The COVID-19 pandemic was wind at the back for the transformation of European nation-states into laboratories for amplification of surveillance and movement control. In reaction to the pandemic, authorities produced a whole set of social, spatial and temporal borders for governing movement and interactions. The social categories aimed at differentiating ‘the dangerous’ (persons, places, times) from ‘the endangered ones’, were at times based on new axes of division (‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ occupations) and at others emphasised existing ones (age, gender, citizenship) (Hameršak and Stojić Mitrović, 2021). Borders and bordering were not only used to cement compartmentalised societies, spaces and times, but, often through exaggerated visualisations, to communicate even unrelated political messages. Although the (mis)uses of borders were overemphasised in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been regular props in political communication both on national, as well as on international scenes. Instead of being static and clear, borders are complex, fluid and emergent. They reflect and build on the existing economic, social and political asymmetries, through the allocation of rights to certain agents and the simultaneous withdrawal of rights of others.

In this text I discuss representations of bordering as enacted by state actors in Serbia, which went all the way from invisibility to spectacularised incarceration of people on the move¹ during the COVID-19 pandemic. The example of Serbia, as EU’s ‘outer’ region, is used to reflect on the role of border spectacles as main instruments of zoning and bordering, as well as the production of geo-political regions with differential operational roles in the larger EU project of migration control. After briefly introducing the migratory movements across the region, labelled as Balkan Route or Balkan Circuit (Stojić Mitrović and Vilenica, 2019), I focus on the role of the Western Balkans in the EU border regime. The analysis of the bordering spectacles taking place across Serbia exhibits the construction of anomalous border zones at the edges of the EU.

Serbia is a state lying on the land migration route from Asia Minor to the EU, in the so-called Western Balkans: a European ‘periphery within’, a non-EU state in Europe, surrounded by EU member states. The clandestine transport of goods and persons across its territory largely stayed out of the public eye until 2015, when the Balkan Route, illustrated by images of lines of people walking, cramped wagons and groups waiting in parks or train stations, became one of the epitomes of the so-called 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ (Hameršak et al., 2020). In 2016, when the formalised migration corridor was terminated, the Balkan Route fell back into invisibility. Migration movements did not stop, however, but took on other, more circular and taxing forms as a result of the heightened securitisation and militarisation of EU borders, the radicalised violence of local authorities toward people on the move, the criminalisation of migrant solidarity groups and networks and the overall excessive funding of policing troops and movement control technologies. The asylum system, one of the last open doors for the legalisation of stay, was essentially transformed from an instrument of inclusion to one of exclusion, mainly through the mechanisms of ‘safe countries of origin/transit’, readmission and/or biometric databases used for rejection.

When the major migration paths rerouted to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkan route came under the spotlight yet again this time as a dead-end or a dumping ground for the unwanted people. There, people on the move were pushed away from society into the cramped camps and squats and kept out of the EU and its internal, ‘free movement’ Schengen zone by means of physical obstacles (fences) and direct violence. The convolution of the migration and pandemic crisis rhetoric of 2020 served to energise further this already repressive approach to migration. Migration movements, now taking place between the threat of forced encampment and simultaneous illegalisation of almost any stay outside officially allocated accommodation. They became even more erratic and desperate, and involved repeated crossings of numerous state borders in both directions, with people on the move referring to these ordeals as ‘the game’² or as ‘the push-back’³. The resulting situation is much more intricate than a question of localising migration control at the external borders of the EU and in the places of encampment (‘buffer-zones’) in countries on the edges or outside of the EU like Serbia. Furthermore, borders are spectacularised, exaggeratedly visualised, as static spaces which divide the outside from the inside. Border spectacles (De Genova, 2002, 2013) not only produce anomalous zones (zones of ill-being) but are politically instrumentalised on both ends: by the core as well as by the periphery of the EU border regime.

Serbia is one of the so-called Western Balkans states, a political construct created by the European Union as an object of its neighbourhood and enlargement policy, comprised of a ‘bunch of states’ lying ‘in the inner outskirts of the EU’, with deep political and economic problems, but with ‘potential European future’ (Hameršak et al., 2020: 17). The region is comprised of the states which emerged from the violent and bloody break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (minus Slovenia and plus Albania) during the 1990s. Decades after the beginning of the Stabilisation and Association Process, initiated and governed by the EU, the Western Balkan states are still overwhelmed with systemic corruption referred to as ‘state capture’, in which private economic and political interests fundamentally influence the state’s decision-making processes and continue to fuel ethno-nationalist and other social and political tensions (Stojić Mitrović et al., 2020: 21). Still, the Western Balkan states remain involved in the EU accession process and implement legislative and other institutional changes demanded by the EU, thus ensuring uninterrupted financial flows. Their participation in the EU border and migration regime is uniformly centered towards, subordinated to and dependent on the EU and its financial and political support in particular. Furthermore, it involves the adoption of concepts, practices, legislation, technologies, proxy agencies, etc. as demanded (and financed) by the EU (Stojić Mitrović et al., 2020; Hameršak et al., 2020).

