Road and railway as intermodal infrastructures of (im)mobility and placemaking for migrants in Serbia

This project examines the relationship of people and transport networks in migration. It focuses on how railways and roads (passenger and freight) impact the movement of migrants, and vice versa. The rationale is to understand the impacts of bordering and EUropean regimes of racialisation, in particular how these transformations play out through a range of actors, public/private spaces, networks and vehicles-infrastructures often ignored in analysis of borders.

The project contributes to a growing field of research where migration, logistics and transport converge-known as viapolitics (Walters 2015). My research applies this theoretical lens to a multi-sited study of transport in Serbia, unpacking the way rail and road infrastructures facilitate forward movement into the EU, are improvised in different ways (paths, shelters), and also are remobilised by the state as humanitarian corridors (Beznec et al 2016), spaces of encampment, or deportation architectures (Hamersak and Plese 2018).

The project contributes to existing scholarship on border regimes (Hess and Kasparek 2017), borderscapes (Brambilla 2015), racialisation on trains (Schwarz 2016) and buses (Teunissen 2020), and white enclosure (Rexhepi 2023), while intervening in a gap in the literature related to "intermodal" transport assemblages. Intermodality is a term used in logistic supply chains (Mogiani 2021) to describe the transferability of goods and containers across different vehicles (train, lorry, ship).

I foreground it in this study as a necessary elaboration of viapolitics, spotlighting the way migration practices and governance work across an integrated web of transport lines, undergirding the flow of materials and bodies under racial-capitalism. Research questions 1. How does viapolitics help explain what enables or limits migrant mobility on rail and road?

2. How do road and rail transport routes shape Balkan Route migration, and vice versa, focusing on how migrants and the state adapt, re-use, and improvise infrastructure?

3. In which ways do migrants experience and exercise place in transport sites, and how does intermodality help explain the integration of practices like passage, shelter, and policing?

The project focuses on Belgrade, Sid and Subotica (among other locations), selected as they host multiple different practices related to migration, freight transport and policing. For example, in 2015 the train tracks leading out of Subotica were used by migrants walking on foot into the EU, while the nearby Röske/Horgos motorway crossing became a site of protests and police violence.

Crossings hidden in freight trains or trucks also developed, while Subotica train station became a space of improvised shelter and a focus of police raids. As a wider case study, Serbia is regionally distinct because of the way disaggregated and changing assemblages of rail/road have been used (or not used) for migration (Beznec et al 2017), and shaped by global capital, such as the Belgrade Waterfront project, the Belt and Road Initiative (Ladevac 2020), and European Pan-corridor X.

I will deploy a multi-sited fieldwork approach, using participant observation and interviews with migrants, solidarity activists, public officials and transport workers (RQ1, RQ3). In conjunction with the primary data, I will use online archival materials (Border Violence Monitoring Network and Pushback Map), Belgrade's railway museum archive and the Serbian National Archive (RQ2).

Specific ethnographic and multimedia elements will be shown on a map I will create using Knightlab software (RQ3), connecting with the growing field of counter-mapping (Henk van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2020).