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Unsettled media: documenting refugees and Europe's shifting borders along the Balkan Route

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Unsettled media: documenting refugees and Europe's shifting borders along the Balkan Route

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Content Unsettled Media:
Documenting Refugees and Europe’s Shifting Borders Along the Balkan Route
by
Eszter Zimanyi
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (CRITICAL STUDIES))
August 2021
Copyright 2021 Eszter Zimanyi

ii

For My Mother

iii
Acknowledgements

This dissertation was written in fits and starts over the course of 2020-2021, as a global
pandemic ravaged the world and sent all of us lucky enough to work from home into deep
isolation. In some ways befitting the title of my project, the past year-and-a-half has unsettled
every aspect of human life. Alongside immeasurable pain and loss, anxiety and uncertainty,
uprootings and displacements, this moment has generated new and urgent questions, ideas, and
visions for the future, many of which hold the promise of hope not for a return to normal, but a
radical re-envisioning of our world. It is my hope that this project contributes, in some small
way, to conversations about how we see and experience our histories and futures together.
Over the past year, there have been countless times when I did not believe finishing this
dissertation would be possible. It is thanks to the incredible and unwavering support of my
committee, friends, and family that I reached the finish line. I am immensely grateful to my
chair, Anikó Imre, who has been an incomparable mentor, colleague, teacher, and advocate of
mine for the past seven years. Anikó has believed in this project and trusted in my ability every
step of the way. She engaged deeply and generously with my work, challenged me to push
myself farther than I believed I could go, and always reminded me of the value of my own ideas.
I could not have wished for a better advisor to learn with and from.
I have also benefitted immeasurably from the guidance of my brilliant committee
members: Priya Jaikumar, Olivia C. Harrison, Nitin Govil, and Michael Renov. Early on in my
graduate studies, Priya’s seminars captivated my imagination and animated my interest in space,
architecture, history, and memory, among many other things. I am grateful to Priya for always
pushing me to be precise with my language and rigorous with my analysis, for her incisive
readership, and her consistent encouragement. Olivia Harrison has also been an invaluable

iv
reader, teacher, and supporter of my work throughout my time at USC. I am grateful to Olivia for
reminding me to start with my objects, encouraging me to think historically and relationally, and
for never letting me shy away from difficult debates. Nitin Govil always asks questions that
inspire new ideas and forge exciting connections in my mind; he points me in the direction of
readings and resources, and keeps me on my toes. Finally, I am thankful for Michael Renov,
whose work and teaching ignited my intellectual passion for documentary and nonfiction media,
and under whose guidance this passion was nurtured.
During my time at USC, I have been privileged to learn from some truly incredible
scholars and teachers. The courses and conversations I had with Tara McPherson, Panivong
Norindr, Lan Duong, Akira Lippit, Virginia Kuhn, Christine Acham, J.D. Connor, Michael
Bodie, Kara Keeling, Holly Willis, Bill Whittington and David James all shaped my thinking and
informed my research in different ways. As a teaching assistant, I had the honor of working with
journalist Howard Rosenberg, who became another valued mentor and whose curiosity and
thorough questions about my research and methods helped me learn how to articulate my ideas
in concise and clear terms.
Alongside these mentors, I am deeply indebted to a number of professors outside of USC
who have consistently championed my work, taught my writing in their classrooms, and/or
invited me to speak to their students. Pooja Rangan, Lauren Berliner, Hannah Goodwin, Anirban
Baishya, Bhaskar Sarkar, Bishupriya Ghosh, Masha Spholberg, Zala Volcic, and Darshana
Sreedhar Mini: I learn so much from you all and cannot thank you enough for your support. I am
particularly grateful to Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, who has not only shared and supported my work
across multiple platforms but has also become one of my most cherished intellectual allies and
helpful interlocuters. Many of the ideas in this project have benefitted from Juan’s careful

v
readership, and I am grateful to Juan for keeping me going with writing exchanges and virtual
meetings over the past year.
My research would not have been possible without the generous support of the USC
Graduate School, which awarded me a Research Enhancement Fellowship in 2018-2019. This
fellowship allowed me to spend extensive time conducting fieldwork in Europe. In 2018, my
work was additionally supported by the Visegrad Scholarship to the Open Society Archives in
Budapest, Hungary. I am incredibly thankful to the many wonderful researchers and archivists I
met with in Budapest during my stay, and who provided feedback and assistance on this project:
Oksana Sarkisova, Csaba Szilágyi, Péter Apor, Elissa Helms, Balázs Varga, Vlad Naumescu,
Katalin Gádoros, Robert Parnica, Judit Hegedűs, Nóra Ungár, Fanni Andristyák, Zsuzsa Kozák,
Renny Hahamovitch, and Kyle Shybunko. At the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies
conference on “Racial Orders, Racist Borders,” feedback from Catherine Baker, Dušan Bjelić,
James Mark, Marwan Kraidy, and David Lloyd was particularly helpful to shaping chapters 2
and 3 of this dissertation. I am also grateful to Sandra Ponzanesi, Manuela Bojadzijev, and
Mihaela Brebenel for taking the time to meet with me during my fieldwork and for discussing
this project with me. A special thank you goes out to Bojana Piškur and Teja Mehrar at the
Modern Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana, who provided me with a guided
tour of the Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned exhibit, and to Greg DeCuir
in Belgrade, who helped me access some of Želimir Žilnik’s recent films. And of course, a big
thank you to Želimir for generously sharing his work with me.
My graduate student colleagues and friends have inspired and helped me in too many
ways to count. As PhD candidates farther ahead in the program than me, Şebnem Baran,
Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Philana Payton, and Maria Zalewska provided constant guidance,

vi
reassurance, and help to me as I navigated graduate school. They generously shared time,
materials, and resources with me any time I asked for advice. At USC, I am grateful to Ennuri Jo,
Patricia Ciccone, Jelena Culibrk, Katalin Kis, Szilvia Ruszev, Sara Bakerman, Darline Morales,
Alia Haddad, Adam Gill, Cord-Heinrich Plinke, Dylan Howell, Allison Ross, Zeke Saber, Jinhee
Park, and Sophia Serrano, among others, for the many conversations, writing exchanges, co-
working sessions, and words of encouragement shared over the years. Thank you to Camillia
Shofani and the Middle East Studies Department for bringing me on as a co-programmer of
USC’s Middle East Film Screening Series between 2015-2018 and thank you to Alex Ago for
helping to make our screenings happen!
Beyond USC, I am grateful to Michael Moshe Dahan for inviting me to co-coordinate a
graduate student working group funded by the University of California Humanities Research
Institute between 2016-2018, to Leticia Garcia for her instrumental help with and participation in
the project, and to the many other graduate students and faculty across UC campuses who shared
their time and energy with the working group. Christian Rossipal, Thomas Patrick Pringle,
Kareem Estefan, and Sasha Crawford-Holland have provided thoughtful and generative feedback
on my work over the years and shared many resources which made this project stronger. Widad
and Aalaa Diab, Zeena Aljawad, and Julia Pataky provided instrumental support with
translations. Additional thanks go to Ilona Jurkonyte, Farah Atoui, Michelle Pfeifer, Iva
Radivojevic, and Mila Turajlic for inspiring ideas.
I never would have applied to graduate school if not for the encouragement of faculty at
UC Irvine. During my undergraduate studies, Fatimah Tobing Rony and Desha Dauchan
recognized my writing early on and have remained valued mentors. I am particularly grateful to
Sohail Daulatzai, who took a chance on me as an undergraduate student and hired me first as a

vii
research assistant, and then as a curatorial and editorial assistant for two art exhibits in Los
Angeles. These experiences profoundly shaped the trajectory of my research and creative work,
and I am grateful for Sohail’s continued friendship and guidance all these years later.
One of the most meaningful aspects of graduate school has been forging lasting
relationships across countries and continents. In Hungary, Mirella Suga and Jennifer Edwards
were always there for me. Zsófia Szemző helped me make Budapest my home and introduced
me to the local art scene. Sonja Simonyi is my favorite person to take eight-hour train rides
through the Balkans with and an amazingly kind and generous friend. She has provided immense
material, intellectual, and personal support to me over the years, particularly during my time in
Europe. Many thanks are due as well to the Simonyi and Van Tomme families for hosting me in
both Hungary and Belgium. I am deeply grateful to Michael Turcios, Jheanelle Brown, Danny
Grinberg, Simran Bhalla, Kathy Stocker, Amy Skjerseth, Zsófi Vályi-Nagy, Timmy Tillemans,
Soham Patel, Bree Russell, Edlin Ortiz, Jazmine Le, Marie Marotte, and Megan Gammon for
their support and friendship over the years. Since high school, Flavia McBride and the McBride
family have played an immeasurable role in my life. I am additionally grateful to Helen
Braithwaite, Michael and Mitchell Lee, Christine Hegel, Luke Cantarella, and Tosca Hegel-
Cantarella, Sylvia Franceware, Monse and Belen Cairo, Molly Schneider, Colby Riggs, Collette
Ford, and James and Tanya Steintrager, for the intellectual, material, and personal support they
have shared with me since my childhood. To Amer and Nassim, thank you for sharing your
experiences with me and trusting me with your stories. Haley Hvdson and Emma Ben Ayoun,
there aren’t enough words to express what your presence in my life has meant to me. Your
friendship has sustained and inspired me, and our conversations and collaborations have made
me a better thinker and person.

viii
Finally, none of this would have been possible without the unwavering support of my
family in both Hungary and the United States. Etu, Jani, Balázs, Kinga, Jancsika, Mama,
Gizinéni, Bálint, és a Kálmán, Orodán, Szőcs, és Ducsai családok: nagyon szépen köszönöm a
segítséget és szeretetet a Magyarországi tartózkodásom alatt. Nehéz kifejeznem, hogy az elmúlt
években veletek töltött idő mit jelentett nekem. To my mother, everything I achieve in this world
is because of you. I love you.

ix
Table of Contents

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...iii

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………….....x

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...xiii

Introduction: Unsettling Europe Along the Balkan Route……………………………………1

Chapter 1: Reactive Mapping: Shifting Europe’s Spaces…………….……………………...27

Chapter 2: Producing Crisis: A New Internationalism of the Far-Right……….…………..80

Chapter 3: Recursive Mediations: Rewriting Counterterror Histories and Futurities…..136

Chapter 4: Living Waste: Scopic Regimes of Disposability and Sites of Refusal…………191

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..262

Bibliography………………………………………………...…………………………………267

x
List of Figures

Figure 1.1 A screenshot of the public view of ICMPD’s i-MAP project showing the “Eastern
Mediterranean” route to Europe. This screenshot was taken in 2018, before ICMPD removed
public access to the i-MAP………………………………………………………………………38
Figure 1.2 The continent view of Lucify’s Flow Toward Europe map as it represents the year
2015. Screenshot taken from https://www.lucify.com/the-flow-towards-europe/.........................40
Figure 1.3 Highlighting Hungary reveals a sizeable number of asylum seekers entering
Hungary’s borders in 2015. Screenshot taken from https://www.lucify.com/the-flow-towards-
europe/............................................................................................................................................40
Figure 1.4 Highlighting Albania shows a sizable flow of asylum seekers out of the country and
into Germany in 2015. Screenshot taken from https://www.lucify.com/the-flow-towards-
europe/............................................................................................................................................41
Figure 1.5 IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map of Migrant Arrivals on June 30, 2016. Screenshot taken
from https://migration.iom.int/europe?type=arrivals.....................................................................43
Figure 1.6 IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map of Migrant Arrivals on October 15, 2018. Screenshot
taken from https://migration.iom.int/europe?type=arrivals...........................................................43
Figure 1.7 IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map of Migrant Presence in November of 2016.
https://migration.iom.int/europe?type=migrants-presence............................................................44
Figure 1.8 A still shot from Minor Border shows the abandoned tollbooths of an old border
checkpoint between Austria and Hungary. Screenshot taken from
https://vimeo.com/102211111.......................................................................................................46
Figure 1.9 A still shot from Minor Border show the deconstruction of the Nickelsdorf-
Hegyeshalom checkpoint. Screenshot taken from https://vimeo.com/102211111........................47
Figure 1.10 Amer in Serbia………………………………………………………………………58
Figure 1.11 Amer in Germany…………………………………………………………………...58
Figure 1.12 Amer in Germany…………………………………………………………………...58
Figure 1.13 Nassim in Serbia…………………………………………………………………….62
Figure 1.14 Nassim in Austria…………………………………………………………………...62
Figure 1.15 Nassim’s Instagram Map……………………………………………………………65
Figure 1.16 Anti-Migrant meme circulated on Facebook and Twitter…………………………..70
Figure 1.17 Anti-Migrant meme circulated on Facebook and Twitter…………………………..70
Figure 1.18 Still Image from Traces of Exile (Tomas Van Houtryve, 2016-2017)……………...73
Figure 1.19 Van Houtryve films the Port of Chios in Athens, Greece and overlays the image with
geotagged migrant/refugee selfies. (Traces of Exile, Tomas van Houtryve, 2016-2017)……….74
Figure 1.20 Maps created by Grupa484 and Djordje Balmazovic of Škart Collective in
collaboration with asylum seekers (2013 – present)……………………………………………..75
Figure 1.21 Maps created by Grupa484 and Djordje Balmazovic of Škart Collective in
collaboration with asylum seekers (2013 – present)……………………………………………..75