In this inherently asymmetric process of legislative ‘harmonisation’, the Serbian state holds almost no negotiation power to influence the formulation of the EU-coordinated objectives. Even so, the very manner of interpretation and implementation of migration related legislation and practices can be turned into a powerful tool for shaping the political sphere, aiming to affect both the relations with the EU, as well as the domestic front. It is to this end that the Serbian state had been engaged in the production and manipulation of border(ing) spectacles (De Genova 2002, 2013; Casas-Cortes et al., 2015).

Spectacularisation is a form of metaphorical abstraction, which enables representation of complex realities in terms of familiar phenomena, as sets of available imageries, and simplified, exaggerated features. Already in 2015 spectacles of refugee misery were taken up by Serbian officials to demonstrate the capabilities of the state and its institutions to ‘respect European core values’ (Hameršak et al., 2020) by treating people on the move humanly. Similarly, by managing transit migration promptly and with no overt violence, Serbia presented itself as a ‘reliable partner of the EU’ (Stojić Mitrović et al., 2020: 43-44), which enabled it to open the first chapters in the negotiation process and get access to funds. First timidly, but overtime more readily, the spectacularisation of the ‘migrant’ menace’ provided a framework for demonstrating the Serbian state’s capabilities to ‘protect the borders of Europe’ which, in turn, enabled closer cooperation with various policing institutions of the EU and its member states (Stojić Mitrović et al., 2020: 30).

Image 1. Heavily armed soldiers ‘protecting’ one of the official centres for the accommodation of people on the move during the pandemic. Source: Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Serbia. Location: Obrenovac Transit-Reception Centre

The year 2020 was exemplary regarding the spectacularisation of bordering practices in Serbia. The process reached a level of open and explicit militarisation: the state of emergency declared in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic was used as a discursive justification for the complete incarceration of people on the move. With the publication of a governmental decree, migrants in Serbia were formally forbidden not only from leaving the camps, but also from staying outside them (Hameršak and Stojić Mitrović, 2021). They were, sometimes coercively, taken from the streets and squats and transferred to already overcrowded camps, which were guarded by heavily armed soldiers. Attempts to leave the camps ended in gunfire, while riots over the overall situation (lack of food and hygiene items, no access to medical care and space for physical distancing, as well as fear of the epidemic and about remaining stuck) were terminated via  repressive measuresthat included beatings, tear gas and relocation to other camps (Hameršak and Stojić Mitrović, 2021). The restrictions on movement, the presence of special policing units near camps and state borders, the raids of squats and the incarceration of people on the move continued after the end of the state of emergency. Even though these practices were present before the pandemic, they were not happening on this scale and not so openly. Subsequently, the official site of the Ministry of Defence started issuing  updates, photo and video materials, while the YouTube channel of the Ministry of Interior occasionally published videos of raids in border areas. Such open and exaggerated visualisations can be less attributed to the sudden urge for ‘transparency’ than to the international narrowing down of the framework through which migration is presented and treated. The Serbian reading of this framework follows the same direction of EU migration policy and leaves the use of force, weapons, dogs, mass pushbacks and indiscriminate and open violence toward people on the move unpunished and not even condemned. This tendency was amplified with the gassing, shooting and killing of civilians on the Greek-Turkish border in late February/early March 2020, when, as noted elsewhere (Hameršak and Stojić Mitrović, 2021), the EU practically gave the green light for the militarisation of migration control to countries forming the so-called ‘shield of the EU’. In the same fashion, the burning of the Moria camp on Lesvos, Greece, and the prompt (re-) establishment of ‘Moria No.2’, despite the EU Commission’s ‘no more Morias’ pledge, demonstrated the normalisation of mass incarceration of people on the move. This was taken up by the Serbian Minister of Defence, who stated that the EU ‘for the first time said “we don’t want you, don’t try to come illegally, there is a way to do it”. […] The Union is finally trying to take a united position and that will make life much easier for us who are not members of the European Union’. In other words, Serbia was no longer going to be forced to balance between humanitarian and securitarian approaches to migration, guessing which one would be the most beneficial for its accession process and closer relations to the EU, its institutions and member states.⁴

