The everyday at the border: Examining visual, material and spatial intersections of international politics along the ‘Balkan Route’
| Author | Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik,Gemma Bird |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836719882475 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836719882475
Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(1) 41 –65
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836719882475
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The everyday at the border:
Examining visual, material
and spatial intersections of
international politics along
the ‘Balkan Route’
Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik
and Gemma Bird
Abstract
This article examines the intersections between the visual, spatial and material and considers how
these interactions capture the border politics of everyday ‘banal’ objects. We do this by looking
at some of the objects and things that constitute the ‘Balkan Route’ through Europe: posters,
signs, directions, notices, flyers and maps produced by state authorities and volunteer-led aid
networks. We use objects to reflect more broadly on how seemingly banal and everyday things
become incorporated into the political work of states and become constitutive of fluid borders.
We argue that everyday objects become visualisations of states and authorities, and help to make
and regulate physical spaces. We show how each visual object encountered along the route
gives us a broader insight into the macropolitics of European border regimes, specifically the
effects of ‘closed borders’ and the criminalisation of aid networks. The article pushes forward the
‘aesthetic turn’ debate in international relations by bringing in insights from political geography and
materialism, and suggests that a walking methodology can be a productive way of encountering
the visual and understanding how its physical location creates political effects.
Keywords
Borders, cities, everyday, space, visual politics
Introduction
This article examines the intersections of visual, spatial and material in international
politics, analysing encounters with ‘everyday’ objects (Guillaume and Huysmans, 2018)
produced and displayed along the so-called ‘Balkan Route’ of migration through Europe:
official and government signs, notices, posters, maps, flyers, and directions, as well as
Corresponding author:
Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK.
Email: j.obradovic-wochnik@aston.ac.uk
882475CAC0010.1177/0010836719882475Cooperation and ConflictObradovic-Wochnik and Bird
research-article2019
Article
42Cooperation and Conflict 55(1)
their less formal counterparts made by solidarity groups and volunteers. We examine
these objects as the ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ of international politics (Salter, 2016), analysing
how their visual effects govern space and are implicated in acts of bordering and its
resistance. We define the objects of the refugee ‘crisis’ – maps, flyers, posters, directions,
signs – in terms of the ‘micropolitics’ of international relations (IR), the ‘features of
social life that slip through our normal schematic or binary frameworks’ (Solomon and
Steele, 2017: 270) and are treated as ‘little nothings’ (Bayart et al., 2008; Macherey,
2009), but when considered in relation to European Union (EU) border governance, can
shed light on macropolitics and macrostructures.
We investigate how things that are ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Featherstone, 1992: 159)
become a part of the border infrastructure and means of governing spaces and mobili-
ties. Displaced people on the move encounter frequently objects with communicative
and political effects, many of which are directed specifically at them: fences, flyers,
maps, posters, signs, directions and graffiti. The objects are frequently inscribed with
instructions: how to register with asylum services, how to reach refugee camps, where
to go and not to go (Figure 2). None of these appear arbitrarily; rather, seemingly banal
objects, such as maps and flyers showing directions to camps, are deployed strategi-
cally and with regulatory effects, intending to manage displaced people away from
specific sites (commercial or public spaces) and towards others (camps and reception
centres). This is the micro-level with which this article engages. At the macro-level, we
locate EU border politics within which countries like Serbia and Greece are embedded,
acting as ‘partners’ securing the EU’s externalised borders (Stojic Mitrović and
Vilenica, 2019).
The visual artefacts we examine are the ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ of migratory routes whose
seemingly apolitical and ordinary appearance stands in contrast to the increasing violence
that has shaped refugees’ journeys through Europe (Davies et al., 2019). However, as we
show, the ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ are not separate from the violence used to enforce borders
(Jones, 2017); rather, they are a part of the infrastructures and practices that embody EU
and state border management. As such, they are significant as visual representations of
states and indirect forms of bordering, intimidation and harassment, affecting the ‘physical
experience of moving in and through particular places’ (Mannergren Selimovic, 2018: 5).
The main research questions we engage with in this article are as follows: how do
these objects contribute to increasingly diffused processes of bordering (Darling, 2016)
and governance perpetuated by state authorities? When do ‘everyday’ objects, such as
directions on reaching a refugee camp, become a part of the governance infrastructure,
and when do they become political? Can the inclusion of these visual, spatial and mate-
rial objects within our analysis ‘correct skewed analytics of power that focus on elites or
structural power’ (Guillaume and Huysmans, 2018: 2)? Following Solomon and Steele
(2017: 270), we suggest that the everyday objects of European border management (and
its resistance), ‘offer compelling reconfigurations of IR, where the varied sites of global
politics are located and the role of “ordinary” people within it’. Whereas Solomon and
Steele (2017) examine the micropolitics of IR through affects, spaces and time, we move
the discussion on towards understanding the ‘features’ of micropolitics as multidimen-
sional in different ways – as visual and material, embedded and located within spaces.
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