Becoming a Smuggler: Migration and Violence at EU External Borders

Abstract

Migrants' involvement in smuggling increases alongside restricted cross-border movement and violent borders, yet this dynamic is usually examined from migrants' position as clients. In this article, we move away from migrants and smugglers as two separate roles and question migrants' aspirations to and experiences of resorting to smuggling networks as workers in the context of EU land borders, where direct violence is used daily to fight cross-border crime. By doing so, we move further the examination of fluid relations in smuggling provisions and the way they are intertwined with care and exploitation, as shaped and circumscribed by violent borders. The article illustrates the intersections between border violence and migrants' active involvement in smuggling by drawing on the case study of an anonymised Border Town and multi-site, multi-author fieldwork from Serbia and Bosnia. By questioning migrants' experiences of shifting roles from clients to service providers, and by taking into account their work in smuggling provision, we show that, in a situation of protracted vulnerability orchestrated by border violence, state and law enforcement, the categories -"migrant" and "smugglers" -can blur.

Makeshift camp geographies and informal migration corridors

“…‘Jungles’ have also proliferated along the so-called Balkan Route corridor – around border zones, at the outskirts of cities and in various transit zones and bottleneck sites where refugee mobility has become more difficult, dangerous and protracted (Arsenijević et al, 2017; Border Violence Monitoring Network et al, 2020; Isakjee et al, 2020; Minca and Collins, 2021). They have emerged particularly in the northern border zones of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Augustová, 2020; Augustová et al, 2021; Jordan and Minca, 2022; Jordan and Moser, 2020; Minca and Umek, 2020; No Name Kitchen; Rigardu; SOS Velika Kladuša; Balkan Info Van, 2018); in northern Greece (Anastasiadou et al, 2017; Moving Europe, 2017; Pelliccia, 2019), as well as in many other micro-sites across the corridor that have received very little academic attention to date.…”

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

“…Some recent interventions have recognised the diverse actors that may be present in the makeshift camp—such as smugglers (Augustová et al. 2021), volunteers (Agier et al. 2019; Jordan and Moser 2020; Sandri 2018), and researchers (Jordan and Minca 2022; Minca 2022)—but engagement with the diverse forms in which power is organised and enacted here has remained limited.…”

“…As has been explored by scholars elsewhere, the role of smugglers is often highly ambivalent, possibly involving violence, but also solidarity, providing essential services and displaying blurred boundaries as many smugglers are also refugees themselves (Achilli 2018; Augustová et al. 2021; Mandić 2017; Tinti and Reitano 2017). Within makeshift camps and the periods of immobility and waiting en route, camp leaders may also rely upon this ever‐present threat of violence, through their possession of weapons, forms of intimidation and manipulation, made possible due to the fact that they often act as the facilitators of onward migration for many in the makeshift camp.…”

Political geography II: Violence

“…The vulnerability of border crossing for migrants can also lead individuals to engage in extra-legal activities as a survival tactic. The experiences of prolonged vulnerability associated with violence at/across borders illustrate the overlapping formations of violence and victimizations along with blurring the distinctions between vulnerable migrant and criminalized smuggler (Augustova et al, 2021). This and other analyses expose binary categorizations as a method of institutionalized violence.…”