The European Union is not the only public to which the spectacles of borders and movement control are directed. The use of overplayed policing practices, hyperbolised borders, and incarceration in crowded camps can be easily interpreted as attempts to appease right-wing groups and to stave off anti-migrant protests.  The implementation of migration controls in Serbia is less an attempt to govern migration per se than to achieve impertinent political goals: closer relations with the EU and the manipulation of the national electoral body. The spectacularisation of ‘order against chaos’ reached grotesque levels during the COVID-19 state of emergency, when armed soldiers ‘protected’ post offices, banks, hospitals, and streets from the virus (Hameršak and Stojić Mitrović, 2021). The framework of crisis was yet again used for the heightened securitisation of public spaces and the normalisation of military presence in everyday activities of control and surveillance.

Although borders are spectacularised as static, localised linearly, or punctually, as a camp, a border-crossing, a border fence, etc., or as more spacious external borderlands, peripheries and inner lands, the situation is much more complicated. As Guild points out, border control is control over individuals’ attempts to move: ‘the individual, through interaction with the state and other actors’ in terms of guaranteeing or denying rights, activates and positions the border (2001: 2). In other words, borders are reproduced in every situation where the legitimacy of a person’s stay and access to services is questioned: borders thus become potentially construed anywhere, in hotels, hospitals, at work and so on. The state of emergency only spotlighted borders as a-territorial, delineating spaces for socio-legal processing of people where exclusionary rules deriving from asymmetrical social relations can be applied (Guild, 2001). As liminal spaces, borders are transformed into laboratories where new forms of policing and criminalisation are created (Pickering and Weber 2006). Therefore, borders are emergent in a-legal or extra-legal spaces, spaces of institutionalised anomaly (Campesi, 2020).

To conclude, people are continuing to move across Europe, circulating from the internal EU Schengen space to the Western Balkans and back, and back again, until they manage to anchor, or give up. Similarly, the extra-legal management of migration movements (chain pushbacks, violence, torture, incarceration, denial of right to asylum or other rights), indiscriminately crisscrosses the whole area of influence of the EU border regime. In other words, there is no clear limit between the external and internal borders of the EU. On the example of Serbia, a ‘European periphery within’, bundles of imageries and actions loaded with meaning, are utilised to exaggerate the division of a genuinely a-spatial EU borderland into differential zones, to which different roles and different rules are attached. The anomalous zones, which are spectacularised as being somewhere on the edges of the EU, are a constitutive part of the EU border and migration regime and its enactment of the complex of ‘territorial delusion’. Through the production of extra-legal spaces, the zoned world deprives people on the move from arriving, entering the ‘right part of Europe’, from which they could claim their rights. The image of a structured world, with emergent a-legal border zones conveniently allocated to ‘peripheries’, conceals the direct involvement of the EU in the fierce repression of movements towards its ‘centre’. Exactly this is used in turn by states at the EU’s periphery, such as Serbia, as resources and tools to engage in the extremely unequal interchange with the ‘centre’. Border spectacles, spectacles of transit, incarceration, encampment, and ill-being, become bargain chips in the process of the EU enlargement, utilised both to confront Serbia’s subjugation as well as to confirm it, depending on the context and phase of negotiations. The COVID-19 pandemic only highlighted their use by the Serbian state in the context of ‘maintaining the order’ and to enhance the production of   the image of having control despite the advancing chaos. It also revealed how easily border regimes can turn the same repressive measures toward new targets and use border spectacles to frame, support and justify re-configurations of the social and political spheres.

Endnotes

1. I use the phrase ‘people on the move’ to avoid connotations attached to more common forms such as ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ (see Pijnenburg and Rijken 2021). [↩]
2. The phrase used by people on the move (‘going for the game’) when attempting to cross heavily guarded borders (border guards, dogs, technology, fences, legal barriers) with very low chances of success. [↩]
3. The phrase widely used for extra-legal deportations of people on the move to a country from which they entered. [↩]
4. Even though there is clear trend to overrepresent the control of  unwanted migration and especially stays outside the officially allocated accommodation,  movement is far from halted, Moreover, reports unambiguously show that the majority of border-crossings  are directly produced by the EU border regime, and in particular through push-backs. [↩]

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