Paper details

Paper authors	Talitha Dubow
In panel on	Making Live, Letting Die at Europe’s Borders – violence and resistance and human mobility
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person & Online

Abstract

This article examines the decision-making processes of migrants whose journeys onwards from Turkey, along the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Balkan routes, have become increasingly protracted, dangerous and uncertain since the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement and the official ‘closure’ of the Western Balkans ‘corridor’ in early 2016. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 44 Afghan and Syrian asylum-seekers interviewed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Turkey in early 2019. The paper firstly illustrates how a ‘politics of exhaustion’ (de Vries and Guild, 2019) – which seeks to contain and deter the ‘disobedient movements’ (Stierl, 2019) that have persisted post-2016 – plays out in the Balkan region. Secondly, the case study contributes to an understanding of migrant decision-making ‘in transit’; specifically, the ‘trajectory’ decisions (i.e. decisions regarding how to reach an intended destination) that constitute the third, but hitherto underexamined, aspect of decision-making following van der Velde & van Naerssen’s (2011) ‘threshold’ model of migration decisions. Overall, the article examines how migrants in the Balkan region continue to chart a path forwards, seeking to reciprocally ‘exhaust’ the measures designed to immobilise them, and furthers a conceptual understanding of the interplay of aspirations and capabilities in a transit migration context.

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