Description du projet
Suivre la migration informelle le long de la route des Balkans
Chaque année, des milliers de migrants (principalement originaires de Syrie, d’Irak, d’Afghanistan, du Pakistan et d’Afrique du Nord) empruntent la «route des Balkans». Considérée comme le principal couloir migratoire par voie terrestre en Europe, cette route consiste en une géographie complexe de sites formels et informels, visibles et «invisibles», théâtre du «game», terme employé par les migrants pour désigner leur traversée irrégulière de la région. Le long de cette route, un archipel de camps de fortune a fait surface, servant d’abris temporaires et de sites dans lesquels les migrants peuvent se rencontrer, se reposer et planifier leurs prochaines étapes. Le projet TheGAME, financé par le CER, examinera les réalités sociales et politiques de ces camps de fortune tout en les considérant comme des formations géographiques interconnectées créatrices de couloirs, essentielles aux nombreuses expériences des migrants sur la route des Balkans.
Objectif
The Balkan Route is the most important overland informal migration corridor in Europe, taken by thousands of refugees every year. Linking Greece to Western Europe across Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Croatia, the Route is a complex geography of formal and informal, visible and ‘invisible’ sites; an assemblage of diverse actors, camps, borders, violence, solidarity, and a multiplicity of micro-routes, constantly adapting and shifting. Across and between these interconnected spatialities, refugees forge their trajectories towards Europe through ‘The Game,’ the term they use to refer to clandestine journeys. Along the Route, an archipelago of makeshift camps has emerged, hosting thousands of refugees as they repeatedly attempt to enter Europe. Key in producing and sustaining The Game, these sites serve as temporary shelters, nodes of services and information, where refugees meet smugglers, wait, and plan the next move. To understand how informal migration corridors work TheGAME aims to: (1) theorize makeshift camps as distinct spatialities with a unique social and political life; (2) investigate the Route’s archipelago of makeshift camp as an inter-connected, corridor-forming counter-geography; (3) produce an archive-in-progress documenting refugee experiences of a corridor endlessly re-invented across space and time; (4) employ counter-mapping as a methodology capable of critically understanding how the Balkan Route functions and propose a novel and replicable approach to studying informal migration corridors globally. TheGAME is the first transnational, multi-sited, multi-temporal, extensive ethnographic research on an entire informal migration corridor, a ground-breaking project with the potential to disrupt how we understand refugee informal mobilities and camps, generate cutting-edge academic work and shape new directions for Camp Studies and Political Geography.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
40126 Bologna
Italie