Figure 2.1 An illustration of the EU flag divided by a border fence published in The Guardian.
Screenshot from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/03/europe-east- west-
divide-refugee-eu-leaders.………………………………………………………………….........90
Figure 2.2 Image from the Hungarian government’s 2016 campaign, “The Hungarian Reforms
are Working!” The advertisement reads, “We do not want illegal immigration!” Screenshot taken
from https://budapestbeacon.com/hungarian-reforms-work-propaganda-campaign-unveiled/...105

xi
Figure 2.3 Image from the Hungarian government’s 2016 campaign, “The Hungarian Reforms
are Working!” The advertisement reads, “Economic growth is higher here than in the EU!”
https://budapestbeacon.com/hungarian-reforms-work-propaganda-campaign-unveiled/...........106

Figure 3.1 Still shots from Lázár’s “Bécs” video show a vignette darkening the edges of the
frame. Slowed down footage of passerby looking into the camera makes otherwise mundane
images feel ominous. Screenshot taken from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0d3S0nnuU...................................................................136
Figure 3.2 Still shots from Lázár’s “Bécs” video show a vignette darkening the edges of the
frame. Slowed down footage of passerby looking into the camera makes otherwise mundane
images feel ominous……………………………………………………………………………136
Figure 3.3 A still frame Lázár’s video ostensibly showing the “visibly dirtier” streets of
Vienna…………………………………………………………………………………………..138
Figure 3.4 Former Chief of Staff to the Hungarian Prime Minister, Jánós Lázár, is framed in
close-up while directly addressing the camera. He warns, “The white Christian Austrians moved
out and immigrants took control of this neighborhood.”………………………………………138
Figure 3.5 Still images from Lázár’s “Bécs” video demonstrate a fixation on Muslim women
wearing hijab, and in particular, on Muslim mothers…………………………………………..139
Figure 3.6 Still images from Lázár’s “Bécs” video demonstrate a fixation on Muslim women
wearing hijab, and in particular, on Muslim mothers…………………………………………..139
Figure 3.7 Still images from Lázár’s “Bécs” video demonstrate a fixation on Muslim women
wearing hijab, and in particular, on Muslim mothers…………………………………………..140
Figure 3.8 Still shots from Lázár’s video show the same sequence of images appears at the 0:28
and 1:25 marks………………………………………………………………………………….141
Figure 3.9 Still shots from Lázár’s video show the same sequence of images appears at the 0:28
and 1:25 marks………………………………………………………………………………….141
Figure 3.10 A government billboard near Budapest’s airport reads “Send a message to Brussels:
Migration must be stopped!” It is surrounded by billboards advertising internet services, sports
equipment, and a thrift store. Screenshot taken from Google Maps Street View………………171
Figure 3.11 Multiple copies of the same government billboard advertising the 2019 “Family
Protection Action Plan” line Lajos street in a residential area of Budapest. Screenshot taken from
Google Maps Street View………………………………………………………………………171
Figure 3.12 News headlines in Hungarian state media accompanied by decontextualized images
from other European locations. Screenshot taken from https://nava.hu/id/3483137/..................175
Figure 3.13 News headlines in Hungarian state media accompanied by decontextualized images
from other European locations. Screenshot taken from https://nava.hu/id/3484916/..................176
Figure 3.14 News headlines in Hungarian state media accompanied by decontextualized images
from other European locations. Screenshot taken from https://nava.hu/id/3492614/..................176
Figure 3.15 News headlines in Hungarian state media accompanied by decontextualized images
from other European locations. Screenshot taken from https://nava.hu/id/3482820/..................176
Figure 3.16 A government billboard advertising the National Consultation on Migration and
terrorism reads, “If you come to Hungary, you must not take away jobs from Hungarians!”…180
Figure 3.17 A 2019 government campaign message reads “You also have the right to know what
Brussels is planning!” In the foreground is Claude Juncker, who at the time of this campaign was
President of the EU commission. Over his shoulder is Hungarian-American financier, George
Soros……………………………………………………………………………………………182

xii
Figure 3.18 An information booklet sent to Hungarian voters contains an infographic showing a
drastic increase in the number of “illegal immigrants” arriving to Europe…………………….186
Figure 3.19 The information booklet shows an infographic containing the number of victims in
the Paris, Brussels, and Nice terror attacks of 2015 and 2016. The headline warns, “Illegal
migration increases the threat of terror”………………………………………………………..187
Figure 3.20 The booklet displays a map of Europe that shows clusters of red circles denoting
allegedly dangerous neighborhoods and claims there are “hundreds of no-go zones in Europe’s
major cities”…………………………………………………………………………………….188

Figure 4.1 A European Union infographic advises countries in the “Western Balkans” about the
required standards for membership……………………………………………………………..208
Figure 4.2 Dirk Planert photographs migrants/refugees at the Vučjak camp in July 2019…….228
Figure 4.3 Dirk Planert photographs a man eating outside at the Vučjak camp………………..229
Figure 4.4 Material refuse takes center frame in many of the BBC’s establishing shots of Vučjak.
Screenshot taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDn7AC5uunU……………….....232
Figure 4.5 Ground level shots of material trash emphasize the inhumane conditions in
Vučjak…………………………………………………………………………………………..233
Figure 4.6 Ground level shots of material trash emphasize the inhumane conditions in
Vučjak…………………………………………………………………………………………..233
Figure 4.7 A series of images from the BBC’s Left Out in the Cold show scabies wounds on
fragmented body parts…………………………………………………………………………..234
Figure 4.8 A series of images from the BBC’s Left Out in the Cold show scabies wounds on
fragmented body parts…………………………………………………………………………..234
Figure 4.9 A series of images from the BBC’s Left Out in the Cold show scabies wounds on
fragmented body parts…………………………………………………………………………..234
Figure 4.10 Jean Mackenzie mediates collective disbelief and concern for viewers at home….237
Figure 4.11 Jean Mackenzie mediates collective disbelief and concern for viewers at home….237
Figure 4.12 Ai Weiwei’s F. Lotus installation in Vienna, Austria……………………………..245
Figure 4.13 Ai Weiwei’s F. Lotus installation in Vienna, Austria……………………………..245
Figure 4.14 #safepassage at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, Germany……………………………..246
Figure 4.15 Ai Weiwei’s Crystal Ball at the Biennale of Sydney……………………………...247
Figure 4.16 Tents line the train tracks in Idomeni, as seen in Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary
film, Human Flow………………………………………………………………………………250
Figure 4.17 Clothing separated by size and style hangs in Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat…………251
Figure 4.18 Shoes are assembled neatly in rows for Laundromat……………………………...252
Figure 4.19 Ai Weiwei’s personal photographs displayed in Laundromat. Screenshot taken from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EQE9fx-jpY ……………………………………………255
Figure 4.20 News headlines and social media posts cover the floor for Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat.
Screenshot taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EQE9fx-jpY………………........256
Figure 4.21 A close-up of some of the headlines and social media posts in Ai Weiwei’s
Laundromat. Screenshot taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGgixKLqdno..........257
Figure 4.22 Close up of the wallpaper design featured in Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat………….258
Figure 4.23 Ceramic vase and wallpaper featured in Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat……………….259

xiii
Abstract

“Unsettled Media: Documenting Refugees and Europe’s Shifting Borders along the
Balkan Route” examines contemporary non-fiction media about Europe’s so-called “migrant” or
“refugee crisis” to demonstrate how multiple supra-state, state and non-state actors use media to
unsettle post-Cold War Europe’s material and conceptual borders as migrants and refugees
journey across the continent. I center my study on the Balkan Route, one of the primary land
routes for unauthorized migrants and refugees traveling toward Western Europe. The route
traverses Turkey, Greece or Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslav region, before terminating in
Austria via Hungary or Slovenia. My central claim is that the Balkan Route functions as an
infrastructure that mediates between the Cold War and War on Terror as migrants/refugees from
the Global South move across the former “Second World.” Prevailing scholarship on the
connections between the Cold War and War on Terror inadequately attends to the ways in which
these wars mark subjects from both Eastern Europe and the Global South as unassimilable to
western civilization. Both wars also continue to shape competing anxieties about European
belonging. The Balkan Route’s role as a mediating infrastructure reveals how these two wars
structure the racist and reactionary responses to the contemporary “migrant crisis” and inform
evolving national and European Union policies.
Recent work on irregular migration to Europe often frames nations along the Balkan
Route as “transit countries,” largely overlooking the integral role these countries play in
enforcing the EU’s securitization and border policies, and by extension, Europe’s conceptual
boundaries. By examining contemporary nonfiction media, including documentaries, broadcast
news, maps and data visualizations, government propaganda, and social media, I intervene in this
scholarship and show how supra-state, state, and non-state actors produce, communicate, and

xiv
contest political configurations of Europe’s citizens, migrants, refugees, and borders. Addressing
these questions through media studies allows me to foreground how differing experiences of
time, space, and collective memory construct the “migrant crisis” as an object of contention and
give rise to divergent understandings of Europe and its boundaries in the process.
Each chapter centers on a different theme and engages local, regional, and
migrant/refugee perspectives to demonstrate how anxieties about the “unsettled business” of the
Cold War are invoked in relation to shifting migratory patterns across the Balkan Route. I utilize
migration as a method and move across various locations, perspectives, actors, and objects that
come into contact along, and give shape to, the Balkan Route. The introduction contextualizes
Europe’s contemporary migrant crisis within the global War on Terror and provides an historical
overview of how Europe’s post-Cold War reunification process has been narrativized in the
years since 1989. It situates the Balkan Route as a site that exemplifies the many contradictions
between the concept of Europe and Europe’s material realities. Chapter one analyzes the
aesthetics and politics of media that map and visualize the Balkan Route. I introduce the concept
of “reactive mapping” to theorize how migrants and refugees remap Europe through both their
autonomous and unauthorized movement and their active documentation of this movement,
shifting Europe’s borders in the process. Chapters two and three explore Hungary’s anti-migrant
propaganda campaigns as political, aesthetic, and technological objects that shift Europe’s
conceptual borders and revise Europe’s modernity timeline. While Hungary’s anti-migrant media
campaigns have been widely criticized by the international community for their racism, I argue
that such anti-migrant discourses are not anomalies out of line with European values but rather
are directly encouraged and enabled by the EU’s accession requirements and externalized
bordering regime. Chapter four examines how the Balkan Route is naturalized as a site of

xv
disposal for the EU’s unwanted migrants through non-fiction media that reproduce scopic
regimes of disposability. These media reveal ongoing exploitative relationships between core EU
countries and peripheral European nations while also providing opportunities for counter-
readings of (images of) waste. The chapter explores how artistic uses of “waste” resist state
attempts to erase migrants from public view and imagine instead a politics and practice of care.
Overall, this project addresses the vital and undertheorized role that mediated processes of
migration across the Balkan Route play in producing and revising Europe’s conceptual
boundaries and material borders.

1
Introduction
On a warm August morning in 2015, I left my aunt’s house in Szatymaz—a small village
in southern Hungary that lies on the outskirts of the city of Szeged—and boarded the intercity
train headed north to Budapest. Szatymaz is the first stop on the northern train line from its
departure station in Szeged; it’s a route that vertically crosses almost the entirety of Hungary and
takes approximately two-and-a-half hours from start to finish. While I was used to the train being
crowded in its southern direction with commuters heading home from work, I expected I would
easily find an empty cabin on my way back to Hungary’s capital city. In August of 2015, I was
mistaken. As I boarded a packed train car, I overheard two Hungarian men speaking with
exasperation as they pushed their way through the interior doors of the passenger carriage and
walked down the aisle, searching for seats. “There’s no room in the back?” One of them asked.
“It’s packed full of migrants again!” The other replied in frustration.
1
I realized, as I walked
through the train, that I had found myself traveling on the Balkan Route, moving in the same
direction as hundreds of thousands of migrants/refugees who were arriving to Hungary’s
southern border through Serbia and making their way to Budapest, where they hoped to board
one more train to Austria.
In those early weeks of August, the Balkan Route—a land route that traverses
Southeastern and Central Europe—had not yet become a site of major concern for the European
Union, nor was it a prominent fixture in global news media coverage of the so-called “migrant”
or “refugee crisis.” As migration scholar and cultural anthropologist Bernd Kasparek notes,
“Even though there were reports about large arrivals on the Greek islands of the Aegean, like
Kos or Lesvos […] the institutions and processes of the European migration regime seemed to

1
At the time, migrants/refugees were instructed to take seats in designated passenger carriages at the back
of the train.
2
focus almost entirely on Italy and the Central Mediterranean” throughout most of the summer.
2

This would markedly change, however, just a few days after I left Hungary and returned to the
United States. First, on August 27
th
, 2015, the bodies of 71 migrants/refugees who had
suffocated to death were discovered in an abandoned lorry parked on the highway close to the
Austrian-Hungarian border.
3
Following the discovery, Austrian officials tightened border
controls with Hungary, despite both countries belonging to the European Schengen zone of free
movement, and Hungarian authorities began denying migrants/refugees access to trains and
buses heading westward. Hungary’s Keleti Railway Station, which just a week prior had
functioned as a transit zone that funneled migrants/refugees onward, suddenly transformed into a
bottleneck of the Balkan Route.
On September 3
rd
, Hungary suspended all international train connections at the station,
but informed migrants/refugees that they could take a domestic train to the Austrian border and
continue their journeys from there. Six-hundred migrants/refugees boarded the first train headed
toward the border, only to discover that the announcement had been a trick. Hungarian police
surrounded the train in Bicske, a town roughly twenty miles outside of Budapest, and tried to
forcibly relocate the migrants/refugees to a refugee camp nearby.
4
News of the deception quickly
spread on social media and through traditional reporting outlets, and migrants/refugees still at
Budapest’s Keleti station began publicly protesting for Europe to open its borders. Violent
clashes broke out between Hungarian police and migrants/refugees, and on September 4
th
,

