The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

Mental Health in the Transit Context: Evidence from 10 Countries

“…One of the main land transit routes refugees are using, with over 150,000 crossings in 2019 [ 5 ], is the Western Balkan route, which includes Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo (This designation is without prejudice to positions on status and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence [ 5 ]. After EU migration governance policies sought to close the Balkan route following the spring of 2016, refugees are increasingly pushed to try “The Game”, informal travel into Western Europe [ 6 ]. For the majority, transit from their homes to the destination countries does not represent a journey but rather the advent of transit as a new reality of living on the move.…”

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

“…The biopolitical control of migrants through mobility across such carceral spaces has been discussed elsewhere in the Mediterranean by Tazzioli (2020: 31) who describes how migrants are “crafted as possible objects of knowledge” through mechanisms of partition, that create “generalizable singularities [that] translate the materiality of individual stories and identities into a virtual population that has not only a descriptive function but also an anticipatory one that works as a blueprint for partitioning migrants”. In the context of the Balkan Route specifically, Minca and Collins (2021: 2) have examined such migratory biopolitics as part of what they term “The Game”: the term coined by migrants to describe their multiple attempts to reach the EU through the Balkan Route, as “a spatial tactic implemented by the refugees as a way of engaging with the impossibility of legally travelling to their desired destinations” (Minca and Collins, 2021: 2).…”

“…The surge of arrivals at the Bosnian border, mainly in the Una Sana Canton and the refugee camps in the municipalities of Bihać and Velika Kladuša, quickly led to the emergence of a humanitarian crisis in the region (Halimović, 2019). The Italian border city of Trieste, at the same time, came to be identified by the migrants as the point of entry of the Route into the EU (Minca and Umek, 2020), and was later conceptualized as the “Endgame” of the Balkan Route (Minca and Collins, 2021: 9).…”

“…These countries are, however, labelled as “transit countries” in EU policy-solutions and practices, and, therefore, deemed responsible for the management of migrants on their territories. The use of the term “transit country” is also problematic insofar as it implies that there is no limitation to the agency of migrants’ journeys, their ability to choose their own path and, therefore, their own “destination country” (a point contested by Minca and Collins (2021) in their conceptualization of “The Game”; see also Tazzioli, 2018). This imaginary also entirely occludes the ways in which specific policy choices and practices of border control (both EU and those implemented by Western Balkan states) act to obstacle and re-direct migrant journeys (see Bird et al., 2021) and, therefore, obscures the responsibility of the EU.…”

Micro‐Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp: The Grafosrem Factory in Šid, Serbia

“…Despite the closure of most borders in 2016, which made it virtually impossible to legally move north, refugee passages have continued, due, in part, to the establishment of a network of institutional refugee camps by state authorities as well as the emergence of an archipelago of makeshift camps across the Route, established by refugees themselves, often with the assistance of grassroots volunteer organisations. Makeshift camps are informal settlements where onward transit is facilitated, where refugees may spend extended periods waiting, resting, and preparing for “The Game”—the term used by refugees to denote their repeated clandestine border‐crossing attempts (Minca and Collins 2021). As the external borders of Europe become ever more enhanced and militarised, and informal passages from the Balkan Route northwards more protracted, difficult, dangerous, and expensive, makeshift camps have become crucial nodes of informal refugee (im)mobilities, within which there emerges a distinct social and political life.…”