Biopolitics, sovereign power and mobility at the intersections between tourism and informal migration along the Balkan Route

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants take the informal Balkan Route from Turkey to Greece and on to western Europe. Along this route, the paths of migrants and tourists frequently cross. Some sections of the route are populated by volunteer tourists, and hostels, railway stations and bus stations are often used by both tourists and migrants. Some hotels accept migrants, while others do not. Similarly, some buses and taxis do not allow migrants to board, while others accept them or even see them as an opportunity to earn extra income. Furthermore, some migrants deliberately dress like tourists in an attempt to blend in with people who can travel freely throughout the region thanks to their passports. In this article, I consider how bodily appearance can influence the biopolitical differentiation of mobility at key intersections where informal migrant routes and tourist itineraries frequently converge, resulting in unexpected encounters. Drawing on the work of Italian political philosophers, I focus on the dispersal of sovereign power in the politics of controlling and managing mobility in this part of Europe. This often results in extraordinary decision-making power being concentrated in the hands of officials or other individuals involved in the day-to-day management of transport infrastructure or border control along this corridor. More specifically, I discuss how such differential mobility is enacted through a set of biopolitical practices ‘on the ground’, examining several sites along the Balkan Route where I have conducted fieldwork. Finally, I argue that a powerful biopolitical dispositive of mobility differentiation emerges precisely at the intersection between these two forms of contemporary mobility via the somewhat arbitrary manifestation of sovereign power, which is often based on the racialized, class-based ‘appearance’ of individual travellers.