2
Bernd Kasparek, “Routes, Corridors, and Spaces of Exception: Governing Migration and Europe,” Near
Futures Online 1 “Europe at a Crossroads,” 2016, 2. http://nearfuturesonline.org/ routes-corridors-and-
spaces-of-exception-govern- ing-migration-and-europe/
3
“Death toll rises to 71 refugees in Austrian truck tragedy,” France 24, August 27, 2015,
https://www.france24.com/en/20150827-europe-migrant-crisis-balkans-summit-austria-lorry-truck
4
Bernd Kasparek and Mark Speer, “Of Hope, Hungary, and the Long Summer of Migration,” Border
Monitoring EU, September 9, 2015, https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/

3
migrants/refugees camped in Keleti announced that if Hungary would not permit travel to
Austria by bus or train, they would go on foot.
5
This spontaneous protest, known as the March of
Hope, made headlines around the world, drawing global media attention to the Balkan Route as a
key site of struggle between Europe’s bordering regime and migrants/refugees.
Like many people, I experienced the March of Hope as a media event. From my home in
California, I watched—transfixed—as spectacular images and video of approximately 1,000
migrants/refugees marching through Budapest proliferated online and played across television
stations. The streets and bridges I had walked myself just two weeks prior suddenly felt
unrecognizable to me as they carried this stunning mass exodus. In response to
migrants/refugees’ enactment of their right to move, as well as media coverage of this
autonomous act of migration, Germany and Austria announced that their borders were open and
that they would accept migrants/refugees arriving to their territories.
6
Hungary conceded to the
will of migrants/refugees and began organizing bus transports to Austria. Over the next few days,
approximately ten-thousand migrants/refugees arrived in Germany.
7

The series of events leading up to and following the March of Hope thus encapsulate how
migrants/refugees unsettle Europe’s material and conceptual borders—shifting where and how
material borders are performed, and thus, upending the image of a unified European continent—
through their unsanctioned, autonomous movement. They also demonstrate how nonfiction
media practices are central to facilitating and containing unauthorized migration, and to
producing, enacting, or suspending the enforcement of borders. In other words, ‘Europe,’ as a

5
Ibid.
6
Kasparek, “Routes, Corridors, and Spaces of Exception.” See also: Nicholas De Genova, “Introduction,”
in The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, ed. Nicholas De Genova,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 11-13.
7
Kasparek and Speer, “Of Hope, Hungary, and the Long Summer of Migration.”
4
concept, and the enforcement of Europe’s territorial borders are shaped by the media networks
through which migrants/refugees navigate their journeys and share and circulate information; the
media infrastructures through which the European Union, in partnership with member states and
candidate states, surveils and polices migrant mobilities; and global news media coverage, which
plays a key role in shaping public discourses about the migrant/refugee crisis (as well as
European responses to it). As media scholar Juan Llamas-Rodriguez writes, mediation:
mobilizes the spectacle of border security for publics who are geographically removed from the
border region. For one, these publics have no access to the material geopolitical border except
through media. [...] Second, border security spectacle is performative in the sense defined by
Judith Butler as a ‘discursive practice that enacts that which it names.’ […] Media becomes a
useful tool in the performance of border security by re-producing the practices of enforcement
and policing continuously across dispersed publics. Border security practices acquire their
‘naturalized effect’ by virtue of this reiteration, yet it is also because of such repetition that gaps
and fissures ‘are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions.’
8

Media thus produce, communicate, and contest who, what, and where ‘Europe’ is at any given
moment through their constitutive relationship with border security practices.
This dissertation examines contemporary nonfiction media to demonstrate how multiple
state and non-state actors use media to unsettle post-Cold War Europe’s material and conceptual
borders as migrants/refugees journey across the continent. I center my study on the Balkan
Route, one of the primary land routes for unauthorized migrants and refugees traveling toward
Western Europe today. The route traverses Turkey, Greece or Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslav
region before terminating in Austria via Hungary or Slovenia. Between 2015 and 2016, its
direction changed multiple times as different national borders unpredictably opened and closed.
The Balkan Route is a unique land route because unlike the Central Mediterranean Route which
enters Europe in Italy and the Western Mediterranean Route which enters through Spain, the

8
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, “Tunnel Risk and the Mediation of the Border Security Spectacle,” in
Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, eds. Bhaskar Sarkar and Bishnupriya Ghosh, (London:
Routledge, 2020), 305.
5
Balkan Route crosses through numerous postsocialist countries that have different political
relationships to the European Union, and thus, different obligations toward enforcing EU border
policies. Hungary and Slovenia, for example, are EU member states and part of the Schengen
Zone, and as such, they are on the frontlines of the EU’s Schengen borders. Croatia, Romania,
and Bulgaria are EU member states but not yet part of Schengen. Albania, Serbia, Montenegro,
and North Macedonia are official candidate states for EU membership, while Bosnia and
Herzegovina, as well as Kosovo, are considered potential candidate states. Whether the countries
are EU member states, candidate states, or potential candidates, they are all regularly assessed by
the EU Commission which evaluates their progress toward ‘Europeanization’—that lofty goal
which has undergirded the narrative of Eastern Europe’s ‘transition’ to the ‘free world’ since the
end of the Cold War in 1989, and which, upon its achievement, will supposedly affirm the
region’s belonging within Europe proper.
By examining contemporary nonfiction media, including documentaries, broadcast news,
maps and data visualizations of migrant flows, EU policy documents, government propaganda,
mixed-media installations, and social media, I show how the Balkan Route functions as a key
site where supra-state, state and non-state actors produce, communicate, and contest ‘Europe’
and its borders. These diverse practices collectively unsettle ‘Europe’ and give rise to competing
visions of European boundaries, histories, and values. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, to unsettle means to “undo from a fixed position,” “to force out of a settled
condition,” and “to deprive of fixity,” while to be unsettled means to be “still in a state of flux or
motion,” to be “undetermined, unresolved, [and] undecided.”
9
To think with the concept of

9
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “unsettle, v.,” accessed May 24, 2021, https://www-oed-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/217786?redirectedFrom=unsettle& Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.
“unsettled, adj.,” accessed May 24, 2021, https://www-oed-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/217788?
6
unsettling allows me to consider multiple practices and experiences of (dis)placement along the
Balkan Route. While migrants/refugees are repeatedly unsettled—both materially and
emotionally—by political, economic, and environmental instability, and the violent bordering
mechanisms of the nation-states they seek shelter in, migrants/refugees also unsettle the fixity of
those same borders, of national and cultural identities, and of the categories of ‘citizen,’
‘migrant,’ ‘refugee,’ and ‘asylum seeker’ through their autonomous enactments of migration.
The “migrant/refugee crisis” is articulated as a crisis precisely because it reminds us that
the material and conceptual borders of Europe are not only subject to revision, but also to
potentially radical change. This is particularly felt along the Balkan Route, where different
nation-states exist in different political and temporal relation to (becoming) Europe(an). I
therefore conceptualize the Balkan Route as a mediated and mediating infrastructure, one that is
produced by, and made coherent through, the media practices of migrants/refugees, journalists
and documentarians, state authorities, and the supra-state agencies of the European Union.
Addressing the Balkan Route through media studies allows me to foreground how these multiple
media practices enable or constrict migrant mobilities toward Europe, as well as how differing
experiences of time and space construct the “migrant/refugee crisis” as an object of contention
and give rise to divergent understandings of ‘Europe’ and its boundaries in the process. Here, I
follow the lead of Tyler Morgenstern, Krista Lynes and Ian Alan Paul, who argue that we must
develop “a rigorous understanding of the visual as a series of ‘image operations,’ that is, as
emphatically real interventions into the whole field of institutional, political, and social relations
within which migrant practices unfold.”
10
Although many of the conceptual frameworks I invoke

10
See: Tyler Morgenstern, Krista Lynes, and Ian Alan Paul, “Introduction: In and Against Crisis” in
Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis, eds. Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern and Ian Alan Paul,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 33.
7
throughout this dissertation could also be applied to media categorized as narrative fiction, I
choose to focus on nonfiction media objects because of governmental, institutional, and public
investments in the evidentiary status of nonfiction media. As the field of documentary studies
has shown, nonfiction media, though it is itself created and interpreted through myriad subjective
choices, nevertheless makes a particular claim to the real that informs its usages in the
production of knowledge and public policy. Understanding what nonfiction mediations of
migration across the Balkan Route tell us about the possibilities for different politics and policies
is of the utmost urgency, particularly as far-right, populist parties entrench their power in nations
around the world.

Background
While irregular migration to Europe has been occurring for decades, the contemporary
“migrant/refugee crisis” reached a tipping point in 2015, when over one million migrants and
refugees seeking asylum made their way to the continent and more than 4,000 drowned in the
Mediterranean during similar attempts. Global media attention to the crisis quickly grew as
journalists, filmmakers, and photographers flocked to Greece to document the chaotic arrivals of
hundreds of people per day. As the EU failed to reach a consensus on how to respond to the
growing number of asylum seekers traveling across the continent, images of dramatic maritime
rescues and violent confrontations at border crossings inundated Europe and the rest of the
world. Across digital media, broadcast news reports, and documentary films, Europe is projected
as fractured and divided over its future, and seemingly unable to agree upon the meaning of
“European values.”
8
As migrants/refugees enacted their right to move and forged their way past Europe’s
external border controls in North Africa and Turkey, Europe’s material borders—where and how
they were performed—shifted in response. Between August and November of 2015, the Balkan
Route functioned as a corridor that enabled the movement of migrants/refugees westward. In
response to the overwhelming number of daily arrivals to Greece, state authorities enabled—and
even hastened—migrants/refugees’ transit northwest, pushing people on the move through the
route as quickly as possible.
11
The transformation of the Balkan Route into a corridor seemed to
represent a contraction of Europe’s borders inward; rather than maintaining Europe’s external
borders, Turkey, North Africa, and Southeastern Europe were funneling migrants/refugees
directly to Austria and Germany.
12
As Nicholas De Genova writes:
Remarkably, by August, September, and October 2015, literally from week to week and even
day to day, the apparent front line of European border struggles was repeatedly dislocated from
one country to another, oftentimes further and further removed from any imagined outer
periphery or frontier of Europe, in a dramatic dialectic of contestation between diverse migrant
and refugee autonomies and a feckless heterogeneity of tactics of bordering. These ostensible
frontline dramas of the borders of Europe had moved decidedly inward […] into Austria and
Germany, and then back again to Croatia and Slovenia.
13

Yet, as Bernd Kasparek writes, while “the EU border and migration regime did not have the
capacity to stop the extraordinary movement of people across its borders, […] morphing the
[Balkan Route] into a confined corridor served to re-establish some kind of control over [their]
movements” and to enable the route’s eventual closure.
14
When Slovenia announced in

11
Kasparek, “Routes, Corridors, and Spaces of Exception.”
12
See: Barbara Beznec and Andrej Kurnik, “Old Routes, New Perspectives: A Postcolonial Reading of
the Balkan Route,” movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies 5, no.1 (2020):
33-55; Marianthi Anastasiadou et al., “From Transit Hub to Dead End: A Chronicle of Idomeni,” Border
Monitoring EU (Munich: bordermonitoring.eu, 2017); Jelena Tosic, “From a Transit Route to the
‘Backyard of Europe’? Tracing the Past, Present, and Future of the ‘Balkan Route,’” in Facetten von
Flucht aus dem Nahen und Mittleren Osten Facultas, eds. Gebhard Fartacek and Susanne Binder (Vienna:
Facultas, 2017), 150-166.
13
De Genova, 11.
14
Kasparek, “Routes, Corridors, and Spaces of Exception,” 6.
9
November of 2015 that only Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan migrants/refugees would be allowed to
enter its territory, Europe’s borders expanded and multiplied outward again. A domino effect of
similar border controls in the countries south of Slovenia followed, and border control
procedures were soon reintroduced at multiple European borders within the Schengen zone as
well, undermining freedom of movement in the European Union.
15

The Balkan Route, which had been functioning as a corridor connected by infrastructures
of transport (railways, bus lines, and highways), thus transformed into a series of holding
containers. New border fences were erected, or older fences reinforced, along the Hungarian-
Serbian, Hungarian-Croatian, Slovenian-Croatian, Austrian-Slovenian, Austrian-Italian,
Bulgarian-Turkish, and Greek-Turkish borders.
16
By March of 2016, the route was declared
“closed” with the announcement of the EU-Turkey Deal, which stipulated that any “irregular
migrant” who arrived in Greece after the 20th of March, 2016 would be deported back to Turkey.
In exchange, the EU promised to resettle one Syrian refugee from Turkey to the EU for every
Syrian returned to Turkey from Greece.
17
While these deterrence policies and material changes
to Europe’s borders have been effective in reducing the number of new arrivals to the European
continent via Turkey, they have also left thousands of migrants/refugees suspended in various
countries along the Balkan Route. Many continue to fight for their right to move, risking their
lives in increasingly dangerous border crossings.

