Author: Adrian Foucher

In 2015, over 800,000 people, most of them fleeing Syria, crossed the Aegean Sea on makeshift boats, leaving the Turkish coastline for Greek islands, then continuing to continental Greece, and finally, via the Balkan route, to Western Europe. Faced with the scale of these arrivals, two kinds of public policy were devised: the unilateral closure of borders and an agreement with Turkey. Based on the study of Belgrade informal camp, this analysis highlights the pernicious effects of those policies: the marginalization of part of the migrants and the development of circumventions practices that forced migrants to take more risks.