in Tito’s Yugoslavia in the post-World War II years, taking place both within and between Yugoslav Socialist Republics, at the same time intersecting with the “othering” and the racialization of some ethnic groups, such as Albanians and Roma (Baker, 2018). During the Cold War, out-migration from the Yugoslav Republics mainly concerned the movement of Gastarbeiter , mostly directed to Germany (Pastore, 2019: 14).…”

“…Scholars have also focused on the intersections between the securitization of international migration and humanitarian discourses along the Route (see Galijaš, 2019; Pallister-Wilkins, 2018, 2021). The work of scholars like Pastore (2019) has also highlighted how EU-Western Balkan relations have evolved following shifts in wider geopolitical narratives of migration, which have most recently assumed securitized connotations.…”

“…Such narratives, strongly marked by cartographic route-thinking (Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias, 2019), contribute to an “overdetermination of borders and, more generally, of an ever more essentialized understanding of the relation between territory and human mobility” (Pastore, 2019: 20), with the catch-all geographical metaphor of a “Balkan Route” permitting both media as well as policy discourses to simplify the highly variegated journeys undertaken by migrants travelling through this region (Pastore, 2019: 18). Such metaphors, moreover, feed into the imaginary of generalized migration “flows”, which obscures “the heterogeneity of migrants’ subjective drives and desires that cannot be reduced to nor contained within overarching explanations about why migrants move and what they want” (Tazzioli, 2020: 33).…”

Strengthening Borders, Managing Centres: Reception Conditions and Provisions of Services to Asylum Seekers in Croatia

“…1 The situation, oftentimes coined as the so-called "European migration/refugee crisis" (European Commission, 2016;Rogelj, 2017) of unprecedented scale, has shifted the position of Western Balkan countries from refugee producing (back in the 1990s) and traditional emigration countries, to transit territories for a vast majority of forced migrants on their way to Western Europe (cf. Sardelić, 2017;Pastore, 2019). A drift to securitisation practices that have taken place following the EU-Turkey deal of March 2016 subsequently led to the closure of the Balkan corridor, and to strengthening the borders while trying to manage asylum and irregular migration in a more securitised and militarised manner.…”