Notes on Terminology

15
Ibid.
16
Nick Thorpe, The Road Before Me Weeps: On the refugee route through Europe, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2016)
17
Ibid., 168-170. See also: European Council, “EU-Turkey Statement, 18 March 2016,” European
Council, March 18, 2016, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2016/03/18/eu-turkey-
statement/
10
The premise of the EU-Turkey Deal, under which Europe agreed to resettle supposedly
authentic refugees in exchange for the right to deport allegedly inauthentic “economic migrants”
to Turkey, also brings to bear strategic governmental practices of categorization of people on the
move. As De Genova argues, the governance of transnational human mobility relies on the
state’s “exercise of power over classifying, naming, and partitioning” people on the move into
different categories which create false divides between migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.
18

De Genova cogently argues that depicting refugees as “migrants,” a term used to connote people
who voluntarily move for economic gain, “has been a crucial discursive maneuver in the
spectacle of Europe’s border crisis.”
19
By emphasizing a distinction between credible refugees
and duplicitous migrants, European politicians have bolstered support for further securitization
measures and increased deportation practices within the continent. At the same time, the focus on
resettling ‘authentic’ refugees problematically reduces displaced people to the status of passive
victims who are entirely reliant on state authorities and aid agencies for survival.
De Genova thus calls upon scholars to reject the partitioning of “migrant” and “refugee”
and to adopt the combined term “migrant/refugee” instead. Doing so emphasizes the tensions and
ambiguities between these individual terms; it recognizes that refugees continue to carry
aspirations after they have been made stateless, and make “strategic and tactical choices about
how to reconfigure their lives and advance their life projects.” Likewise, “migrants are often in
flight (or fleeing) from various social or political conditions […] thereby actively escaping or
deserting forms of everyday deprivation, persecution, or (structural) violence that may be no less
pernicious for their mundanity.”
20
Following De Genova’s call to refuse the conceptual division

18
De Genova, 9.
19
Ibid., 8.
20
Ibid., 9.
11
between migrants and refugees, I use the term “migrant/refugee” throughout this dissertation to
foreground the overlaps between people on the move along the Balkan Route and to underscore
shared experiences of displacement and migration across multiple communities.
Throughout this dissertation, I also invoke the terms “state,” “supra-state,” and “non-
state” to refer to the multiple actors that produce and mediate migration across the Balkan Route.
These terms, though imperfect, are meant to foreground the differing political aims of, and the
uneven and shifting power dynamics between, national governments and their representatives
(“state”); transnational political bodies, institutions, and agencies of the European Union, which
exert significant financial and political influence over national governments (“supra-state”); and
independent actors, including artists, activists, and migrants/refugees, who do not act as
government representatives and do not directly make or enforce policy decisions but nevertheless
influence political decision making through their actions (“non-state”). While the categories of
supra-state, state, and non-state may initially appear to chart a top-down view of power, my
research demonstrates that there is no clear-cut hierarchy of power between these actors. Rather,
the ability of each of these actors to exert power and influence over another is always unstable
and subject to contingencies, revealing how the very concept and definition of ‘Europe’ itself is
continuously unsettled by competing visions of what ‘Europe’ should be. These competing
visions are themselves undergirded by the histories and logics of the Cold War and War on
Terror, two ideological projects that have shaped European foreign policy and influenced ideas
about European identity for over seventy years.

Between the Cold War and War on Terror
12
The central claim of my dissertation is that the Balkan Route functions as an
infrastructure that mediates between the Cold War and War on Terror as migrants/refugees from
both the Global South and the former “Second World” move across it. The Cold War and War on
Terror mark subjects from both Eastern Europe
21
and the Global South as unassimilable to
western civilization, and the anxieties produced by both wars converge along the Balkan Route,
which has long been imagined as both a bridge and barricade between western Europe and its
exteriors.
22
I argue that these wars continue to shape competing anxieties about European
belonging and European power in the twenty-first century, whether these anxieties are expressed
from the point of view of core European Union (EU) member states, European countries seeking
membership in the EU, or non-European migrants and refugees. These competing anxieties and,
consequently, competing mediations of what, where, and who ‘Europe’ is unsettle perceptions of
Europe’s boundaries as stable or fixed. The route can therefore be conceptualized similarly to
what Walter Benjamin describes as “structures that convey and connect,” and whose “mediating
function has a literal and spatial as well as figurative and stylistic bearing.”
23

At the height of the migrant/refugee crisis, Western and Eastern Europe appeared to have
deep disagreements on migration and asylum policy. While prominent EU leaders in the west
sought to establish refugee resettlement quotas across member states to ease the pressure on Italy

21
I use the term Eastern Europe to signify a broad region that encompasses the former Eastern Bloc;
however, the Balkan Route specifically traverses areas of the continent that are more commonly referred
to today as Southeastern Europe and Central Europe. These conceptual markers are not apolitical. As
historians James Mark, Bogdan C. Iacob, Tobbias Rupprecht, and Ljubica Spaskovska eloquently attest,
dissidents and Communist reformers in Hungary, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia evoked “Central
Europe” as a regional identity in the 1980s in order to affirm the countries’ cultural and political home
was with western Europe rather than the Soviet Union. See: James Mark et al., 1989: A Global History of
Eastern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 125-172.
22
See for example: Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
23
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1932]), 125.
13
and Greece, Eastern European nation-states like Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and
Poland openly denounced the quotas and claimed they would refuse to adhere to them.
24

Multiple reports in western news outlets, including Austria’s ORF(Austrian Broadcasting
Corporation), Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the United Kingdom’s The Guardian,
pointed toward these countries’ communist pasts as the reason for their xenophobia, lack of
solidarity with the EU, and inability to assimilate into Western European liberal democracy.
25

Debates about the “illiberal turn” in Eastern Europe, spurred by the rise of far-right populist
governments in countries like Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia, and Poland, have revitalized Cold War
stereotypes about the region, marking Eastern Europe as inherently prone to autocracy.
26
Such
analyses tend to focus on Eastern Europe’s progress toward ‘Europeanization’ from the
standpoint of human rights and democratic governance; however, criticisms of the region’s
response to unauthorized migration overlook the integral role these countries play in enforcing
the EU’s own securitization and border policies, often as part of their bids to join the EU and/or
the Schengen zone.
Admission into the European Union—a goal for much of the former Eastern Bloc—
requires that candidate states meet the EU’s established political and economic criteria and that

24
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania officially voted against the resettlement scheme,
while Poland ultimately voted affirmatively. See: Ian Traynor and Patrick Kingsley, “EU governments
push through divisive deal to share 120,000 refugees,” The Guardian, September 22, 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/22/eu-governments-divisive-quotas-deal-share-120000-
refugees
25
See: “Demokratie muss gelernt werden,” ORF, August 10
th
, 2016.
https://orf.at/v2/stories/2352553/2352583/; Meret Bauman, “Auch Osteuropa muss Solidarität zeigen:
Entlang des einstigen Eisernen Vorhangs geht der tiefste Riss in der europäischen Asyldebatte,” Neue
Zürcher Zeitung, September 10
th
, 2015. https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/auch-osteuropa-muss-solidaritaet-
zeigen-1.18610703?reduced=true; Natalie Nougayrède, “Healing Europe’s east-west divide is central to a
lasting refugee solution,” The Guardian, September 3
rd
, 2015.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/03/europe-east-west-divide-refugee-eu-leaders
26
See for example: Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: Why the West is Losing the
Fight for Democracy, (New York: Pegasus Books, 2020).
14
they demonstrate “administrative and institutional capacity to effectively implement the acquis”
of the Union, including “measures relating to [the EU’s] common foreign and security policy.”
27

This includes demonstrating infrastructural and organizational capacity to adequately secure
borders, manage traffic, and monitor migration across their territories—projects for which the
EU provides extensive funding to both member and candidate states. For example, in 2018, the
EU Commission provided 305 million euros in emergency funding to member states “under
pressure” from migration. The funds were sourced through the Commission’s Asylum,
Migration, and Integration Fund and its Internal Security Fund, as part of a broader 10.8-billion-
euro funding package allocated to “migration, border management, and internal security” within
the EU’s 2014-2020 budget. As part of this emergency funding, Croatia received 6.8 million
euros “to help reinforce border management at the EU’s external borders” and to “strengthen
border surveillance and law enforcement capacity.”
28
The funding was allocated to Croatia
despite extensive reports of Croatian police violating international law by committing illegal
pushbacks of migrants/refugees at the country’s borders with Bosnia and Serbia.
29
Thus, while
criticisms that frame Balkan Route countries as un-European for their anti-migration policies and
violent bordering tactics abound, these same policies and tactics are directly encouraged and
supported by funding from the EU, which deploys Central and Southeastern nations as a
bordering force for Europe’s core. In short, from the standpoint of the nation-states along the
Balkan Route, securitizing Europe’s borders is precisely what evidences their ‘Europeanness’ to

27
European Commission, “Accession Criteria” and “Acquis,” EUR-Lex Glossary of Summaries,
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary.html
28
“Migration and borders: Commission awards additional €305 million to Member States under
pressure,” EU Commission, December 20, 2018,
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_6884
29
Andrew Connelly, “Croatia Abuses Migrants While the EU Turns a Blind Eye,” Foreign Policy,
December 6, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/06/croatia-is-abusing-migrants-while-the-eu-turns-
a-blind-eye/
15
the EU. The Balkan Route’s role as a mediating infrastructure therefore reveals how the
ideological underpinnings of the Cold War and War on Terror structure the racist and reactionary
responses to the contemporary “migrant/refugee crisis” and inform evolving national and EU
policies.
Importantly, Eastern European countries are not only expected to serve as a buffer zone
between the Global South and core European countries; they are also expected to manage and
control the mobilities of their own citizens toward the west and delimit emigration. Nick Thorpe,
in his book The Road Before Me Weeps: On the Refugee Route through Europe, describes how
the United Kingdom’s ‘Brexit’ campaign to secede from the European Union was shaped by
anti-migrant sentiments directed at migrants/refugees from both the Global South and Eastern
Europe. Thorpe recounts how former British Prime Minister David Cameron travelled to
Hungary in January of 2016, in the midst of the growing Brexit campaign:
David Cameron had visited Hungary […] in one of his last-ditch efforts to win concessions from
EU countries to reduce immigration to the UK to below 100,000 a year, from the over 300,000
where it [then] stood. The key to that, he believed, was to reduce or eradicate benefits for fly-by-
night East Europeans, including Hungarians, whom the Daily Mail and the Daily Express
claimed were only drawn to the UK in the first place by the possibility of cheating the British
state.
30

Cameron’s visit to Hungary speaks to the multiple anxieties animated by migration across
the Balkan Route. While the Balkan Route serves as a land bridge between Asia and Europe, the
countries along the route do not simply serve as transit zones for migrants/refugees from the
Global South. Balkan Route countries are also significant suppliers of migrant labor to western
Europe, and a sizeable number of asylum seekers originate from the Balkans themselves. The
BBC reports that “In the first seven months of 2015, Germany received almost 200,000 requests
for asylum. More than four in 10 of those applicants came from the Western Balkans,” primarily

30
Thorpe, 195.
16
Albania and Kosovo.
31
Thus, admission to the EU for Balkan states that are still in the process of
accession depends not only on their ability to secure Europe’s borders but also on their ability to
stem the flow of undesirable Eastern European asylum seekers toward the west. In collectively
taking up the role of Europe’s border guard, the nations along the Balkan Route play a
contradictory role: they violently manifest Europe’s material borders in the hopes of acceding to
the European Union and becoming ‘European,’ yet their bordering tactics are consistently
criticized by international observers for being un-European. In this way, the Balkan Route
produces and mediates Europe’s material and conceptual boundaries, as in the process of
managing the mobilities of migrants/refugees it becomes a measure of postsocialist Eastern
Europe’s progress toward Europeanizing.
32

Between 2015 and 2018, the vast majority of non-European migrants/refugees travelling
the Balkan Route came from three countries: Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
33
Syria had already
suffered four years of civil war by the time the migrant/refugee crisis became a global media
sensation, and by 2014 part of its territory had come under the control of Daesh (commonly
referred to in Anglophone publications as the Islamic State). Consequently, Syria became
enveloped in the United States’ global War on Terror; the U.S. intervened in the country by
training and offering equipment to Syrian rebel fighters, launching airstrikes, and sending ground

31
Guy Delauney, “Migrant crisis: Explaining the exodus from the Balkans,” BBC News, September 7,
2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34173252
32
See for example: Emilio Cocco, “Where is the European frontier? The Balkan migration crisis and its
impact on relations between the EU and the Western Balkans,” European View 16 (2017): 293–302;
Jelena Tosic, “From a Transit Route to the ‘Backyard of Europe’? Tracing the Past, Present, and Future of
the ‘Balkan Route,’” in Fartacek, Gebhard and Susanne Binder, Facetten von Flucht aus dem Nahen und
Mittleren Osten Facultas, (2017): 150-166
33
“Migratory Routes: Western Balkans Route,” FRONTEX, n.d., https://frontex.europa.eu/we-
know/migratory-routes/western-balkan-route/
17
troops to Syrian territory.
34
Meanwhile, by 2015, Iraq and Afghanistan had endured nearly
fifteen years of violence under United States’ led invasion and occupation. The War on Terror
has displaced millions of people since its inception in 2001 and has amplified a global security
industry that thrives on violently producing and policing new borders around the world.
35
Like
the Cold War before it, the War on Terror imagines a Manichean battle between civilizational
ideologies. Where the former has come to be understood as a war between two different
conceptualizations of imperial modernity that sought to gain power during the Global South’s
anti-colonial revolutions, the latter, according to Darryl Li, marks a war against an alternative
universalism embodied by Islam which is diametrically opposed to Euro-American empire.
36

The Balkan Route manifests anxieties about Europe’s infiltration by ‘Muslim terrorists’
and ‘criminal’ Eastern Europeans because of its role as an infrastructure of transit and
trafficking. This pathway that migrants/refugees follow to western Europe is the same pathway
used to transport material goods from the Greek port of Piraeus, where they are imported, to the
European core. It is the same route used by the Balkan Stream pipeline to transfer natural gas
from Russia and Turkey to countries in Southeastern and Central Europe.
37
It is also the pathway
that China has used to advance its economic interests in Europe; China has invested in
infrastructure along the Balkan Route, incorporating the region within its massive Belt and Road

