Movements upon movements: Refugee and activist struggles to open the Balkan route to Europe

Migration control entangled with local histories: The case of Greek–Turkish regime of bordering

“…Likewise, we may expect considerably different local responses from the Kurdish-majority cities of Turkey, where we observe a long history of state violence and oppression of Kurds and other minorities, and hence a different sense of militarized border. Yet, there has been increased tendency of anti-Syrian sentiments among the Kurdish grassroots (S ¸eno guz, 2017), unlike Albaniandominated Southern Serbia where locally driven alternative acts of citizenship emerged in 2015 (El-Shaarawi and Razsa, 2019). In this light, it is doubtful that the local state and nonstate actors would have acted any differently than those in Edirne, had the 2015 demonstration in Edirne happened elsewhere in Turkey.…”

“…Local civil society organizations and politically active citizens mainly watched from a distance and let the officials do their job of containing and stopping further movement across the border. 1 Activists from across Europe joined local communities along the route to support migrants crossing borders, re-routing, or waiting along the route, leading to scholarly debates on the potential of these new forms of solidarity and resistance to unsettle established notions of citizenship (Benzec and Kurnik, 2020; El-Shaarawi and Razsa, 2019; Kasparek and Speer, 2015). But why the inertia among Edirneans, especially when local officials showed solidarity with those on the move?…”

“…Post-colonial accounts have recently shed light on the ways in which historical path dependencies and decolonization processes continue to shape contemporary migration politics, fixating on the global, regional, or national level (cf. El-Enany, 2020; El Qadim, 2017) and largely forgoing locally grounded analyses (for an exception, see El-Shaarawi and Razsa, 2019).…”

Reconsidering the vignette as method

“…They also include wider considerations about the politics that inhere in socially engaged art at times of crisis; its attempts at collaboration with anthropology (Rikou & Yalouri, 2018;Wright, 2018); the difficulties of such art disengaging from colonial frames (Kalantzis, forthcoming); what Herzfeld (2020) has called "crypto-colonial" modes of thinking (see also Kalantzis, 2020); and the role that art can play in collaborations that seek to decolonize the discipline (Alonso Bejarano et al, 2019;Khosravi, 2021). They are aware of concerns about the role of activism and ethical commitments (Fobear, 2017;Jones, 2018;Tello, 2016;Yalouri, 2019) and of the increasing significance of collaborations between researchers, projects, and policy agendas (Andersson, 2017;Doering-White et al, 2017;El-Shaarawi & Razsa, 2019;Fassin, 2015).…”

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

“…As we will argue, the marking out of the Western Balkans as a criminal and lawless "badlands" (Bird et al, 2021), as an unruly, unregulated wild zone at Europe's immediate frontier -that which Rexhepi (2018Rexhepi ( : 2218 has termed a "zone of vulnerability requiring constant surveillance"-is a crucial part of the geographical imaginaries that describe the Route and that, accordingly, prescribe the appropriate ways to contain its dangerous "flows" before they reach the borders of the EU. Describing the Route as an evershifting, "under-ground" and informal "corridor" -descriptions that populate both the European mass media and EU policy documents -further embeds today's migration with the region's longer associations with a racialized criminality (Bird et al, 2021;El-Sharaawi and Razsa, 2019). It is precisely such geographical imaginaries of exceptionality, danger, and lawlessness that justify the violent technologies of bordering along the Balkan Route today.…”