The Everyday Violence of the “Balkan Route”: Migrant Intimate Traces in and around the City of Trieste

Abstract Since 2015, the Italy–Slovenia border and the city of Trieste have become key points on the so‐called Balkan Route, contributing to this border's stratified history. This article proposes the concept of “intimate traces”—such as discarded objects and bodily waste—as a novel perspective to analyse the everyday violence to which migrants are subjected upon applying for asylum in Italy. Drawing on recurring periods of fieldwork in 2022–2023, I reveal how intimate traces expose the everyday violence that works towards the debilitation of migrants' physical and psychological condition—instrumental to reinforcing technologies of migration control. At the same time, intimate traces become a testament—a way for migrants to engage with the territory they traverse, to become part of the stratifications and re‐materialisations of the border. Concurrently, intimate traces are often co‐opted into anti‐migration narratives to divert the attention from the local government's inaction.