Claudio Minca

The ‘Game’ is a term used to refer to irregular journeys people must use to transit through different Balkan countries on their way to parts of Western Europe. The Game consists of a set of spatial practices specific to connecting different sites, border areas and actors along the way. Key to traversing this space are Google Maps used by people migrating and smugglers. These maps are especially made, marked and edited by users to connect different parts of the Game. While using the Google Maps base, they consist of their own archive, ways of crafting and economies of circulation. We theorise on this use of cartographic tools along the Balkan route, to inquire further into the functions of mapping in migration politics and to push concepts like counter‐mapping further. While the role of cartography in migration management has been analysed, as have distinct counter‐cartographic experiments to advocate for freedom of movement, the role of maps that facilitate the actual journeys of people migrating (or their facilitators) has rarely been considered. While opening this avenue of inquiry, we also pose the delicate ethical questions that must be attended before engaging these spatial practices in‐depth.

Since October 21, 2023, Italy has reintroduced selective controls along its border with Slovenia. According to Article 25 of the Schengen Borders Code1 (SBC), border checks between member states ma...

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants take the informal Balkan Route from Turkey to Greece and on to western Europe. Along this route, the paths of migrants and tourists frequently cross. Some sections of the route are populated by volunteer tourists, and hostels, railway stations and bus stations are often used by both tourists and migrants. Some hotels accept migrants, while others do not. Similarly, some buses and taxis do not allow migrants to board, while others accept them or even see them as an opportunity to earn extra income. Furthermore, some migrants deliberately dress like tourists in an attempt to blend in with people who can travel freely throughout the region thanks to their passports. In this article, I consider how bodily appearance can influence the biopolitical differentiation of mobility at key intersections where informal migrant routes and tourist itineraries frequently converge, resulting in unexpected encounters. Drawing on the work of Italian political philosophers, I focus on the dispersal of sovereign power in the politics of controlling and managing mobility in this part of Europe. This often results in extraordinary decision-making power being concentrated in the hands of officials or other individuals involved in the day-to-day management of transport infrastructure or border control along this corridor. More specifically, I discuss how such differential mobility is enacted through a set of biopolitical practices ‘on the ground’, examining several sites along the Balkan Route where I have conducted fieldwork. Finally, I argue that a powerful biopolitical dispositive of mobility differentiation emerges precisely at the intersection between these two forms of contemporary mobility via the somewhat arbitrary manifestation of sovereign power, which is often based on the racialized, class-based ‘appearance’ of individual travellers.