Enforcing and disrupting circular movement in an EU Borderscape: housingscaping in Serbia

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

“…For example, the “closure” of the Hungarian border with barbed wire fences and increased violence—the original exit point of the early iteration of the Balkan Route—was supported by Viktor Orban’s narratives about “defending Christianity” from the “virus of terrorism” and “mixed‐race nations” (Fekete 2018). Each border closure along the Balkan Route pushed, pulled and diverted displaced people around the region in circulatory movements into increasingly precarious border crossings (Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica 2019). When apprehended in Croatia and Slovenia, migrants are often expelled back to Bosnia in what has come to be termed as a “pushback”.…”

The ‘Badlands’ of the ‘Balkan Route’: Policy and Spatial Effects on Urban Refugee Housing

“…How do assumptions about space, place, and spatiality, shape European Union and national‐level policies on refugee accommodation and support? Within this article we interweave Dikeç’s, (2007) conceptualisation of the ‘badlands’, with questions of race, space and place (Neely and Samura, 2011; Shabazz, 2015) as well as our own empirical research carried out between 2015 and 2019 along the so‐called ‘Balkan Route’. We engage with the concept of the ‘badlands’ as a lens through which to consider the different types of housing made available for refugees in key urban centres in Greece and Serbia.…”

“…We engage with the concept of the ‘badlands’ as a lens through which to consider the different types of housing made available for refugees in key urban centres in Greece and Serbia. We examine the relationships between refugee camps, reception and identification centres (RICs) and urban, informal housing, paying particular attention to how formal camps and informal housing are imagined, conceptualised, ordered and othered (Neely and Samura, 2011). Following Dikeç, we ask: how do policies which envisage camps and RICs as the ‘best place’ for refugees, and urban hubs as spaces of criminality, constitute spaces of intervention?…”

“…The paper proceeds as follows. We first set out the theoretical framework in which we discuss how we draw on the work of Mustafa Dikeç, as well as scholarship on race, space and place (Neely and Samura, 2011; Shabazz, 2015) to make sense of policy interventions and how they constitute spaces. We then discuss our methods before exploring the context of the ‘Balkan Route’ and the way in which this label itself acts as a process of articulation (cf.…”

“…Dikeç, 2007), of distancing and ‘othering’ (Trakilović, 2019). Finally, we present more specific qualitative data on RICs in Serbia and Greece, as well as informal refugee accommodation in urban hubs, and discuss the policy interventions which constitute and perpetuate the ideas of the ‘badlands’, as a racialised and othered space (Neeley and Samura, 2011), presented against the camp, the ‘most suitable accommodation’.…”