Paper details
| Paper authors | Elissa Helms |
| In panel on | Resisting Border Violence: The Role of Civil Society, Local Actors, and Researchers |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
Bihać is a small town in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina near the border with Croatia, just outside the EU. When thousands of migrants, refugees, and other “people on the move” got stuck there, delayed by violent pushbacks in their journey to the more prosperous EU countries, Bihać became the site of border “externalization” policies that further dehumanized the migrants as objects of both security and humanitarian policies. EU-funded camps run by the IOM and partner organizations became sites of official humanitarian work, yet the migrants carved out alternative spaces of humanitarian action by squatting in abandoned buildings, fields, and wooded areas around the town and drawing aid from sympathetic local volunteers. Based on ten months of ethnographic research in 2019-20 and after, this paper analyzes local autonomous aid as a form of resistance to the externalizing effects of the EU border regime. Local aid-givers recognized the “slow violence” and dehumanization of migrants’ illegalized position on the Bosnian side of the border. By providing food, clothing, supplies, and human contact, the volunteers made it possible for migrants to continue their journeys and defy the dehumanization imposed by both the border regime and the policy of externalization.
Back