34
Oluwaseyi Emmanuel Ogunnowo and Felix Chidozie, “International Law and Humanitarian
Intervention in the Syrian Civil War: The Role of the United States,” SAGE Open, (April 2020).
https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020919533.
35
See Liz Fekete, Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right, (London: Verso, 2018).
36
See Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2019). See also: James Mark et al, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
37
Andrey Gurkov, “Gazprom loses gas monopoly as Southeast European market advances,” January 8,
2021, https://www.dw.com/en/gazprom-loses-gas-monopoly-as-southeast-european-market-advances/a-
56173827
18
Initiative.
38
These economic encroachments from the east mark the Balkan Route as a site of
potential concern for western European business interests as well as western European
geopolitical influence. However, anxieties about the Balkan Route’s ability to undermine
western European hegemony extend beyond formal economic investments. The Balkan Route is
also a significant pathway for underground economies, and it is here where the collision of the
Cold War’s afterlives and the contemporary War on Terror are perhaps best illustrated. In
November of 2015, after hundreds of thousands of migrants/refugees had successfully reached
the west, a series of mass shootings rocked the city of Paris and reanimated fears that ‘Muslim
terrorists’ were infiltrating Europe by posing as refugees. Though it turned out that the attackers
were born and raised in Europe, the image of terror being transported across the Balkan Route
was bolstered by the discovery that the shooters’ guns were manufactured in Serbia and Croatia,
used during the Yugoslav secession wars of the 1990s, and subsequently illegally traded on the
black market. An article in Time magazine, headlined “How Europe’s Terrorists Get Their
Guns,” reported:
Once European terrorists realized the strategic advantages of guns, they quickly discovered they
were surprisingly easy to find. Just beyond the countries of Western Europe, with their restrictive
gun laws, lie the Balkan states, awash with illegal weapons left over from the conflicts that raged
there in the 1990s. According to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, there are anywhere
between three million and six million firearms in circulation in the Western Balkans—and
possibly more.
39

Here, the Balkan Route is framed as an unruly, ungovernable, and un-European frontier space,
where the rule of law does not apply. It is imagined as a frightening infrastructure of human and

38
See: “China’s Investments in the Western Balkans,” Strategic Comments 26, no. 10 (2020): iv-vi. DOI:
10.1080/13567888.2020.1868206
39
Naina Bajekal and Vivienne Walt, “How Europe’s Terrorists Get Their Guns,” Time, December 7,
2015, https://time.com/how-europes-terrorists-get-their-guns/
19
arms trafficking, enabled by ‘criminal’ Eastern Europeans, that funnels terrorism into the heart of
Europe.
40

As concerns about the Balkan Route’s role in facilitating terrorism circulated in the
media and across EU communiques in the wake of the Paris attacks, nations along the Balkan
Route ramped up the securitization of their borders to evidence their ability to protect Europe
from unwanted outsiders. This dissertation argues, in part, that an integral aspect of this
bordering work is the public performance of the counter-terror security state, which aims to
distance Eastern European countries from their socialist pasts and align them instead with
western Europe through a shared commitment to fighting ‘Muslim terrorism.’ Through a
reinvigoration of the antemurale myth, a flexible myth that designates certain spaces as European
bulwarks against the expansion of Islam, countries like Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia cast
themselves as the true defenders of European culture and civilization. Anti-migrant policies and
the mobilization of far-right populisms therefore do not evince a turning away from ‘Europe,’
but rather an overidentification with Europe and the modern/colonial world order it brought into
being.
41
By bringing together the antemurale myth and the logic of the counter-terror security
state, I argue that Eastern European nations unsettle Europe’s conceptual boundaries—which

40
An important tension here is that Serbian nationalism, and the Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims in
Srebrenica, has also come to be a source of inspiration for far-right agitators online, and was cited as an
influence by white supremacist terrorists Anders Breivik (who committed the 2011 Norway attacks) and
Brenton Tarrant (who committed the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand). As such, the Balkan
Route mediates fears about growing extremism on both the right and left. See: Jasmin Mujanović, “The
Balkan Routes of the Far Right’s ‘Great Replacement’ Theory,” Newlines Magazine, March 12, 2021.
https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-balkan-roots-of-the-far-rights-great-replacement-theory/
41
Walter Mignolo writes of the modern/colonial world system as a particular project that originates in
Europe and achieves global dominance through European colonialism. Mignolo contends that coloniality
is constitutive of modernity, and that modernity requires a double colonization of time and space that
together constitute the “two pillars of Western civilization.” The ascription of different temporalities to
geographical spaces plays a key role in how Eastern European nations appropriate and perform the logic
of the counter-terror security state. For Mignolo’s argument, see: Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of
Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
20
mark Eastern Europe as less modern, less European, and subsequently, less white—and remap
‘Europe’ around Central and Southeastern Europe.

Migration as Method
My methodological approach is inspired by the work of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett
Neilson, who argue for the border as method in their influential text by the same name. Mezzadra
and Neilson call on scholars to take up the border not as a research object but rather as “an
epistemological viewpoint that allows an acute critical analysis not only of how relations of
domination, dispossession, and exploitation are being redefined but also of the struggles that take
shape around these changing relations.”
42
Heeding this advice, I aim in this text to work with
migration as an epistemological viewpoint. Accordingly, my chapters migrate across the multiple
actors and perspectives that come into contact along the Balkan Route, from migrants/refugees,
to EU institutions and agencies, national governments, transnational political consultants, local
residents, journalists, and filmmakers and artists. I also situate my own experiences moving
within the region. Between 2015 and 2020, I spent extensive time in Hungary—the country of
my birth—and also traveled to Turkey, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The majority of my fieldwork took place between 2018 and 2020, during which time I conducted
archival research in the “RefugeeDocsMap” collection at the Open Society Archives in
Budapest.
43
I also immersed myself in the city during the lead up to the EU’s 2019 Parliamentary

42
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor, (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2013), 18.
43
The Open Society Archive’s “RefugeeDocsMap” collection is part of the archive’s Film Library, which
contains over 5,500 documentary films engaged with human rights issues. “RefugeeDocsMap” is a
“visual geographic catalogue” that organizes the archive’s films about forced migration and displacement
onto a world map in order to help researchers find visual media about specific migrant and refugee
communities. See: “RefugeeDocsMap,” Open Society Archives, https://refugeedocsmap.osaarchivum.org/
21
elections in order to experience how Hungarian government media campaigns mediate public
spaces.
By shifting between these perspectives and thinking transregionally, I aim to trouble the
methodological nationalism that underpins the majority of research conducted in both migration
studies and media studies. I also seek to unsettle the binaries of home country/host country,
host/guest, and citizen/immigrant that all too easily reproduce themselves in studies on migration
and displacement. As my dissertation shows, the perception of these categories shifts depending
on the position and perspective from which we engage them. Utilizing migration as a method
allows us to hold and examine these multiple perspectives together, even when—or perhaps
especially when—they exist in tension and contradict one another.
I also apply migration as a methodological tool for examining my primary sources by
drawing upon methods across multiple fields of study, including textual and discourse analysis,
cultural historiography, and political theory. My project places documentary studies, migration
and border studies, and postcolonial studies in conversation with Eastern European area studies.
Each of my chapters centers on a different theme and moves between perspectives to
demonstrate how Europe’s material and conceptual borders are invoked in relation to shifting
migratory patterns across the Balkan Route.
In chapter one, I use migration as a method by transiting across the institutional mapping
practices of supra-state institutions, including the International Organization for Migration and
the International Center for Migration Policy Development, the conceptual mapping of Europe’s
borders in documentary films, the mapping practices engaged by migrants/refugees through
geotagging on social media, and the remediation of migrant/refugee content in artistic works. By
moving between these media objects and producers, I show how competing understandings of
22
‘Europe’ emerge along the Balkan Route. In chapter two, I map the global connections between
the Hungarian government and transnational far-right political consultants to illustrate how the
ideologies and tactics of the far-right migrate through extensive networks of international
collaboration. I shift between the perspective of the Hungarian government and the perspective
of international far-right activists to demonstrate how Hungary has marketed itself as a model
illiberal state to conservatives and far-right populists around the world.
Chapter three maintains its focus on Hungary but shifts to close readings of government
media campaigns, broadcast news reports, city renovation projects to show how Hungarian
government propaganda transforms public and private space and unsettles the spatial, temporal,
and political orientations of the Hungarian population. This practice of unsettling affects various
segments of the Hungarian population in different ways. I therefore use migration as a method to
foreground how and what public space communicates from multiple vantage points, including
from the perspectives of Hungary’s Jewish and Roma minority communities, its LGBT+
community, its far-right nationalists, and its migrants/refugees. Finally, chapter four uses waste
as an object and conceptual framework to move between state practices of bordering,
migrant/refugee testimonies of border violence, international news reporting, and artistic
appropriations of migrants/refugees’ abandoned personal items.

Chapters
My first chapter analyzes the aesthetics and politics of media that map and visualize the
Balkan Route in order to examine how Europe’s material and conceptual borders are variously
enacted and contested through mediated processes of migration. I examine institutional maps and
data visualizations of migrant flows across the Balkan Route; documentary films that act as
23
conceptual mappings of Europe; migrants/refugees’ self-documentation and geotagging of their
journeys on social media; and the remediation of migrant/refugee media in art exhibitions. I
introduce the concept of reactive mapping to theorize how migrants/refugees’ autonomous and
unauthorized movement, and the active documentation of this movement by multiple actors,
unsettles Europe’s borders. By thinking of mapping practices as reactive, I draw attention to the
ways in which mapping is a dynamic and fluid process that depends on, and incites, moments of
encounter between actors and environments.
Chapter two and chapter three focus on Hungary as a specific node of the Balkan Route,
one that has actively disrupted the route’s geographic pathway through policy decisions and
shifted public perceptions of the route through aggressive anti-migrant media campaigns. I assess
how the Hungarian government mobilizes the Balkan Route as a threatening—but also
strategic—infrastructure in order to cohere public support for increasingly identitarian and anti-
democratic policies domestically, while presenting Hungary as the most successful security state
in the European Union (EU) to publics at home and abroad. In chapter two, I show how the
widescale recentralization of Hungarian media networks and the expansion of Hungarian pro-
government media beyond Hungary’s borders amplify Hungary’s performance of the counter-
terror security state. This performance, which coheres narrative frameworks from both the Cold
War and War on Terror, organizes a far-right, nationalist Hungarian public around the
fortification of Hungary’s territorial and demographic borders as well as the protection of (an
imagined to be pure) white Christian European civilization at large—a civilization in which
Hungary firmly locates itself. Importantly, it is a performance that has been shaped through the
Hungarian government’s close collaboration with transnational far-right political consultants. I
trace these networks of collaboration to assess how the country became a prototype of the
24
‘illiberal state’ celebrated internationally by hardline conservatives and condemned
internationally by liberals and leftists.
In chapter three, I close read Hungary’s anti-migrant propaganda campaigns to analyze
how Hungarian politicians, state-sponsored media, and government-friendly news organizations
manufacture the Balkan Route as a weaponized passageway and deploy images of an always-
imminent migrant “invasion” in order to bolster the country’s performance of the counter-terror
security state. I introduce the concept of recursive mediations to theorize how Hungary rewrites
Europe’s modernity timeline through these campaigns and situates itself, and by extension the
rest of Eastern Europe, at the forefront of European progress. I define recursive mediations as
audiovisual discourses that construct a present moment of extended crisis through mapping
national and regional traumas of the past onto a soon-to-be-realized, but still avoidable, future
and argue that these mediations unsettle Europe’s conceptual boundaries by framing western
Europe within a dystopian future that Hungary still has the ability to avoid. This chapter
additionally explores the contradictory deployments of anti-colonial and anti-terror discourses in
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speeches to demonstrate how the country’s performance of the
counter-terror security state hinges on a disavowal and distancing of Hungary from its socialist
past. This distancing bolsters the recursive mediation of Europe’s modernity timeline.
Importantly, it does not only take place discursively; I argue that the rewriting of Europe’s
modernity timeline is also evidenced through city renovation projects that aim to return Budapest
to its pre-socialist image and, thus, to visually erase Hungary’s socialist period.
In my final chapter, I focus on waste as material and aesthetic matter to examine how
migrants/refugees and the Balkan Route are relationally transformed through scopic regimes of
disposability. I argue that scopic regimes of disposability—a term I borrow from Sherene Razack
25
that theorizes how human bodies are made into waste—make the Balkan Route legible as a site
of waste disposal for western Europe’s unwanted migrants and refugees.
44
Migrants/refugees are
simultaneously transformed into living waste: bodies designated for management, containment,
and eventual elimination. I trace the production of the Balkan Route as a site of waste disposal to
Cold War-era conceptualizations of Eastern Europe as a wasteland to demonstrate how waste
along the Balkan Route mediates anxieties about both the EU’s expansion into the Balkans and
the unsanctioned movement of migrants/refugees from the Global South. I close with a reflection
on the more utopian possibilities of waste by engaging Chinese artist and exile Ai Weiwei’s
mixed-media installation work addressing the migrant/refugee crisis. I argue that Ai’s
appropriation of migrants/refugees’ abandoned personal items, which he collected from the
Idomeni camp on the Greek-North Macedonian border and the shores of the Greek island of
Lesbos, invites viewers of his exhibits to move beyond empathy and toward a practice and
politics of care.
Overall, this project addresses the vital and undertheorized role the Balkan Route plays in
producing and revising Europe’s conceptual boundaries and material borders. If, as Lisa Parks
argues, “mediation involves demonstrating, putting forward, or bringing to life as much as it
involves representing or depicting something that has already occurred,”
45

assessing the Balkan
Route’s role in mediating ‘Europe’ and its self-proclaimed values, such as liberal humanism,
democracy, and secular modernity, is vital to making sense of not only the unfolding

44
Sherene H. Razack “Human Waste and the Border: A Vignette,” Law, Culture and the Humanities,
(December 2017). https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872117749524.

