Description
This paper explores the performance of multiple forms of violence against illegalised migrants on European borders as an every-day practice of coloniality. The argument draws on fieldwork conducted in Bihac, a Bosnian town close to the Croatian border, which recently became a crucial point of passage and immobilisation for illegalised migrants traveling on the Balkan route. Frontiers like Bihac resemble colonial spaces in reproducing relations of domination based on racialized standards. Violence is not only performed in the form of physical deportation. It exists in the IOM camp, which becomes a space of confinement. It exists in the cafés where illegalised migrants are not welcomed and in the supermarkets, that do not sell them food. The paper suggests that, with the mobilisation of bodies from the decolonised world, colonial violence is reorganised throughout the illegalisation and immobilisation of post-colonial migrants at the margins of Europe. As a result, European frontiers became uniquely interesting contexts where to observe coloniality performed. They are places where Europeans and their post-colonial others are forced to cohabit in the same space for an undetermined amount of time. Spaces where stratification of exclusion are manifest and explicit. Here, the colonial relation between oppressed and oppressors is re-polarised and re-created according to different mechanisms of discrimination. Looking at this context, this paper anticipates the theoretical framework of my PhD dissertation, and suggests a decolonial approach to frame where this violence is performed (frontier of immobility), in which modality (coloniality) and at whose expenses (illegalised migrants).
