Researching migrants in informal transit camps along the Balkan Route: Reflections on volunteer activism, access, and reciprocity

Abstract

The changing geographies of irregular migration require new methodological approaches and modes of researcher engagement. In and around Europe, migrants are increasingly residing in unconventional, dynamic, and diverse spaces such as informal transit camps. Along the Balkan Route, these temporary, makeshift encampments are emerging as a result of the EU's crackdown on border controls, tightening restrictions on asylum legislation and aid provision, and increasingly long, difficult, and fragmented migratory journeys. Across cities, border-zones, and at strategic transit hubs, immobilised migrants have established informal transit camps where they may temporarily reside and access services, information, and smugglers before their next clandestine attempt to cross into the EU. Due to transit state policies that effectively ignore these transit camps and ban larger NGOs from operating there, the majority of services and humanitarian aid is provided by small, grassroots organisations and unpaid volunteers. The proliferation of informal transit camps, and the particular social constellations of actors who reside and operate in these spaces, call for further scholarly attention. In this paper, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities of taking on a role as a volunteer while conducting research among migrants in informal transit camps. By considering the acute conditions of informality, vulnerability, and precariousness, this paper illustrates how volunteering in this context is a way of gaining access to the site, establishing rapport and legitimacy, and fostering reciprocity among migrant subjects. Drawing from fieldwork along the Balkan Route as a volunteerresearcher, this paper examines methodology, best practices, positionality, and the ethical benefits and limitations of highly participatory, engagement-driven research in informal transit camps at Europe's periphery.

Qualitative research methods I: Emotionally engaged approaches to working with vulnerable participants

“…Existing ethics protocols are imbued with the guidance to ‘do no harm’; from the obvious, where our presence endangers, for example making refugee camps or illicit livelihoods more visible to authorities (Hagan, 2021), to managing the entanglements of researcher and participant life course where the boundaries of interpersonal relationships become difficult to judge (Aroussi, 2020). There can be isolation and guilt for the researcher at the end of a project, while participants are left to continue in precarity, in pain (Dempsey, 2018; Jordan and Moser, 2020; Keyel, 2021; Lewis, 2017; Wimark et al, 2017; Zonjić, 2021). The hyper-reflexivity associated with some qualitative methods such as ethnography, can be an ‘intensely demanding form of emotional labour, which can take its toll on researcher well-being’ (Akehurst and Scott, 2021: 2–3).…”

“…‘Do no harm’ requires that researchers have the ability to recognise our own limits, particularly if research slides into a therapeutic space, for example understanding when participants are not ready to discuss painful experiences even after they have given consent (Aroussi, 2020). There is a need to recognise when we do not have requisite skills and need training or additional support (Jordan and Moser, 2020). Neal (2020: 414), for example argues for the need to ‘prioritise and cultivate multicultural research skills and competencies’ in recognition of the increasingly diverse and socially differentiated world in which research is situated.…”

“…This poses a series of challenges for qualitative approaches, particularly when working with people in psychological and physical pain, such as refugees, victims of sexual and racial violence, those in the criminal justice system, those who grieve. Working with vulnerable groups has been widely influenced by feminist and post-colonial methodologies that attempt to flatten power relations between researcher and participants, to ‘empower’ or give voice, and to acknowledge the impact of researcher standpoint (Aroussi, 2020; Daley, 2020; Dempsey, 2018; Hagan, 2021; Jordan and Moser, 2020; Sleijpen et al, 2016; Wimark et al, 2017).…”

Closing camps

“…After its closure, the Idomeni informal encampment which hosted up to 15,000 refugees stranded for months at the border with North Macedonia in Spring 2016 seemed quickly forgotten. Other smaller, makeshift camps emerged along the so-called Balkan Route, part of a broader spatial pattern of camps that ‘appear and disappear’ (Jordan and Moser, 2020; Katz et al, 2018: 3; Minca et al, 2018, 2019; Minca and Umek, 2020; Šantic et al, 2019; Stojić Mitrović et al, 2020; Thorpe, 2019). In such landscapes, formal camps and makeshift encampments have a ‘complementary, almost symbiotic relationship’ (Martin et al, 2020: 744).…”

Makeshift camp methodologies along the Balkan Route

“…In his work in Preševo, an official camp in Serbia, Mandić (2018) notes the ‘near unanimous contempt expressed for journalists who visit [the camps] fleetingly (“like a zoo”), ask a few questions, and abscond forever’ … These short visits are frustrating for some of the long‐term migrant residents that have witnessed countless journalists come, ask for stories and personal details, and leave without providing anything to those who gave their time. (2020, p. 3)…”