45
Lisa Parks. Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror. (New York:
Routledge, 2018), 11.
26
migrant/refugee crisis, but also the relationship between the Cold War, Europe’s post-1989
transition, and the global War on Terror.

27

Chapter 1. Reactive Mapping: Shifting Europe’s Spaces

Near the end of the 2013 Hungarian documentary Superior Orders (Felsőbb Parancs),
we come across two young Afghan men as they follow train tracks toward the Serbian-
Hungarian border. Seemingly alone and wearing jackets too thin for the cold winter weather,
they walk in silence until one remarks to the other: “This is not Europe. Europe is still far from
here. This only belongs to Europe geographically.”
1
On the surface, the man’s comment could be
interpreted simply as a reference to Serbia’s position outside of the European Union, but similar
comments in other documentary footage of migrants/refugees traveling along the Balkan Route
suggests something else.
Take, for example, Orban Wallace’s documentary film, Another News Story (2017).
Wallace follows a Syrian woman named Mahasen as she travels the Balkan Route in September
of 2015, with the hopes of receiving asylum in Germany. When Mahasen, along with hundreds
of other migrants/refugees, boards a train headed from Hungary to Austria, Wallace asks her,
“What does Austria mean to people?” Her response is telling: “It means freedom. It means real
Europe. Real Europe. It means we are much more safer than East Europe countries” [sic].
2
As
Mahasen inches closer to the Austrian border, she greets the country with relief: “Hello Europe,
we hope you will accept us.” This pattern of speech begs the question: where exactly is Europe,
and who is considered a part of it?

1
Superior Orders / Felsőbb Parancs, directed by Viktor Oszkar Nagy and András Petrik (2013; Hungary:
Campfilm), DVD.
2
Another News Story, directed by Orban Wallace (2017; United Kingdom: Gallivant Film), streaming on
Amazon Prime.
28
Migrants/refugees traveling along the Balkan Route repeatedly invoke “Europe” as a
destination that is contingent on more than the geography of the European continent. In
interviews and on protest signs, they plead for “Europe” to open its borders, even when they are
already inside EU member states like Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, or Hungary. This insistence
that Europe is somewhere beyond the Balkan Route affirms that migrants/refugees arrive to the
continent with preconceived notions of what ‘Europe’ is and where it is to be found. As Souad
Osseiran notes, migrants/refugees “invoke their own discrepant imaginings of Europe and the
EU, contributing thereby to how these spaces are always in process rather than stable or fixed.”
3

Based on fieldwork conducted with Syrian migrants/refugees in Istanbul, Osseiran argues that
migrants/refugees “configure Europe and the EU not in terms of core and periphery, or centers
and margins” but rather as “spaces of temporariness,” where they do not want to remain, and
spaces where they hope to resettle.
4
Osseiran argues “their movement within EU space, therefore,
is best understood to be, at times, a continuation of their movement into the EU space—toward
‘Europe.’”
5
Migrant/refugee practices of movement are therefore also autonomous practices of
rebordering ‘Europe.’
While I agree with the general premise of Osseiran’s analysis, it does not provide a
satisfactory account of why and how migrants/refugees come to understand certain spaces within
Europe and the EU as spaces of transit, or temporariness, and others as spaces of resettlement.
Osseiran attributes migrants/refugees’ evaluations of different EU countries solely to differences
in asylum policies and economic opportunities, so that even France can be conceptualized as a

3
Souad Osseiran, “’Europe’ from ‘Here’: Syrian Migrants/Refugees in Istanbul and Imagined Migrations
into and within ‘Europe,’” in The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, ed.
Nicholas De Genova (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 185
4
Ibid., 186
5
Ibid., 191
29
space of temporariness. Yet, I argue that Mahasen’s suggestion that Eastern Europe is not the
real Europe evidences other narratives at play in migrants/refugees’ perceptions of ‘Europe.’
Mahasen’s statement at once reaffirms Europe’s Cold War division between East and West and
speaks to the ways in which this conceptual division still retains global prevalence and potency,
long after the “end of history” and Europe’s supposed reunification.
6
While the Eastern Bloc
ostensibly ‘returned to Europe’ after the fall of the Soviet Union, it continues to be mediated as a
less developed, less democratic, and less safe region of the continent.
Just as Mahasen invokes her own conceptual mapping of ‘Europe’ within Another News
Story, the film itself functions as a cartography of the continent by documenting the autonomous
movement of migrants/refugees along the Balkan Route. If, as Tom Conley argues, “a film can
be understood in a broad sense to be ‘map’ […] that locates and patterns the imagination of its
spectators,” Another News Story’s structure as a journey narrative that charts Mahasen’s pathway
from Greece to Germany is likewise a patterning of audiences’ conceptual understandings of
‘Europe.’
7
By offering viewers a narrative arc in which the Balkan Route operates as a brutal
transit zone that migrants/refugees must survive and surpass in order to reach safety, Another
News Story ultimately draws Europe’s conceptual borders firmly around the continent’s western
core. This is perhaps most clear in the film’s representation of migrants/refugees’ arrival in
Austria. While their crossing of the Hungarian-Austrian border is presented as a moment of
elation and celebration—Wallace’s footage shows migrants/refugees cheer with excitement upon
reaching Nickelsdorf, where Austrian volunteers warmly greet thousands of people with
handouts of food, clothing, and even toys for children—the experiences of migrants/refugees
moving along the Balkan Route are framed by violent encounters with the police, the

6
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, vol. 16, 1989, 3-18.
7
Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 1
30
disorganization of state authorities, confusion, and exhaustion. These experiences are neither
illegitimate nor fabricated; however, the film offers a limited understanding of the dynamics
along the Balkan Route over the summer of 2015 and a mostly uncritical view of the reception of
migrants/refugees in western Europe after their initial arrival.
8
Because the film does not offer
viewers glimpses of the many local volunteers who helped migrants/refugees in the countries
along the route prior to Austria, it ultimately maps a stark division between Western and Eastern
Europe. The former is framed as a beacon of democracy, equality, acceptance, and human rights,
and the latter as a violent, xenophobic, intolerant, and ungovernable frontier. While these
stereotypes of Eastern Europe predate the Cold War, their continued mobilization speaks to the
ways in which the post-Cold War narrative of ‘transition’ and ‘reunification’ has done little to
shift global perceptions of two existing Europes (one corresponding to the “First World” and the
other corresponding to the “Second”).
If, as Nicholas De Genova argues, the migrant/refugee crisis is in fact a crisis of Europe’s
borders, the aforementioned films gesture to the ways in which this crisis of borders is not only
material but also conceptual.
9
In practical terms, the arrival of nearly one-million
migrants/refugees in 2015, who insisted on their collective right to go to ‘Europe,’ upended the
European Union’s Dublin regulations and halted free movement within the Schengen Zone. EU
countries reintroduced border controls to stem the flow of unauthorized migration and bickered

8
A coda to the film shows news coverage of the November 2015 Paris attacks, which elevated fears that
terrorists were posing as refugees to infiltrate Europe. It gestures to a shift in public sentiment toward
refugees, but only briefly, and closes with a joyous scene of Mahasen reuniting with her children in
Germany. While I am critical of the film’s conceptual mapping of Europe, the film as a whole is a
powerful examination of the media dynamics surrounding the migrant/refugee crisis and its strengths lie
in its ability to showcase how the crisis is produced as a mediated event.
9
Nicholas De Genova, The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
31
over whether and how to enforce the Dublin procedures.
10
Symbolically, it also had the effect of
upsetting the narrative that Eastern Bloc countries were reintegrated—or at the very least, could
be reintegrated—with Western Europe after 1989. As I analyze in greater detail in chapters 2 and
4, while Eastern EU member states like Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia performed their
Europeanness by securitizing their borders under the auspices of defending Europe’s territory
and cultural identity from a “migrant invasion,” Western European observers criticized Eastern
European nations for showing a lack of solidarity with the EU and failing to uphold European
values in their treatment of migrants/refugees. In short, the EU’s inability to agree on a cohesive,
unified response to the migrant/refugee crisis, coupled with migrants/refugees’ insistence on
their right to migrate and resettle in Western Europe, brought to light competing visions and
understandings of what, where, and who ‘Europe’ is.
This chapter analyzes the aesthetics and politics of media that map and visualize the
Balkan Route in order to examine how Europe’s material and conceptual borders are variously
enacted and contested through mediated processes of migration. The Balkan Route is a
particularly rich site from which to examine practices of mapping ‘Europe,’ as it traverses
multiple countries with different political relationships to the European Union and thus different
legal obligations with respect to border control.
11
As a practice, mapping has been theorized as a
process of world-making that orders the social and inscribes divisions in territories.
12
According

10
The Dublin regulations stipulate that asylum seekers must claim asylum in the first EU country they
enter. If a migrant/refugee asks for asylum in one EU country and is found to have been fingerprinted in
another EU country previously, he will be deported to the country where he was first fingerprinted and
obliged to file his asylum claim there.
11
Austria, Hungary, and Slovenia are all EU member states, part of the Schengen Zone of free movement.
Greece is an EU and Schengen Zone member, but functions as a Schengen island since it does not border
any other Schengen states. Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia are EU member states but not part of the
Schengen Zone; North Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro
are not members of the EU, but are considered potential candidate states.
12
John Brian Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica, vol. 26, 1989, 1-20.
32
to John Pickles, maps “territorialize identity and foster hegemony,” confirming the authority of a
proposed understanding of the world.
13
They also, as Jason Farman argues, serve as “signifying
tools for how we think about the world” as well as “representations of the ways that we want to
practice that world.”
14
Maps form boundaries, create identities, and carve out differences through
the drawing of smooth lines; yet they can also produce new ways of seeing and being in our
environments. As Maribel Casas-Cortes, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo
Pezzani note, the politics of mapping are ambivalent and multiple.
15
Consequently, media that
map the Balkan Route—whether through traditional territorial maps, data visualizations of
migrant flows, geotagged social media posts, or films that follow migrants/refugees as they
journey northward—not only reflect desires to surveil and control migratory movement across
the region. They can also make visible uneven and shifting expressions of power between supra-
state, state, and nonstate actors—as well as unexpected moments and expressions of
commonality—that trouble the material boundaries of the EU, and ‘Europe’ as a conceptual
marker.
In this chapter, I introduce the concept of reactive mapping to theorize how
migrants/refugees’ autonomous and unauthorized movement, and the active documentation of
this movement by multiple actors, unsettles Europe’s borders. The term reactive focuses our
attention to the ways in which mapping both depends on and incites moments of encounter
between actors and environments; it also envisions processes of mapping as dynamic and fluid.

13
John Pickles, A history of spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world (New York-
London: Routledge, 2004), 40.
14
Jason Farman, “Map Interfaces and the Production of Locative Media Space,” in Locative Media. Eds.
Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 85.
15
Maribel Casas-Cortes, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani, “Clashing
Cartographies, Migrating Maps: Mapping and the Politics of Mobility at the External Borders of
E.U.rope,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol.16, no.1, 2017, 1-33.
33
While recent work in critical cartography studies about the migrant/refugee crisis has
emphasized “counter-mapping” as a form of resistance to the “statist gaze” of migration,
16
I find
that the term counter-mapping too easily assumes clear-cut divisions between mapping actions
taken by the state and mapping actions taken against, and in direct response to, the state. Casas-
Cortes et al. write, for example, that the emergence of “engaged and activist mapping practices
contesting the more official cartographies of the EU and its border guard agencies resituates
mainstream debates and practices on migration, establishing competing visions and enactments
of the border.”
17
The authors describe this phenomenon as a “combat of cartographies,” where
“part of the ‘combat’ of maps concerns the reappropriation of existing maps and the subversion
of their initial function.”
18
The notion of counter-mapping as a “combat of cartographies” implies
a process of action-reaction that, while exciting for its militancy, seems to me to leave less room
for more banal forms of mapping that do not necessarily aim to undo or resist the gaze of the
state, but nevertheless inscribe relationships to space and place that unsettle the state’s
biopolitical authority—its ability to govern and dictate how human life is lived and experienced.
Shifting to the concept of reactive mapping allows me to think through how mapping practices
are relational, entangled, and always informing each other in ways that are less about “reaction”
as an act and a counter-act, and more about “reactivity” as a malleability triggered by contact
between different agents, and the potential “reactivations” of connections between agents that
such contact can spur. Reactive mapping therefore opens up a broader field of engagement that
not only considers state mapping practices in relation to migrant/refugee and activist mapping

