Makeshift camps and migrant (counter)infrastructures: geographies of interrupted transit in Bihać, Bosnia-Herzegovina

In cities and along border zones where clandestine journeys are facilitated and interrupted, migrants seek out, generate and occupy temporary dwellings or ‘makeshift camps’ in which to take shelter and rest before moving onwards. While makeshift camps are often ephemeral and dismal spaces, definitively marked by all kinds of violence, they have nonetheless emerged as crucial, increasingly permanent features of contemporary migrant geographies. This research undertakes ethnographic fieldwork across the constellation of makeshift camps in the transit hub of Bihać, a city in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina where thousands of migrants pass (and get stranded) each year as part of the game – the colloquial term for clandestine routes and crossings towards destinations in Europe. Building on critical geographic scholarship on camps, migration, infrastructure and urban informalities, this project seeks to provide alternative readings of migrants’ informal journeys through the spaces they improvise en route. This research explores the diverse material, spatial and temporal formations of these dwellings in transit, foregrounding the subversiveness of migrants who incessantly invent and appropriate infrastructures of survival and logistics for their journeys, despite and within conditions of acute violence. Given their transient residents and the constant nature of police raids and destruction of these sites, key to this research is developing a mobile and adaptive methodology capable of investigating the geographies of makeshift camps, even (or precisely) once they have been abandoned or dismantled. By ‘counter-mapping’ migrants’ vanishing spaces in transit, this research not only reveals forms of obscured violence on the bodies and temporary homes of migrants, but also contributes to excavating the messy, lively, insurgent spatial histories of those who build and inhabit these infrastructures at the borders.