Survivors of Violence
Dismissal, refusal, expulsion, refoulement or pushbacks... Words cannot express the indelible imprint of these experiences of violence. Nor can numbers measure the impact of these inhuman and degrading practices. But in the presence of the people it affects, this widespread violence takes on a consistency: that of the countless traces left by pushbacks on bodies and in traumatic narratives.
In Borići and Lipa, everyone carries with them, or on them, a story of physical or psychological violence endured. M* has an injured leg from his last attempt to enter Croatia, and can no longer afford to walk, in the absence of proper examination and care. For T*, his life's work and dreams were shattered at the Croatian border: “My boxing career came to an end because the Croatian police injured my right and left knees”. His mental strength enables him to put things into perspective: “There are those who have become completely unable to walk, and this continues to happen here in Bosnia”. F* says he has suffered violence at the hands of the Croatian police, which he doesn't allow himself to detail. E* explains that music gives him the strength not to go mad.
Far from the miserabilist or victimizing portrayals – which would have us believe that people who are violently repressed are victims by nature, when in fact they are victims of clearly identifiable legislation, systems and practices (Fassin 2023) – it is important to take the time to ask a simple question: who are the people targeted by such violence?
“Here, you could write a book about everyone”. As R*, one of the men I met in Lipa, suggests, migratory journeys are rich and plural. The routes differ, whether you come from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. The socio-economic profiles range from the unemployed, to students, to the qualified; in Lipa, you'll find a cook, an economist, an engineer, a musician, a professional boxer... The taxi drivers know it well: “Among them, you'll find highly educated people, graduates, even professors”. These multiple experiences show that it is pointless to compare the reasons for departure: people flee wars as much as persecutions, or social and political contexts that make a decent life impossible.
Another disturbing trend is that many of the people blocked in the canton of Una-Sana have already spent time in EU member states, sometimes for several years, before new physical and administrative barriers were erected. These are the result of tougher legislation introduced with the construction of the Schengen area in the 2000s. Control is now exercised upstream of the Schengen area, from the moment a Schengen visa application is submitted in the country of departure; it then extends to all transit countries, where EU-funded control systems are outsourced; finally, administrative barriers are put in place following forced returns to the country of origin, for example via bans from European territory.
J* tells me that he lived legally in France in the 1990s, where part of his family still lives, before returning to Tunisia; to make the same journey again twenty years later, he had to take an illegal route through Turkey, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he is now at a standstill. For his part, X* was able to work for two years in Italy after leaving Morocco; he was then deported to Serbia, from where he resumed his journey towards Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro, where I met him before he in turn joined one of the IOM camps in Bosnia.
These stories illustrate that people caught in the “buffer-zone” of the Balkan borders are subject to a gradual process of irregulaziration or illegalization” (Bauder 2013; Akoka 2017). As Steffen Mau (2023) rightly writes, a “cascade of borders” stands in front of those who take the Balkan routes. But this demultiplied border operates beyond the Balkan space: it is “embedded in a supra-regional constellation” and integrated into EU border and migration management – or, more precisely, reactivated in the Balkans by the EU.
People caught up in these extended border meshes experience cumulative, gradual violence. Beyond its administrative, filtering function, the Balkan “buffer-zone” fulfils a biopolitical, degrading function: if people categorized as undesirables don't give up, they arrive in Europe increasingly destroyed by the crossing.
10/11/2025
This text is taken from the series of portfolio articles “Rivers are deadly if you're not on the right side” previously published on Mediapart, Le Courrier des Balkans, visioncarto.net and Migreurop. This series of portfolio articles is the result of field research carried out in the spring of 2024 in several South-East European countries: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania. This publication is sent to all interlocutors met in the field. To preserve their anonymity, the exiled people are referred to here by a randomly assigned letter, with their consent.
Author would like to thank the exiled people she met on these roads and along these rivers, the people from the collectives, associations, universities and institutions with whom she spoke, as well as Louis Fernier, Romain Kosellek, Eva Ottavy, Elsa Putelat and Marijana Hameršak for their invaluable contributions prior to and during this field mission.
Literature
Akoka Karen. 2017. "Refugees and Migrants". In The Atlas of Migration in Europe. A Critical Geography of Migration Policies, Migreurop. Clochard Olivier, ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 18.
Bauder, Harald. 2013. „Why we should use the term illegalized immigrant“. RCIS Research Brief 1. Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement. Ryerson University.
Fassin, Didier. 2023. Les épreuves de la frontière (3). Lecture at the Collège de France on April 19, 2023.
Mau, Steffen. 2023. La réinvention de la frontière au XXIe siècle. Translated by Christophe Lucchese. Paris : Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.