Objectives

The Balkan Route is the most important overland informal migration corridor in Europe, taken by thousands of refugees every year.

Linking Greece to Western Europe across Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Croatia, the Route is a complex geography of formal and informal, visible and ‘invisible’ sites; an assemblage of diverse actors, camps, borders, violence, solidarity, and a multiplicity of micro-routes, constantly adapting and shifting. 

Across and between these interconnected spatialities, refugees forge their trajectories towards Europe through ‘The Game,’ the term they use to refer to their clandestine journeys. Along the Route, an archipelago of formal and informal camps has emerged. Key in producing and sustaining The Game, these sites serve as temporary shelters, nodes of services and information, where refugees meet smugglers, wait, and plan the next move.  

To understand how informal migration corridors work TheGAME aims to:

1. theorize refugee camps as distinct spatialities with a unique social and political life;  
2. investigate the Route’s archipelago of refugee camps as an inter-connected, corridor-forming counter-geography; 
3. produce an archive-in-progress documenting refugee experiences of a corridor endlessly re-invented across space and time;  
4. employ counter-mapping as a methodology capable of critically understanding how the Balkan Route functions and propose a novel and replicable approach to studying informal migration corridors globally.