The Balkan Route is the most important overland informal migration corridor in Europe. In late 2015, after the so-called ‘long summer of migration’ (or ‘refugee crisis’), during which almost one million refugees reached Europe via a semi-formal humanitarian corridor, the Balkan Route was gradually closed, a shift marked by the construction of fences and border walls and the increase in episodes of violence and illegal push-backs at the EU’s peripheral borders. From March 2016, a series of deals and decisions were made between the EU and Turkey and among the countries crossed by the Route, formally closing the corridor and blocking virtually all legal and viable pathways into the EU. Despite these solid barriers and border agreements, the Route has remained ‘informally open and active’ – with thousands of refugees continuing to pass along the corridor even during the peak moments of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Crossing Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Croatia, the Balkan Route links Greece to Central and Western Europe. It is made up of a complex geography of formal and informal, visible and ‘invisible’ sites, an assemblage of diverse actors, camps, borders, policing, detention, violence and solidarity, and a multiplicity of micro-routes and passages that is constantly morphing and mutating to adapt to new border policies, fences and walls, changing seasons and geographical conditions. Across and between these interconnected spatialities, refugees continue to forge their trajectories towards Europe by going to ‘The Game,’ the term they use to refer to clandestine journeys and border crossings. The irony of this playful name is not lost on the refugees who coined it. The Game is often a protracted, dangerous journey, requiring movements forward, backward, and laterally along the Route, entering and exiting multiple states, including moments in which refugees may be temporarily incorporated into formal asylum procedures or contained in institutional camps along the way. Yet, through The Game, refugees themselves produce a counter-geography which is more than just a chaotic series of paths, illegal border crossings, and clusters of tents. It is, rather, a constellation of strategically organised refugee spatialities and imaginative geographies, marked by the hopes and ambitions of seeking a better life in Europe, together with memories, pain and trauma of war, exile and of the perilous journey, fear and excitement for the future, success and failure, moments of celebration and of desperation. But what do we really know about the geographies produced by The Game? What actually takes place within and between the informal refugee sites along the Balkan Route? What more is there to say about the spatialities of informal migration corridors towards Europe?
Across the precarious, ambivalent, ever-changing circumstances of the Balkan Route, a new, informal, ‘hidden geography’ of makeshift camps has emerged, hosting thousands of refugees as they make repeated attempts to enter Europe. Generated and organised by the refugees who occupy them, and driven by an ‘irresistible desire’ to continue their journeys, these ‘make-shift’ spaces serve as temporary, informal shelters, nodes of services and information, where refugees meet smugglers, stop, wait and organise their next move. Makeshift camps are often established around bottlenecks, ‘chokepoints’, or transit hubs like ports or railways stations along well-travelled migration routes across the continent where informal mobilities are curtailed, blocked, or interrupted by enhanced borders and push-backs, but also negotiated and facilitated by onward transport options, smugglers, and informal aid. As The Game becomes increasingly protracted and unsafe, makeshift camps have become essential pivot-points for refugee journeys to Europe, and have proliferated around the continent, emerging also in fields, forests, under bridges, in old factories, warehouses, farm-houses, empty apartments and other abandoned sites where squatting may be tolerated or unnoticed for extended periods of time. Despite this proliferation, however, the scholarship on the role played by makeshift camps in the production of informal corridors has remained very limited. In fact, there has been no scholarship on entire informal migration corridors, nor on how to conduct research on them.
Addressing this crucial gap in the existing literature, TheGAME aims to understand how informal migration corridors work by exploring the ways in which they are conceived, spatialized, and reproduced. More specifically, the project has the following four objectives:
1. To theorise the makeshift camp as a distinct spatiality, which produces its own particular social and political life
2. To investigate the archipelago of makeshift camps along the Balkan Route as an interconnected, refugee-generated, counter-geography
3. To produce an archive-in-progress documenting the multi-temporal and multi-spatial aspects of a corridor constantly morphing and re-inventing itself
4. To propose countermapping as a methodological approach providing critical understanding of how informal migration corridor works
Challenging the conventional framing of makeshift camps as marginal spaces, TheGAME positions makeshift camps at the core of the analysis of the Balkan route – as spaces from which there is much more to learn to understand how informal migration corridors work. Furthermore, by studying informal migration corridors through the makeshift camp, TheGAME has the potential to disrupt and reshape studies on camps within and beyond geography.
