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Contribution short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in a town on the Bosnian border with Croatia/EU, this paper uses small-scale autonomous aid to migrants in defiance of prohibitions on giving aid to carve conceptual space for such actions within frameworks of humanitarianism, citizenship, solidarity, and commoning.

Contribution long abstract:

Since 2018, Bihac, a small town in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina close to the Croatia/EU border, has been a gathering site for irregularized migrants traveling the Balkan Route to the EU. Expectations were that local residents, the majority being Bosnian Muslims, would feel solidarity with the mostly Muslim migrants. However, as in neighboring countries without Muslim populations, many soon turned against people on the move, casting them as illegal “economic” migrants, leading to vocal initiatives to drive them away. Local authorities began to restrict migrants’ movement and to de-facto forbid people from offering food, lodging, or transportation, while EU money funded the establishment of reception centers, or camps, where minimal care combined with control and containment. During my ethnographic research in Bihac in 2019-2020, many migrants preferred to avoid the camps in favor of squats and make-shift shelters in and around the town. Despite the near criminalization of offering aid, there were local residents who continued to quietly support migrants from their own resources and as autonomous actors not affiliated with organizations or aid groups. This paper addresses this spontaneous and autonomous aid as a way to bring together concepts typically applied to similar activities - vernacular humanitarianism, everyday citizenship, or migrant solidarity – with the idea of mobile commons in an attempt to call attention to these acts of generosity that are not only invisible in dominant accounts of responses to migrants but also made invisible through the emphasis on political resistance present in most scholarly assessments of small-scale aid.