Robert Rydzewski: The Balkan Route – Hope, Migration and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces

Robert Rydzewski’s political ethnography The Balkan Route – Hope, Migration and Europeanisation in Liminal Spaces examines the movements of migrants and the impediments to these movements along the so-called Balkan route, particularly between Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and the Hungarian border. The book presents three parallel narratives. The first of these narratives delves into the macropolitical project of reinventing the European border regime, characterised by various forms of institutionalised violence. This includes: various experiments, such as the issuance of the “one-month paper” in Greece, informally known as chartia, which is released to migrants upon irregular entry into the country, allowing them to seek asylum or abandon the country before its expiry; the waiting lists to enter the Hungarian transit zone at the Serbian–Hungarian border; the creation and closure of refugee camps in such transit spaces; racial profiling, that is the arbitrary classification of “good” and “bad” refugees during the “long summer of migration” in 2015; the distinction between “refugees” and so-called “economic migrants”; and social engineering in the form of an exclusive and elusive asylum system, failed resettlement and relocation projects, and the production of the social categories outlined above and beyond. Additionally, the European border regime weaponises the complexities of local politics centred on ethnic unrest as well as the natural environment to discourage movement and cause death, for example by fencing off rivers and forests. While discussing the investment in high-tech and the militarisation of borders, which lead to fatalities, improvised encampments in borderlands, harsh survival conditions, and general dehumanisation, Rydzewski aptly highlights the close ties between European and global (im)mobility regimes, intertwined with the pervasive political projects of fostering Islamophobia and racism, nurtured through the Global War on Terror and the European “refugee crisis”.

The second narrative consists of fragments of testimonials from migrants the author met during his research. His interlocutors undertook perilous journeys to Europe, following an imaginary topography where their dreams of happiness, safety, education, work opportunities, and financial remittances for their families back home were supposed to come true. This storyline, woven into the discussion of the border regimes that stand in the way of migrants’ dreams and desires, draws readers into an ethnography of camaraderie, hope, agency, and perseverance of border crossers. They continue their movements despite circular and repetitive patterns and recurring liminality, countering the discursive portrayal of refugees as desperate and threatening subjects. The fragments of the migrants’ narratives presented by the author demonstrate counter-positionalities to what inevitably emerges in such crude conditions – Rydzewski’s is an ethnography of survival, misery, and the decline of mental health.

The third narrative follows the journey of the ethnographer whose positionality reveals itself chapter by chapter. The reader discerns the juxtaposition of the despair of the migrant, with whom the researcher is in solidarity, and the latter’s experience of moving through the same territories as if they were borderless, enjoying the privilege of a young European white male traveller. In this way, Rydzewski demonstrates how intertwined the researcher, their research, and the participants in it become.

Rydzewski’s political ethnography is a highly relevant contribution to the growing body of scholarship discussing the emergence and disintegration of the Balkan corridor and its borders. His work is essential for understanding the re-establishment of a European border regime, which has reinforced the “old fortress” with novel measures of securitisation and racialised surveillance, and allowed a rising toll of migrant deaths, resting on the ongoing production of anxiety against people of colour and those who come from “Islam-land”, to use the term coined by the American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod in 2013 in her Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. Rydzewski aptly shows his analytical competence in navigating complex political terrains as he critically examines how the growing securitarian/humanitarian industry converges with and espouses the neoliberal surge that is mirrored in the technology and militarisation budgets of the EU member states and enmeshed with the ethnonationalist politics of the successor states of Yugoslavia when negotiating their access to the EU. He meticulously elaborates the spaces of liminality, and the affective, epistemic, behavioural, legal, and other structural conditions that establish – in a Foucauldian sense – the governmentality of violence and criminalisation, perpetrated by state structures such as police, smugglers, vigilante groups, taxi and bus drivers, international non-governmental organisations, security guards, translators, and clerks. In so doing, he clearly demonstrates the biopolitical control and punishment of populations, treating them as what Homi Bhabha calls human waste.

Rydzewski’s work builds on an abundance of interdisciplinary literature stemming from anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and political science. The works he draws on were published across the Mediterranean and various European geographies, and include scholarly deliberations and documents created by civil society in the Balkans. He thus recaps literature between spaces which have experienced longstanding violence against human life, aiming at preventing human movement – where walls have been erected and nature has been degraded by dehumanisation. This Rydzewski combines with local ethnographies of the cities of Preševo, on the Serbian–North Macedonian border, and Subotica, on the Serbian–Hungarian border, accounting for the local production of knowledge. In sum, he embarks on a serious endeavour striving to seek epistemic justice.

In addition, Rydzewski’s methodological approach to combine action research and multisited ethnography with compelling ethnographic illustrations calls for this work to be understood as an epistemic act of resistance and refusal of violence. Particularly important are the snippets of hope and solidarity, which bring to light the epistemologies of border crossers. Hope here is not only a human emotion but rather a political tool of the unprivileged and a communal practice of solidarity, in defiance of the structural violence and burdens of the recurring state abandonment and states of exception as explained by Giorgio Agamben. Crucially, Rydzewski entangles all this with the memories of wars, exile, and the coercive production of otherness of the local population along the Balkan route.

Following the author’s intention to transcend what Gurminder K. Bhambra terms “bordered analysis”, his critique of European racism would have been more robust had he applied sharper analysis to the experiences of racialisation he describes. As it is, these experiences only reaffirm the elasticity of the term and, what is more, underscore the privileged status of the ethnographer. The book would also have benefited from a clearer explication of the “long summer of migration” as a descriptor for the mass movement of people and the “refugee crisis” as a discursive construct that produces social fear, threat, and anxiety about the perceived burden refugees from the Middle East might impose on white and civilised Europe. Additionally, while the relationships between the researcher and the migrants were built on trust, the text lacks details on how these migrants became research partners, or what specific power or benefits they might have gained from participating in the research, particularly as some individuals had moved on. Finally, it is essential to reconsider the ethics of revealing migrants’ survival and movement strategies, as these could be weaponised by the very regimes they aim to escape, especially within asylum procedures.

Rydzewski’s book is critical for comprehending the intricate dynamics of migration, securitisation, and human experience within liminal spaces. In a time where state and social violence have become normalised, leading to numerous deaths in the European borderlands, Rydzewski offers a vital perspective on the entanglement of empathy and academic inquiry. His work elucidates how the Covid-19 pandemic has extended the violence of securitisation against refugees and migrants. He predicts increased stringency with the implementation of the EU Pact on Asylum and Migration, a new regulation introducing stricter control, surveillance, and the removal of migrants, as well as limiting access to safety. Greater empathy within academic institutions, as Rydzewski demonstrates in his research, could mitigate these deaths and the dehumanisation that occurs, as many in academia and beyond often turn a blind eye to ongoing violence, such as that which is being committed at the European borders, allowing this violence to become normalised.