16
Martina Tazzioli and Glenda Garelli, “Counter-mapping, refugees, and asylum borders,” in Handbook
on Critical Geographies of Migration, eds. Katharyne Mitchell, Reece Jones, and Jennifer L. Fluri
(Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), 397-409.
17
Casas-Cortes et al, 7
18
Ibid.
34
practices, but also migrant/refugee mapping practices in relationship to the everyday mapping
practices of local residents along the Balkan Route.
This chapter is subsequently broken into three case studies. First, I briefly examine the
aesthetics of the i-MAP produced by the International Center for Migration Policy Development
(ICMPD), which works closely with the EU, the Flow Monitoring Map produced by the
International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the Flow Towards Europe interactive map
created by Lucify, a Finnish data visualization company that partners with various governments,
NGOs, universities, and businesses.
19
While the i-MAP and Flow Towards Europe map represent
the Balkan Route as a site of transit, where seemingly uninterrupted flows of migrants/refugees
travel toward Western Europe, the IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map aesthetically marks the Balkan
Route as a site of contagion from which migrants/refugees spread. Both the representations of
“hot spots” and of smooth, linear movement across Europe advance the ideology that
migrants/refugees are an invasive force that threatens to overtake the continent. Such
representations also overlook the integral role nations along the Balkan Route play in sorting,
containing, and pushing migrants/refugees backward, as they manage the speed of migrant
mobilities northward. In doing so, these maps produce the Balkan Route as a threatening
infrastructure through which migrants/refugees infiltrate and contaminate the body of Europe.
Next, I offer a close reading of encounters between Eastern Europeans and newly arriving
migrants/refugees in Lisbeth Kovacic’s short documentary, Minor Border (2015). Minor Border
expertly illuminates how Europe’s borders no longer materialize strictly at the territorial

19
The i-MAP is no longer available online. However, information about ICMPD’s projects can be found
on their website: http://www.icmpd.org. For the IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map, see: “Flow Monitoring,”
International Organization for Migration, accessed May 30, 2021,
https://migration.iom.int/europe?type=arrivals. For Lucify’s data visualization project, see: Ville Saarinen
and Juho Ojala, “The flow towards europe,” Lucify, November 11, 2018, https://www.lucify.com/the-
flow-towards-europe/
35
divisions between one country and another, but rather attach themselves to different bodies in
different ways. In Kovacic’s film, Europe’s borders are shown to be shifting and mobile; they
come into being in relation to the bodies that traverse Europe’s spaces, allowing uninterrupted
mobility for some while arresting others. The film demonstrates how the reactive nature of
Europe’s borders marks both Eastern Europeans and migrants/refugees from the Global South as
Europe’s Others, even as the former are technically granted free mobility if they are citizens of
EU member states.
Finally, I turn to migrant/refugee practices of mapping through (self)documentation and
geotagging on social media to demonstrate how their mediations of the Balkan Route unsettle
Europe’s borders and inscribe migrants/refugees’ into Europe’s spaces. I examine
migrant/refugee mappings of Europe alongside the remediation of these mappings in the artistic
projects of the Belgian photographer Tomas Van Houtryve and Serbia’s Djordje Balmazovic.
Both Balmazovic and Tomas Van Houtryve’s projects amplify migrant/refugee subjectivities by
incorporating migrant/refugee-authored media and personal testimonies into new maps of
‘Europe.’ Balmazovic’s Maps (2013-2015) shows a series of hand-drawn maps made
collaboratively with migrants/refugees living in an asylum center in Belgrade. These maps
reflect migrants/refugees’ testimonies about migrating across the Balkan Route. While
Balmazovic worked directly with migrants/refugees, Van Houtryve relied on public social media
posts to create his video installation, Traces of Exile. In Traces, Van Houtryve superimposes
photographs posted to Instagram by migrants/refugees over his own location shots of different
sites in Europe. Through an examination of these objects, I argue that migrant/refugee authored
media refuse the institutional maps’ datafication of the migrant/refugee crisis, which reduces
migrants/refugees to abstract numbers that pose a threat to Europe’s ability to manage its
36
borders. Instead, migrant/refugee practices of mapping invite viewers to reflect on subjective
experiences of migration and ‘Europe’ and insist on migrants/refugees’ rights to exist freely in
any location. While I argue that the act of taking selfies and geotagging social media posts
functions to reinscribe migrants/refugees’ relationships to place, social media usage can also
animate suspicion and animosity towards migrants/refugees. Consequently, I also analyze anti-
migrant memes that call attention to migrants/refugees’ cell phones to situate how
migrants/refugees’ access to media networks generates anxieties about the control of Europe’s
spaces and borders. Social media therefore becomes a key site where ‘Europe’ is reactively
mapped, as different actors encounter each other in physical and digital realms.

The Balkan Route as a Site of Contagion: Institutional Maps of Migrant Flows
To understand the relational and entangled processes of reactive mapping from multiple
vantage points, I will first provide an overview of how the European Union conceptualizes and
manages its borders. Extensive research exists on the European Union’s practice of externalizing
the responsibility of policing EU borders to nations outside the EU, and even beyond the
European continent, in order to preserve freedom of movement for EU citizens within the
Schengen zone.
20
Through partnerships made under the European Neighborhood Policy, the EU
provides financial aid and trade benefits to non-EU member countries in Eastern Europe, North
Africa, and the Levant region. In exchange, these non-EU countries must agree to strengthen the
policing of their borders and crack down on undocumented migration. According to Maribel
Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias, the EU has increased the number of its bilateral

20
See for example: Migration Keywords Collective, “New Keywords: Migration and Borders,” Cultural
Studies vol. 29, no. 1, 2015, 55–87.

37
agreements with non-EU countries since the onset of the migrant/refugee crisis. These
agreements stipulate that non-EU countries will collaborate with the EU on border patrol and
surveillance, migrant interception, and the return of unauthorized migrants to their countries of
origin.
Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias trace the ideological underpinnings of these bilateral
agreements to the EU Council’s 1998 policy paper titled “The EU Strategy Paper on Asylum and
Migration.” This paper divided the globe into four concentric circles categorized as desirable
destination zones and spaces of mobility (the EU); zones of transit adjacent to the EU (such as
southeastern Europe); exterior transit zones (North Africa, the Levant); and departure zones that
supply unwanted migrant population flows.
21
The policy paper argues that “an effective entry
control concept cannot be based simply on controls at the border but must cover every step taken
by a third country national from the time he begins his journey to the time he reaches his
destination.”
22
As Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias argue, “This hierarchical and racialized
understanding of rights to mobility […] is based on designating the members of specific
territories and populations as having different entitlements to move. By doing this, focus shifts
from border crossings at national limits to a more global method of migration control.”
23
Thus,
the purpose of cross-border collaboration on migration management efforts is to surveil human
mobilities in zones of departure and transit and to intercept migrants before they arrive in
Europe. The cleaving of the world into different zones reproduces the logic that migration only

21
Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias, “It Is Obvious From the Map! Disobeying the
Production of Illegality beyond Borderlines,” Movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border
Regime Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, 29-44.
22
European Union, the Council (1998): Strategy Paper on Immigration and Asylum, 9809/1/98, Rev. 1,
CK4 27, ASIM 170, 13.
23
Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias, “It Is Obvious From the Map!,” 33.
38
happens in one direction, from the South/East to the North/West, and that the EU is the desired
destination zone for all people on the move.
While the EU Council’s policy paper on asylum and migration imagined the world in
four distinct zones, the International Center for Migration Policy Development’s (ICMPD)
animated map, called the i-MAP, envisions flows of global migration toward Europe through
various “major hubs.” The i-MAP, which was once available for public viewing online but has
since been removed, is also distributed internationally to various border control offices to help
inform border control agencies of major migrant routes. The purpose of the i-MAP is to surveil
migrants’ entire journeys by mapping the common routes used by undocumented migrants, so
that border control agencies may intercept migrants before any of Europe’s borders are
successfully crossed.

Figure 1: A screenshot of the public view of ICMPD’s i-MAP project showing the “Eastern
Mediterranean” route to Europe. This screenshot was taken in 2018, before ICMPD removed
public access to the i-MAP.

39
The ICMPD’s i-MAP view of the “Eastern Mediterranean” migrant route to Europe, which
encompasses the Balkan Route, displays a series of major hubs in Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria.
These hubs are illustrated with yellow circles, out of which pathways shoot northward toward
western Europe. While the lines representing migrant pathways connect at various different
cities, as well as across and between “major hubs,” their visual representation suggests a smooth,
linear, and uninterrupted flow toward Austria and Germany. The i-MAPs thus represent the
Balkan Route as an infrastructure of transit that facilitates movement into the European core,
overlooking the ways in which the region has become a key bordering force for the EU,
particularly since November of 2015, when multiple countries along the route began closing their
borders to migrants/refugees.
The aesthetic representation of the Balkan Route as a site of uninterrupted transit into the
European core is similarly reproduced in Lucify’s Flow Toward Europe map, designed by Ville
Saarinen and Juho Ojala. This interactive data visualization project uses the UNHCR’s public
asylum seekers data set to represent the number of asylum seekers arriving to Europe between
2012 and 2018. Each pixel represents 25-50 refugees. Moving the cursor over a specific country
will show whether it is a destination country or an origin country and will conjure a numerical
value for the number of asylum seekers either leaving or arriving to that specific country.
40

Figure 2: The continent view of Lucify’s Flow Toward Europe map as it represents the year
2015.

Figure 3: Highlighting Hungary reveals a sizeable number of asylum seekers entering
Hungary’s borders in 2015.
41

Figure 4: Highlighting Albania shows a sizable flow of asylum seekers out of the country and
into Germany in 2015.

When no specific country is highlighted, the Lucify map represents migrants/refugees as bright,
white dots that hurtle toward Europe’s western core like comets streaking across a dark night
sky. Graphic bars appear over the countries with the highest number of asylum applicants;
though there is some variation between 2015-2016, Germany, Sweden, France, and the United
Kingdom appear to have consistently high numbers over the six-year period covered by the
project. Lucify’s map is effective at illustrating the scale of the migrant/refugee crisis (the stated
goal of the project). It also includes asylum seekers from Balkan countries, as shown in Figure 4,
and thus highlights how the Balkan Route is not only a transit zone for migrants/refugees from
the Global South but also a departure zone for migrants/refugees from southeastern Europe.
However, its presentation of migrant/refugee flows, particularly when no specific country is
highlighted, presents several concerns. First, presenting migration as a unidirectional flow
toward western Europe takes no account of the number of asylum claims that are denied and
ultimately result in deportation. In other words, the map presents the arrival of migrants/refugees
42
to Europe as a linear and permanent event, when in fact, most migrants/refugees experience
cyclical journeys comprised of repeated migrations, apprehensions, and deportations. Second,
when no country is highlighted, migrants/refugees appear to coast over the Balkan Route (as well
as other migratory pathways, like the Central Mediterranean Route through Italy), straight to
their final, western European destinations. As such, the map does not make adequately clear how
many migrants/refugees are being contained in the countries on, or close to, Europe’s exterior
borders. Lucify’s dramatic visualization of millions of tiny dots piercing into the core of Europe
thus ultimately reproduces an ideology that frames migration as an overwhelming infiltration,
and visually suggests that all the migrants/refugees arriving to the continent have permanently
resettled within the heart of Europe.
While the ICMPD’s and Lucify’s maps visualize smooth, uninterrupted journeys across
the Balkan Route, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Flow Monitoring Map
visually constructs the Balkan Route as a site of infection and potential contagion. The Flow
Monitoring Map illustrates unauthorized migration flows between the years of 2016 and 2021.
Below, I analyze the aesthetics of IOM’s Flow Maps of “Migrant Arrivals” and “Migrant
Presence” along the Balkan Route in 2016 and 2018. Because the Flow Map requires viewers to
select a specific date when moving between years, I chose dates that showed a high number of
arrivals, as high arrivals make the map more visually “active.”
43

Figure 5: IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map of Migrant Arrivals on June 30, 2016.

Figure 6: IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map of Migrant Arrivals on October 15, 2018.
44

Figure 7: IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map of Migrant Presence in November of 2016.

Unlike Lucify’s Flow Toward Europe map, the IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map is not animated.
Nevertheless, it recalls what Giuseppe Fidotta identifies as the trope of “the conquering stain” in
animated maps. In the arrival maps above, circles representing the arrival of migrants/refugees in
nations along the Balkan Route appear like stains on the map of Europe. Smaller circles
containing arrow symbols show an increase of arrivals in most areas along the Route in 2016.
The map appears almost identical in 2018, but notably, the light blue circles have spread across
Bosnia and Herzegovina. While dark blue circles indicate the country of first arrival, light blue
circles signify migrants/refugees have arrived from another European country. In both images,
the Balkan Route appears flooded with light blue circles which threaten to expand ever-further
northward. One light blue orb penetrates Austria’s borders in both the 2016 and 2018 maps,
suggesting the creeping spread of migrants/refugees. Yet, for some unexplained reason, the Flow
Map of migrant arrivals does not chart arrivals anywhere farther north than Hungary, Slovenia,
and Italy. Moving the map with a cursor does not generate a different view of the data. Because
migrant arrivals to western Europe are left unrepresented in the IOM’s Flow Map, migration
45
appears like a “conquering stain” that threatens to spread across the continent. Fidotta notes that
the conquering stain primarily appears in war films and “appeals to the ideas of contagion,
infection, and corruption which in turn recall a distinctive conception of the nation as a body of
political nature.”
24
The aesthetic connection to contagion and disease is emphasized further by
the Flow Map of migrant presence, which illustrates the presence of migrants/refugees in sickly
orange and green circles that recall cysts filled with puss. In this way, the IOM’s maps of
migration imagine the Balkan Route as a site of contagion from which migrants/refugees
threaten to spread outward.
In the institutional maps above, the unauthorized and autonomous mobility of
migrants/refugees spurs an anxious practice of mapping that aims to track migrants/refugees’
patterns of movement in order to evidence the risk migrants/refugees pose to the European body.
The ICMPD’s i-MAP designates “major hubs” as sites of necessary intervention in order to
prevent access to the Balkan Route, which appears as an infrastructure of transit into Europe’s
core. In Lucify’s data visualization map of arriving asylum seekers, migrants/refugees similarly
seem to coast across Europe’s exterior borders at an unprecedented scale. While Lucify’s Flow
Toward Europe map was not created with the explicit purpose of advancing the EU’s bordering
regime, its presentation of an overwhelming, unidirectional flow of migrants/refugees to
Europe’s core easily lends itself to the argument that Europe’s borders must be further
securitized. Finally, the IOM’s Flow Monitoring Map visually constructs the Balkan Route as a
site of disease and contagion through its aesthetic representation of “migrant arrivals” and
“migrant presence,” which reproduce the trope of the conquering stain. All three of these
mapping projects demonstrate a reactive mapping of the European continent, wherein the

24
Giuseppe Fidotta, “Animated Maps and the Power of the Trace,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media
Studies, vol.3, no.1, 2014, 284.
46
stability of Europe’s borders is unsettled by migrants/refugees’ autonomous and unauthorized
movement.

