By Karolina Augustovaa, Helena Carrapicob, and Jelena Obradović-Wochnik
Migrants’ involvement in smuggling increases alongside restricted cross-border movement and violent borders, yet this dynamic is usually examined from migrants’ position as clients.In this article, we move away from migrants and smugglers as two separate roles and question migrants’ aspirations to and experiences of resorting to smuggling networks as workers in the context of EU land borders, where direct violence is used daily to fight cross-border crime. By doing so, we move furtherthe examination of fluid relations in smuggling provisions and the way they are intertwined with care and exploitation, asshaped and circumscribed by violent borders. The article illus-trates the intersections between border violence and migrants active involvement in smuggling by drawing on the case studyof an anonymised Border Town and multi-site, multi-author fieldwork from Serbia and Bosnia. By questioning migrants experiences of shifting roles from clients to service providers,and by taking into account their work in smuggling provision,we show that, in a situation of protracted vulnerability orche-strated by border violence, state and law enforcement, the categories – “migrant” and “smugglers” – can blur.Introduction I am a smuggler. Without smugglers, no people would reach Europe, not evenme’, said Mula, while sitting in a train station. Mula, like dozens of other people around him, travelled through the ‘Balkan Route’ to attempt hisjourney across the increasingly violent borders with the EU states, such asCroatia. However, Mula had no money, and the only way to pay for clandes-tine transport was using his own labour as a smuggler, as he called himself.A blurring of clients and perpetrators in organised crime is not a new phenomenon (Lo Iacono 2014). Same patterns of fluid relations also takeplace in smuggling, an activity recognised in policy terms as impersonal organised crime; a feature that, however, often lacks in human smuggling
GEOPOLITICS2023, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 619–640
