Mass Migration, Crimmigration and Defiance

The year 2015 saw an unprecedented number of refugees and migrants arriving to Europe through the “Western Balkans migration route”, where the states through which the route passed established the so-called “humanitarian corridor”. The operation of this corridor was outside the European normative framework and was treated by those states as a de facto undeclared “state of exception”. This situation, marked by an exceptionally intensive arrival of refugees and migrants en masse, was governed by ad hoc rules that were changing on a daily basis, creating an extremely unpredictable and uncertain situation for all stakeholders involved, in particular for the migrants and refugees themselves. This article discusses the crimmigration responses to mass migration management that are prevalent in contemporary law and politics, analyses the corridor within the current crimmigration context and demonstrates how the corridor defied the contemporary crimmigration approach to mass migration.