Paper short abstract:

Based on long-term ethnographic research along the Balkan migratory trail, we discuss how the railway, as a mobility structure shaped by the ideology of progress, coordination and certainty, is simultaneously used and reshaped in the context of uncertainty of clandestine migration.

Paper long abstract:

As a product of modernity, the railway is a mobility (infra)structure shaped by the ideology of progress, coordination and certainty (Beaumont and Freeman 2007). In this presentation, we ask how this structure works in the context of uncertainty. We are interested in the interactions of prolonged and repeated situations of uncertainty related to clandestine or irregularized migration, on the one side, with the railway, on the other. Our main question is how railways are utilized for both containing and enabling mobilities towards the EU. Based on long-term ethnographic research along the Balkan migratory trail, we discuss how railways are used by clandestine migrants for facilitating movement (as leads, resting infrastructures, etc.), and how they are used by state authorities to hinder and revert this movement (as detention, backward-paths, etc). We examine the relation of tragic events and border deaths associated with railway-use in the context of irregularized migration with changes in migration practices and discourses. The use of railways to prevent unwanted movement toward the EU has also resulted in physical changes of railway infrastructure. We investigate how the usages of active/abandoned railways inform and reshape everyday geographies of movement along the route, intercity mobility and life on the EU administrative border.

By focusing on the entanglements of railway and clandestine migration, this presentation seeks to illustrate how uncertainty operates on the move, unpacking the way train infrastructure spatially interfaces mobile bodies with the potentials and foreclosures of crossing borders, contributing to a non-linear understanding of migration.