Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SECURE BORDERS (The EU Migration/Refugee crisis and border security: a contribution to theory and practice through the case of Hungarian-Serb border policing practices)
Reporting period: 2020-11-01 to 2022-10-31
This project focused on border security at the Hungarian-Serbian border and on the communities living and working at the border. The aim was to offer a deeper understanding of these communities and how they manage security concerns locally in order to analyze the impact of migration, especially in transit countries like Hungary. Transit communities at the Hungarian-Serbian border are generally poorer but homogenous groups and tend to vote for far-right candidates. Understanding these communities’ grievances is the first step towards offering new ways to engage with them. This is a tall task as fear-based politics has been applied not only at this border region in Hungary but in general. Therefore, openness does not come easily to communities like this. Through my fieldwork and publications, especially non-academic ones and those published in Hungarian, I strive to offer an opening through engagement.
I began my fieldwork at the Hungarian-Serbian border in the middle of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite having to change my initial plans, I collected over 50 interviews with locals who live and work at the four border crossings my study focused on. Many of those who are working for the border police or related agencies talked to me in their personal capacity rather than in their official one. Data collection was very difficult due to people having to quarantine, work longer hours, or me having to quarantine and wait for restrictions to be lifted. These constraints, however, presented me with different opportunities. I immersed myself in this landscape by driving, biking, and walking through it; first with the locals, but as I learned more and more about the area, I went on my own discovery, often with my dog Bonnie. Along the way, I took notes of this vast borderland and photos to remind me of the landscape. This borderland has a specific geography that is unusual in Hungary and Europe in general. Next to small villages and towns, people live in farmsteads spread throughout the area covering 175 km of border. The photos I took serve as the base of the photographic essay I titled “Borderscapes/Határtérség” (Palgrave). The aim of this publication is for my work to reach an audience beyond academia. Visual methodologies help to connect an audience to difficult topics like migration. This would also help people, including policymakers, who are not familiar with the geographical position of this border to engage with it and better understand the concerns of the people living there.
Besides Borderscapes, I published two more theoretically oriented pieces on the topic. One piece focused on the securitization of migration by Hungarian and Slovakian governments at the height of the refugee ‘crisis’ and how both governments facilitated making refugees a security priority. This comparative work revealed how both governments used this event for domestic political gains despite only one of them (Hungary) having had people migrating through it. The second piece compared the Turkish and Hungarian leaderships and their ways of deploying migration policy to gain a higher standing in the global hierarchical order. Applying a postcolonial feminist lens revealed the masculine anxieties both leaders utilized to address migration policy.
Besides Borderscapes, I published two more theoretically oriented pieces on the topic. One piece focused on the securitization of migration by Hungarian and Slovakian governments at the height of the refugee ‘crisis’ and how both governments facilitated making refugees a security priority. This comparative work revealed how both governments used this event for domestic political gains despite only one of them (Hungary) having had people migrating through it. The second piece compared the Turkish and Hungarian leaderships and their ways of deploying migration policy to gain a higher standing in the global hierarchical order. Applying a postcolonial feminist lens revealed the masculine anxieties both leaders utilized to address migration policy.
At the early stage of the project, I published an article in International Politics focusing on the facilitating conditions that the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, deployed to securitize people migrating through Hungary and create a ‘crisis’. As my fieldwork progressed, I quickly realized that Central and Eastern Europe would also benefit from the application of a postcolonial lens when considering the region. While this part of Europe might not have had the same postcolonial experience as African colonies or India, for example, it has certainly lived with the postcolonial system and has either been colonized or acted as a colonial power vis-à-vis to neighboring countries. Considering specifically Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe in general as postcolonial space is not a usual route. By following it, it helped me to reconceptualize migration and border security beyond the rigid margins of the Security Studies scope, and to link it to how governments utilize this policy area to gain more recognition within the current hierarchical order. This article was published by European Security. Beyond this theoretical move, two of my forthcoming publications, Borderscapes/Határtérség along with my forthcoming book on Narratives of Migration ‘Crisis’ (CEU Press), offer better understandings of the security dilemma that locals face specifically at the Hungarian-Serbian border but also transit communities more generally. These publications are narratives supported by visual methodologies. The methodological choices in both publications allow a wider audience to access the findings of the project.