Description
This paper examines the politics of mapping what became known as ‘the refugee crisis’, and explores the roles that maps and cartography played in constituting ‘the crisis’ and the creation of EU’s spatial imaginaries. The paper focuses on maps on, or about, ‘The Balkan Route’, showing how European mapping of the route relied on assumptions about ‘The Balkans’ to represent ‘the crisis’ as a distinctly South-European problem. The paper engages with existing literature migration maps, but extends this by looking at maps produced for refugees – maps of cities, directions, refugee camps, enclosures – to show relationships between power, space and policy. The paper also historicises the current migratory journeys through the Balkans by placing them in the broader context of post-Yugoslav wars, and shows these intersections through maps of 1990s and maps of present-day migration, and the author’s own map showing proximity of refugee camps to 1990s concentration camps. Overall, the paper suggests that maps and cartography are productive sites from which to examine how spatial imaginaries contribute to our understanding of the micropolitical in international relations.
