“You know, migrants used to live here…”: Biopolitics, Resistance and Contested Urban Space in Bihać,  Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Focusing on the city of Bihać, Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), this thesis discusses the ways in which urban space is contested and negotiated between People on the Move (PoM) and Migration Managers. Bihać, a small city in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, has since 2018 become an important node on the so-called “Balkan Route.” The route is traversed by many people from the Global South seeking to migrate to Western Europe. Importantly, Bihać lies some mere 5 km from the Croatian border, making the city an ideal place for PoM to plan their way forward on the route, or rest after an illegal pushback at the border. Often, people in transit irregularly reside in abandoned buildings. Many of such occupied buildings, also known as squats, have been evicted by local Migration Managers repeatedly over the past five years. Yet, despite the evictions, PoM would often come back from the camps where they had been deported, and re-occupy the squats in Bihać. These cycles of evictions and (re...Show moreFocusing on the city of Bihać, Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), this thesis discusses the ways in which urban space is contested and negotiated between People on the Move (PoM) and Migration Managers. Bihać, a small city in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, has since 2018 become an important node on the so-called “Balkan Route.” The route is traversed by many people from the Global South seeking to migrate to Western Europe. Importantly, Bihać lies some mere 5 km from the Croatian border, making the city an ideal place for PoM to plan their way forward on the route, or rest after an illegal pushback at the border. Often, people in transit irregularly reside in abandoned buildings. Many of such occupied buildings, also known as squats, have been evicted by local Migration Managers repeatedly over the past five years. Yet, despite the evictions, PoM would often come back from the camps where they had been deported, and re-occupy the squats in Bihać. These cycles of evictions and (re)occupations are framed in this thesis as contestations of urban space. Such space contestations, recounted using relational ethnography, are then given further theoretical grounding through the bi-focal lens of biopolitics and resistance. In light of these theoretical elaborations, camps in the area of Bihać are speculatively characterized as biopolitical technologies of control, dispersal, and governance of migrant lives and mobility. In contrast, squats are understood as cases of resistance against the border regime, by virtue of their role as Infrastructures of border crossing.Show less

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“You know, migrants used to live here…”: Biopolitics, Resistance and Contested Urban Space in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina.