Full Camps in Empty Landscapes and Empty Camps in Full Landscapes: Governing Migration through Environmental Presence and Absence

Migration and border regimes operate through environments marked by layered legacies of war, past displacements, industrial decline, political and economic marginality, and infrastructural ruination. Whereas critical migration and border studies have attended to the environmental and infrastructural dimensions of migration control, this article adds to the discussions by asking how historically sedimented environemnts become media through which migration is governed. Situated at the intersection of crtical migration studies and political ecology, the article proposes emptiness and fullness as relational spatial formations through which historically defined environments become intelligible, actionable, and governable as spaces of migration containment. Specifically, it captures socio-material configurations through which migrants are made present, absent, concentrated, dispersed, excessive or containable in relation to particular environments. Through cases from Southeast Europe, the article shows diverse socio-material processes from histories of abandonment, infrastructural withdrawal, or contemporary material reconstructions, and landscape regenerations that are selectively activated to produce enivornments as tools of migration containment and bordering. The article conceptualizes these processes as producing emptiness as spatial availability and fullness as spatial pressure, both organizing environments as available for intervention and as objects of management, containment, and control.