Words by Ksenija Berk

I am writing this paper from a schizophrenic location behind the barbed wire. No, I am not in occupied territories. There is no war going on around me, and no state of exception has officially been declared. And yet, large amounts of barbed wire are mounted on the southern border between Slovenia and Croatia. As if the situation were not problematic enough, metal doors have been placed on several bridges connecting both countries, ready to be shut any minute. Their purpose, in the words of the politicians, is to ‘keep us safe’ if ‘a large number of refugees would have arrived from the South’.[1] What has actually happened, one might ask, to bring us to this point? Let’s take a look at the course of events that has brought about this situation. Over the years, we have borne witness to the appalling situation of more than six million people being internally displaced, with thousands becoming refugees, mostly due to armed conflicts in the Middle East region (Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan). These refugees have embarked upon impossible journeys and attempts to escape from the places of armed conflict to the promise of asylum and shelter in European Union countries. During these journeys, their lives have been endangered in more ways than we can possibly imagine. At the end of 2013, the world witnessed, for the first time since WW2, more than 50 million people being forcibly displaced.[2] Over 5000 of those lost their lives just in the year 2016 alone, with most perishing in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. Several regulatory regimes of bio-politics [3] on the Balkan route were instituted, and discriminatory power-relations established in order to ‘regulate’ the flow of refugees. In 2015, and for the first time since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, walls between European countries started to emerge again. From the dark periods of Europe’s past, harmful and controlling objects and devices, such as barbed wire, have quickly made their way from political talk and history books, back into everyday reality. Barbed wire was first introduced by Hungary in 2015, when it was used on the Hungarian and Serbian border; this approach was adopted, rather quickly, by Slovenia when, in 2016, it decided to mount barbed wire on the southern border with Croatia.

Continue reading