The Game: Ritualized Exhaustion and Subversion on the Western Balkan Route

Abstract

ABSTRACT The expression to go game is widely used among migrants transiting across the Western Balkan route to describe the attempt to cross a border irregularly. In the Bosnian canton of Una Sana, one of the crucial transit spaces across the route, migrants who go game are repeatedly and violently pushed back from the Croatian side of the border. They return to precarious managed facilities and makeshift camps, where they endure constant evictions, mistreatments, and neglect, while planning their next attempt to cross. This paper takes the vantage point of the game to propose a Bourdieusian reading of exhaustion and subversion on the route. It theorises the game as the sum of ritualised practices (habitus) through which migrants endure and subvert a politics of exhaustion diffusing across EUrope’s transit spaces; and situates it as a collective imperative exemplifying the generative and enduring force of autonomy of migration. Written almost a decade after the year of the so-called migration crisis that opened the political imaginary of the route, this article provides necessary reflections on how dynamics of exhaustion and subversion which developed within EUrope’s border regime sedimented into ritualised and relational practices complicating the already contested geographies of Europe’s transit spaces.