Dr Arshad Isakjee (Liverpool) and Dr Thom Davies (Nottingham) are presenting on Violent and Racialised Borders in the EU.

2pm - 3.30pm in Bartholome House.

Actually-existing asylum is not so much a right to be claimed, but a Game to be ‘won’. To cross into the Western EU states via the Balkan route, migrants must evade a host of border technologies designed to repel them, including outright physical violence. Migrants routinely describe this struggle to cross borders as ‘the Game’. This paper explores what factors make for a successful ‘Game’ of migration across the Balkan route. Access to wealth, the capacity to endure bodily harms, and the ability to ‘pass’ as white-European all help to determine the success of reaching intended destinations in relative safety - but access to material and monetary resources remains paramount. This has significant implications; in practice, those who lack financial resources, those with physical limitations and those negatively racialised have greater difficulty finding the legal protection of asylum that most seek. This paper argues that to comprehend the implications of the Game, and to understand asylum in Europe as it actually exists, we must directly unsettle the bifurcated subjectivities of ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘economic migrants’ and foreground a material analysis of asylum and migration together with one that implicates race as a technology of European border violence.