“I Refuse to Sink”: Narratives of the Dispossessed Within Refugee Stories on the Balkan Route

Jovanović, Srđan Mladenov

doi:10.1177/1532708617737097

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…They constantly felt that this process was endless as they no sooner arrived at a destination than they had to regroup after all the hardships and adversities in order to secure the continuation of their journey. Their life was transformed into a life of constant movement from one checkpoint to another without the possibility of long term planning and with the constant possibility of the journey coming to an end (Jovanović, 2017). Greece was another such point where they were forced to remain in limbo, in "liminal spaces of temporary dwellings" for a significant period of time (Arvanitis, Yelland, & Kiprianos, 2019;Den Boer, 2015).…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life Stories of Syrian Refugees: A Qualitative Study

Issari¹,

Christopoulou²,

Galika³

2021

PSYCH

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The present qualitative study adopted a narrative approach and a social justice, strengths-based outlook in order to explore the life stories of Syrian refugees who lived in Greece waiting to relocate to another EU country. Narrative inquiry places the participant in the center of the research process as the "expert" providing an opportunity to be heard in ways that might otherwise be dismissed, ignored or silenced. We conducted biographical narrative interviews, with the help of interpreters in the context of an NGO. Six participants narrated their life stories in a moving and relatively direct way: the times before the war in Syria, the biographical rupture in their lives once the war broke, the much-enduring journey from Syria to Greece across the Aegean sea, what had sustained them so far, their hopes for the future.

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Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life Stories of Syrian Refugees: A Qualitative Study

Issari¹,

Christopoulou²,

Galika³

2021

PSYCH

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“…The Croatian-Bosnian border marks one of the entry points to the EU and the near end of people's intended journeys. Various routes across Bosnia-Herzegovina have historically been used as the transitory point for migration and smuggling to Western and Northern Europe (Jovanović, 2018), shaped by broader global economic and geopolitical contexts (Hozic, 2004).…”

Section: The Bosnian-croatian Bordermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Croatian-Bosnian border marks one of the entry points to the EU and the near end of people’s intended journeys. Various routes across Bosnia-Herzegovina have historically been used as the transitory point for migration and smuggling to Western and Northern Europe (Jovanović, 2018), shaped by broader global economic and geopolitical contexts (Hozic, 2004). In 2018, larger numbers of people started arriving at this border, in search for an alternative passage after having been stuck in transit for months or years in Greece and Serbia, or in order to find alternative crossing points after existing regional routes became more dangerous and violent.…”

Section: Externalising Identical “Push” Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Augustová

Farrand-Carrapico

Obradović-Wochnik

2023

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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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.

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Historical Layers of Refugee Reception in Border Areas of Italy: Crossroads of Transit and Temporalities of (Im)mobility

degli Uberti,

Altin

2024

Int. Migration & Integration

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In border areas, time and space are constantly suspended from the usual rules along a liminal pathway transforming status and identity. In order to understand how different regimes of mobility and reception influence the experience of time and the subjective actions of both asylum seekers arriving via the so-called Balkan route and Ukrainian refugees fleeing from the war, the paper puts forward an analysis of the multiple scales of migration and reception policies as historically situated practices. How and to what extent has the increasing role of the humanitarian regime contributed to improving or worsening the lives of asylum seekers in borderland places where the memory of wars, civil conflicts, and experiences of refoulement is very much alive? Building on a multilocal ethnography of the temporalities of migrants’ reception, the paper aims at disentangling the historical layers of hospitality in the northeastern Italian border areas of Trieste and Bolzano and the intersecting forms of (im)mobility at play. By addressing “reception” as an entanglement of spatial and temporal practices carried out by migrants, institutional, and humanitarian actors, we discuss not only how time reduces the existence of asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees to an empty and meaningless human condition by exerting control over the subjective experiences, but also how the migrants’ experience of waiting translates into an active state of being with the creative potential to trigger new forms of sociality, solidarity, and senses of belonging.

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“I Refuse to Sink”: Narratives of the Dispossessed Within Refugee Stories on the Balkan Route

Cited by 4 publications

References 34 publications

Life Stories of Syrian Refugees: A Qualitative Study

Life Stories of Syrian Refugees: A Qualitative Study

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

Historical Layers of Refugee Reception in Border Areas of Italy: Crossroads of Transit and Temporalities of (Im)mobility

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