Description
This article examines the experiences and narratives of displaced men ‘employed’ by human smugglers along the Bosnia-Croatia borders; their aspirations to negotiate transit and avoid border violence; and their working practices and power relations of local smuggling hierarchies. We do so in order to examine the relationship between EU border security and smuggling.
The literature on human smuggling points out that tighter border surveillance increases the reliance of people on the move on smugglers to reach Europe. While current literature explores processes of human smuggling, it does so by dividing human smugglers as organisers of the clandestine transits on the one hand; and people on the move as their clients on the other. There is limited research on the way the EU’s strict border governance is leading displaced people relying on smugglers to become smugglers themselves, mainly as a result of being stranded in EU border zones. With the focus on the relation between the increasingly EU violent ‘border management’ and the recruitment of people on the move into smuggling networks, this paper seeks to contribute to the debates on impacts of the EU’s border management on clandestine transits. In order to address this relationship, the article is theoretically informed by the assumptions of External Governance, focusing on the modes and effectiveness of EU external governance in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. By exploring the process of externalisation of EU border controls to neighbouring countries, we argue that such border management instead of combating smuggling, in fact, increases both the reliance on smugglers and smuggling activities. We argue that this is the case because, as our empirical data shows, smuggling is not just a means by which borders are crossed - rather, it is a source of employment, protection, survival, structure and hierarchy, and as such, is deeply embedded in the lives and experiences of displaced people’s journeys through the EU.
