The impact of the refugee crisis in the Balkans: A drift towards security

Šabić, Senada Šelo

doi:10.11643/issn.2217-995x171sps80

Cited by 24 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…the securitization of migration and the blooming research of migration as a security topic in the past two decades (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998;Huysmans 2000;Šabić 2017).…”

Section: O N L I N E F I R S Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of (in)security: Visualizing borders, migrants and control in Serbia's news media

Krstić

2024

J Regional Security

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Media images of borders and their control have been one of the most dominant frames in reporting on the migrant crisis in European media and the negative coverage of the topic of migrants, presenting them as a threat to security and public health dominates media narratives around the world. This paper examines the way migrants and refugees have been portrayed on the borders of Serbia, a transit country alongside the Western Balkans migration corridor. The mixed method analysis is based on 300 images published in relevant national and regional print media and their online versions from 2015 until 2020. The results show that the visual depiction of walls, wires, control, law and order, modern technological equipment, security providers, and important political authorities have been often intensified with sensational headlines and tabloid coverage and at the same time confronted with images framing migrants as violent and deviant, threatening borders, people, and security.

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“…the securitization of migration and the blooming research of migration as a security topic in the past two decades (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998;Huysmans 2000;Šabić 2017).…”

Section: O N L I N E F I R S Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of (in)security: Visualizing borders, migrants and control in Serbia's news media

Krstić

2024

J Regional Security

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“…This Route “extend[s] from the Eastern Mediterranean Route going from Turkey through Greece, the countries of former Yugoslavia, continuing through to Hungary in the North and Austria in the West” (Ilievski and Tasev, 2019: 59–60). Scholarship on the most recent iterations of the Route has focused principally on the first phases of the “long summer of migration” (Ilievski and Serbos, 2016), and the role of external actors such as Turkey (Engler, 2019; Tsarouhas, 2019) in negotiating policy solutions aimed at governing migration along the route.Other work has examined how the Route’s formal “closure” in 2016, and informal re-opening, have impacted Western Balkan countries, with a progressive shift from humanitarian to securitized responses to migration (Prodromidou et al., 2019; Šelo Šabić, 2017; Sicurella, 2017; Zaragoza-Cristiani, 2017) noting how the securitization of migration contributed to turning the Western Balkans into a de facto buffer-area, or a series of “transit-countries”, to which the management of the refugee crisis could be outsourced. 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).…”

Section: Understanding the Balkan Routementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Bergesio

Białasiewicz

2023

Environ Plan D

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This article examines some of the contested geographical imaginaries of the so-called “Balkan Route” as part of the wider Mediterranean migration complex. More specifically, we interrogate how such varied imaginaries of the Route contribute to shaping conflicting geographies of responsibility for migration in the region among a shifting set of international and state actors. We highlight how the attribution of responsibility for the governance of migration is shaped by numerous geographical and historical entanglements, including on-going processes of post-conflict state-making and the geopolitics of European Union accession, with migrants becoming pawns in the negotiation of preferential relations between the countries of the region and the European Union. Focusing in particular on the framing of migration policy responses along the Croatia–Bosnia and Italy–Slovenia sections of the Route, we examine the perspectives of both policy-makers and solidarity networks active in the area, noting how their divergent narratives contribute to the proliferation of conflicting formal and informal practices of border control.

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“…The first phase of the migrant crisis in Serbia was marked by a rather quick transit of migrants, who were entering Serbia in a small town on the Serbian–Macedonian border and leaving toward Hungary or Croatia as soon as possible, often in less than 72 hr. Lured by initial “refugees welcome” policy (Šelo Šabić, 2017) of some EU Member States, migrants were not applying for asylum in Serbia, but only transiting toward more desirable countries of destination in Western Europe. To meet migrants’ basic needs, Serbia significantly improved its reception capacities with the help of international donors, by opening numerous reception centers throughout the country (UNHCR, 2017, p. 1).…”

Section: The Emergence Of Ontological Insecurity During the Migrant C...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ontological Insecurity as an Emergent Phenomenon

Ejdus

Rečević

2021

European Psychologist

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Abstract. One of the central debates in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has been about the level-of-analysis. While some authors focus on individuals, others have scaled up the concept and applied it to collectives such as states as the main ontological security seekers. In this article, we contribute to the level-of-analysis debate in OSS by providing a novel argument in defense of scaling up. By drawing on the literatures on complexity and securitization, we conceptualize ontological security as an emergent phenomenon. It arises from the ground-up and is driven by feedback loops in a non-linear and spontaneous fashion from horizontal micro-interactions and securitizations from below, ultimately reaching a tipping point. We illustrate this argument in a case study of anti-immigrant mobilization in Serbia since the outbreak of the European migration crisis (2015–2020). At the outset of the crisis, state officials interpreted the migration crisis as a manageable and temporary situation, adopted an “open door” policy and even banned far-right extremist demonstrations against migration. Over time, however, ontological insecurity over the migrant threat has gradually emerged from the bottom-up through a cascade of rumors, connective action, and everyday securitizing acts. While it might be too early to conclude that the national tipping point has been reached, this case study clearly shows why ontological insecurity merits to be studied as an emergent phenomenon.

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The impact of the refugee crisis in the Balkans: A drift towards security

Cited by 24 publications

References 4 publications

Images of (in)security: Visualizing borders, migrants and control in Serbia's news media

Images of (in)security: Visualizing borders, migrants and control in Serbia's news media

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

Ontological Insecurity as an Emergent Phenomenon

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