Epilogue: Unwanted 

The ethnographic research map aims to present the research within the academic project ERIM – European Irregularized Migration Regime at the Periphery of the EU (2020–2024).

The map highlights specific locations that illustrate the regime’s characteristics of constant change, fragmentation, and violence.

While the map incorporates some recognizable elements of ethnographic mapping, it does not depict all sites associated with the regime, such as every camp or border crossing. Instead of highlighting paths and directions, the map focuses on specific places that researchers have located or resided during fieldwork. As such, it intentionally departs from conventional visualizations of migratory movements using arrows that evoke representations of military invasions. Locations appearing on the map collectively evoke movement — hidden journeys through a hostile territory marked by numerous stops, closures, cruelties, and controls. The ethnographic research map, along with its accompanying photographs, offers an incomplete and fragmented depiction of sites of racialized social segregation, the production of illegality and criminalization, desirable and undesirable migrations and existences.

This map serves as a postscript, counterpoint, and a crushing epilogue to the explorations of non-European cultures. The mobilities it recalls are echoes, and even consequences of European colonialism, in which travelers, explorers from our regions participated on the margins.

ERIM is a project of the Croatian Science Foundation carried out by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research.

Reception Center

A reception center is one of the terms used for institutions and facilities providing collective accommodation for displaced people. Globally and locally, these centers are constantly multiplying and transforming. Under the unofficial designation of refugee or migrant camps, these centers, in a symbiosis of humanitarian and repressive functions, play a key role in transit policies, control, dehumanization, illegalization, and violence. 

Station

As transportation hubs, bus and train stations spontaneously become gathering places for illegalized migrants. The infrastructure available at these locations — water, electricity, taxis — facilitates planning and continuation of their journey, or the game. Stations are rare meeting places with local residents and other travelers, offering humanitarian support, but also come with heightened police controls and racial profiling. 

Trace

The material traces of migrants’ clandestine movements — objects such as glasses, photographs, backpacks, strollers, or a bullet — are especially visible near border crossings. Some of these items, like a camp card or food packaging, directly point to transnational movement, and all of them speak to the hardship of the journey, to people on the move and their helpers, but also to those trying to stop them. 

Game

Game is an informal term for clandestine attempts to cross borders and move from the countries at the European peripheries to the one in the center of the continent. It includes evading police controls, constantly hiding in means of transportation, on forest paths, in mountains, and making dangerous crossings of rivers and even minefields. It is not depicted on the map, but it is crucial for understanding the current regime of irregularized migration. 

Border Crossing

A border crossing is an official place for controlling the crossing of borders, where the movement of people is strictly monitored using increasingly sophisticated technologies (thermal imaging cameras, heart rate detection devices, biometric passports). As official entry points into a country, border crossings are, for people seeking refuge, the opposite: places of exclusion, detention, and pushbacks. 

Wire

Material barriers — fences, walls, barbed wire, and razor wire — at external and internal borders of territories, varied in their technical characteristics and materials, are collectively referred to here as wire. This infamous symbol of oppression and violence is intended to prevent passage and movement for those seeking refuge, exposing them to suffering and death.

Death

Deaths at borders are premature, violent deaths related to restrictive border controls. Illegalization, the visa system, wires, and the fear of persecution and deportation force refugees into hiding. These and other tools of border control push people onto train roofs, into the undercarriages of buses and trucks, into the depths of containers and refrigerated trucks, karst terrain, minefields, forests, mountains, and rivers—into weaponized landscapes, danger, and death. 

Squat

Squats, or informal camps, arise without institutional support, they are erected and torn down near borders that must be crossed, in more or less hidden locations — abandoned or ruined buildings, forests, or on the outskirts of official camps. They serve as improvised shelters for survival during the journey, sometimes supported by solidarity from groups and individuals outside the camps.

Park

Urban green spaces often serve as temporary shelters for people on the move. The shade and cover of trees, benches, drinking water, and proximity to facilities like public toilets, shops, and stations make parks suitable gathering places for rest before continuing the journey. Depending on the current micropolitics of control, parks are often spaces of surveillance and periodic crackdowns. 

Profiling

Profiling is a mechanism of control involving selection practices aimed at exclusion, expulsion, and detention. It is based on stereotypical assessments of external characteristics: appearance, skin color, speech. Police profile on roads, in trains and buses, on streets, and in other public spaces. However, other members of society — drivers, doctors, conductors — often engage in profiling as well. 

Pushback

Pushback is the prompt deportation of unwanted individuals, usually into a neighboring country. It involves forced backwards movement, conducted by police, with or without administrative procedure, routinely and secretly. It is not limited to border areas and is frequently accompanied by physical, verbal, and other forms of violence. Though officially denied, thousands of testimonies speak to its omnipresence and brutality. 

Detention

Detention refers to the practice and place of confinement for refugees and other non-citizens. The police detain unwanted foreigners, refugees, migrants who are caught attempting to cross the border or stay in the country in closed, fenced-off, and heavily guarded camps. The deprivation of freedom is carried out as an administrative measure rather than a criminal one, and is accompanied by disenfranchisement, humiliation, exclusion, and “stuckedness.” 

Gate

Gates as defensive elements at border crossings are installed to physically stop the mass movement of unwanted people. Another type of gate is placed at green borders, as part of a fence that connects areas separated by wire, for instance, a field and a riverbank, with the goal of facilitating the movement of local populations. While some gates hinder movement, others facilitate it. 

Grave

Graves of the deceased along borders and due to borders are scattered along borders, roads, and places of persecution. Invisible, located at the margins of cemeteries, marked modestly or not at all, solitary or clustered together, often anonymous and isolated, these graves are marks of lives cut short, violent borders, and posthumous marginalization. They are also places of final rest, memory, and mourning.