Mapping Encounters at the Minor Border
Lisbeth Kovacic’s 2015 experimental short documentary, Minor Border, begins with a
shot of a wide, open field, marked by a small roadway sign bearing the Austrian flag, before
cutting to a close-up shot of the glass doors of an abandoned tollbooth. A series of fragmented
images of a roadway and a rooftop follow, until eventually we learn that we are viewing the old
and disused Nickelsdorf-Hegyeshalom border checkpoint between Austria and Hungary, a
checkpoint that ceased operating with the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Figure 8: A still shot from Minor Border shows the abandoned tollbooths of an old border
checkpoint between Austria and Hungary.

47

Figure 9: A still shot from Minor Border show the deconstruction of the Nickelsdorf-
Hegyeshalom checkpoint.

Minor Border takes place entirely in and around this abandoned border control station. Over the
course of its twenty-five-minute runtime, we watch as the old checkpoint is dismantled by
construction workers tasked with tearing it down, only to hear of how new border checkpoints
are being erected in Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia, and Ukraine. While Minor Border visually
documents the material deconstruction of a Cold War-era checkpoint, the film’s narrative is
framed by six voices—each speaking a different language—who recount their experiences of
crossing the Hungarian-Austrian border. The film offers a poetic reflection on how Europe’s
borders, and mobility within Europe, have shifted between the Cold War and present day.
Kovacic never shows us her subjects, nor does she offer their names. Instead, she
juxtaposes their testimonies with images of landscapes that disturb viewers’ spatial orientation,
making it difficult to know which side of the border we are on at any given moment. Many of
Kovacic’s shots are either of glass windows or doors that reflect distorted images of the highway
nearby, such that it is difficult to tell what direction cars are driving in. Other scenes are taken
48
from the vantage point of a moving car that crosses back and forth between Hungary and
Austria; however, we are offered only partial views through the car’s windows and here, too, the
direction of travel is never clearly discernable. This spatial disorientation disturbs the notion of
the Hungarian-Austrian border as a fixed and stable territorial divide, while the voices of
Kovacic’s interview subjects attune viewers to the ways borders shift in relationship to the
bodies seeking to cross them. Though we never see the interview subjects in Minor Border, and
only one of the subjects interviewed—a Hungarian woman—identifies her country of origin, the
film’s credits show that the languages spoken in the film include Farsi, Pashto, Somali,
Hungarian, and German. Despite being disembodied, the voices highlight how borders are
differentially enacted against racialized bodies.
The first voice we hear in the film is a woman speaking Farsi. She notes, “I never take a
truck, I always try to take a train, and I always come on my own. I don’t want to travel with other
people; when you are in company with others, you attract attention.” Later in the film, the same
woman remarks, “When I take the train from Budapest to Vienna, there is no police in the
stations. But in fact, they are there. I believe there are conductors cooperating with the police and
informing them [sic].” Here, the woman alerts viewers to the racialized policing of the Schengen
zone, where infrastructures of transit (buses and trains) become the mobile border of Europe.
This mobility of Europe’s borders—which, Mihaela Brebenel cogently argues, turns racialized
bodies into borders
25
—is echoed by the Hungarian woman featured in Minor Border, who
identifies herself as a labor migrant hoping to find a better source of income in Austria. She
notes, “since Hungary became a member of the Schengen zone, the border has been totally open,

25
Mihaela Brebenel, “Embodied Frictions and Frictionless Sovereignty,” b2o: An Online Journal, vol. 5,
no.2, 2020, https://www.boundary2.org/2020/08/mihaela-brebenel-embodied-frictions-and-frictionless-
sovereignty/
49
or at least for us Hungarians. But without an EU ID or a visa, you are not allowed to cross. Those
people get taken off of the trains and put in refugee camps.” The woman’s statement marks a
shift in Hungarian mobilities after the country’s inclusion in the EU and Schengen zone which
seem to offer greater opportunities to Hungarian citizens. Yet, despite the Hungarian woman’s
ability to cross into Austria with ease, she reveals another ‘border’ has kept her from finding
steady employment. After briefly finding work as a housekeeper and hotel maid, the woman is
fired for not speaking German well enough, and states that she has not been able to find another
place of employment in Austria since her termination. Thus, educational and class barriers
constrain the woman’s mobility, even as her Hungarian citizenship provides her with the
privilege of moving between Hungary and Austria unharassed.
While Minor Border predominantly reflects the experiences of people attempting to
move from Hungary into Austria, it does not only recount mobilities from East to West, or South
to North. As one of the two Austrian subjects included in the film declares: “The traffic on the
A-Road towards Hungary is mainly caused by Austrian drivers, needing a dentist in Hungary,
going to a spa, having a massage done.” This mapping of transit from Austria into Hungary for
the sake of cheaper health and wellness services unsettles the unidirectional flow of migration
visualized in institutional mapping projects like the ones analyzed in the previous section. The
film demonstrates how Europe’s borders expand and contract in relation to specific bodies—
offering flexible mobility to subjects who carry the right passport and appear to have capital,
while aggressively limiting the mobility of subjects considered undesirable. Thus, as Minor
Border illustrates, it is bodies—rather than checkpoints—that become the markers of Europe’s
borders. The film offers a reactive mapping of Europe that unsettles the notion of Europe’s
50
borders as fixed, territorial entities, and instead poetically illustrates how borders shift in relation
to the autonomous mobility enacted by migrants/refugees.

Reactive Mapping: Migrant/Refugee Cartographies of Europe

In the summer of 2015, I met a man named Amer at a restaurant in a popular tourist area
of Istanbul. At the time of our meeting, Amer was twenty-three-years-old, with a college degree
and aspirations of being a theater director. He was also one of over five-and-a-half million Syrian
refugees displaced from his home due to the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
26
Amer recounted to me
that his family has been dispersed over a number of different countries since the war began in
2011. By 2015, he had already been living on his own in Istanbul for two years.
Not long after I left the city, Amer contacted me through Facebook to let me know that
he, like thousands of others, was leaving Istanbul to seek asylum in Germany in what would later
become known as the “long summer of migration.”
27
For the next month, I followed his journey
across the European continent through the photographs and status updates he shared online.
Despite the very real dangers migrants/refugees like Amer face when traveling unauthorized,
Amer’s photographs contained nothing of the spectacular or gut-wrenching imagery of
overpopulated rafts or barbed-wire fences that many have grown to associate with Europe’s
migrant/refugee crisis. Instead, Amer often shared mundane selfies as he reached new locations;
many of his selfies were taken in front of unremarkable buildings or along riverbanks as he

26
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the total number of Syrian “persons
of concern” is 5,602,649. See “Syria Regional Refugee Response,” United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees, Last modified May 19, 2021, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria
27
The summer of 2015 marked a high point in what has been called Europe’s migrant or refugee “crisis.”
The border monitoring agency FRONTEX recorded 617,412 irregular border crossings to Europe
between July and September, up from 170,155 recorded crossings during the same three-month period in
2014. See “FRAN Quarterly: Quarter 3 July-September 2015”, FRONTEX, Accessed December 20, 2018,
https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/FRAN_Q3_2015.pdf

51
traveled northward across the Balkans. Notably, Amer’s Facebook and Instagram posts were also
often accompanied by geotags that indicated his specific location. As such, his social media
practices functioned as both a digital scrapbook and cartography of his journey; by geotagging
his posts, Amer produced an affective map of Europe, one shaped by his enactment of migration.
As I watched Amer’s personal movement digitally unfold, I began to wonder what might
be motivating his and other migrants/refugees’ production and dissemination of images that
directly map their movements. While there is certainly a valuable indexical quality to selfies
taken by migrants/refugees, in that they assure family members of their loved ones’ relative
safety and health, what interests me here is the potential of migrants/refugees’ social media
practices to unsettle ‘Europe’ and its boundaries. How do selfies taken by migrants/refugees
influence or disrupt our understandings of place? How are these selfies remediated in new
contexts, and what might migrant/refugee authored media tell us about the ways in which
competing conceptualizations of ‘Europe’ take shape and circulate?
In this section, I use a small subset of publicly shared selfies as a platform for considering
how migrant/refugee-authored digital media reactively map locations. The selfies I discuss here
are all discoverable through their geotagged locations on Instagram and were posted to the social
media site during the summer of 2015. Throughout this section, I refer to the selfies as
“migrant/refugee selfies;” however, their status as migrant/refugee-authored can admittedly be
made only through inference, and some uncertainty inevitably remains as to whether these
photographs were taken by migrants/refugees seeking asylum, or rather by tourists visiting
Europe on visas. Still, the Instagram profiles of the users sharing what I call “migrant/refugee
selfies” reference a Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi, or other national identity associated with a high
migrant/refugee population, and the physical trajectory of the users’ geotagged photographs
52
reflect their subjects’ movement across multiple national borders in Europe, following
recognizable routes taken by most migrants/refugees headed from Turkey toward western
Europe. For this reason, I have decided to label these photographs “migrant/refugee selfies,” as
these selfies participate in a particular discourse about the European Union’s handling of the
migrant/refugee crisis during 2015, regardless of the legal status their authors ultimately occupy.
Building on scholarship about selfies and locative media, I suggest that migrant/refugee
selfies produce new cartographies that not only archive migrants/refugees’ movements across
Europe, but also claim migrants/refugees’ right to author their own migration narratives and to
exist in Europe’s places. Geotagged selfies embed migrants/refugees in Europe’s places by tying
migrants/refugees’ photographs to all other social media posts collected under the same
locational pin. However, this practice of inscribing migrants/refugees in place remains tenuous. I
argue that, while individual photographs function to (re)inscribe migrants/refugees in place, the
longer digital trail left behind by migrants/refugees’ social media posts creates a disruptive
affective charge that prompts outside viewers of these images to contend with the precarity of the
migrants/refugees’ existence in any location. This disruptive affective charge unsettles Europe’s
conceptual borders and informs reactive mappings of Europe that take shape through diverse
media platforms. I trace these practices of reactive mapping across the remediation of
migrant/refugee selfies, as well as what Lilie Chouliaraki terms “migrant-related selfies,” on
social media and within the works of Djordje Balmazovic and Tomas Van Houtryve. I examine
how ‘Europe’ is reactively mapped through the circulation of migrant/refugee selfies and the
remediation of migrant/refugee-authored media outside their original contexts. While I argue that
the act of taking selfies returns a sense of authorial agency to migrants/refugees documenting
their own journeys across Europe, this claim to agency is complicated by remediations that
53
excise photographs of migrants/refugees from their original contexts and distort them with false
or misleading information in order to fortify Europe’s boundaries against outsiders. Through a
comparative analysis of anti-migrant memes and Balmazovic’s and Van Houtryve’s installation
pieces, I argue that an inherent contradiction of the migrant/refugee selfie is its ability to
simultaneously signify and undermine belief in a migrant/refugee’s authenticity. This uncertainty
about authenticity undergirds anxieties about the instability of Europe’s borders and the
autonomy of migrants/refugees to remap Europe itself.
Although I believe that engaging migrant/refugee-authored media is necessary in order to
center migrants/refugees as actors, rather than passive objects of study, and to fully understand
the migrant/refugee crisis, I remain wary of the ethical implications of reproducing
migrant/refugee selfies outside of their original contexts without consent. Consequently, I rely
primarily on descriptions of social media posts, and have chosen to share only a few photographs
taken by Amer and another contact of mine, Nassim, who at the time of his migration to Europe
was a twenty-five-year-old refugee from Iraq. Both Amer and Nassim have given me permission
to share their images.
28

Defining the Migrant/Refugee Selfie

Before discussing migrant/refugee selfies more closely, it is useful to review some of the
ways selfies have been theorized by scholars thus far. Selfies are generally understood as
amateur and often mundane self-portraits taken by the represented subject with a cellphone
camera and shared on social networking sites.
29
Paul Frosh further defines the selfie as a

28
‘Amer’ and ‘Nassim’ are pseudonyms. Both men requested that their real names not be published in this
dissertation.
29
“The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013,” Oxford Dictionaries. Accessed February 7th, 2016,
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/
54
reflexive and “gestural image” that encourages interaction and response from viewers. Frosh
argues that the selfie “foreground[s] the relationship between the image and its producer [and]
says not only ‘see this, here, now,’ but also ‘see me showing you me.’”
30
For Frosh, the indexical
quality of the photograph combines with the gestural quality of the author’s imaged self to create
a “communicative action” that encourages a response through likes, shares, and comments from
viewers engaging with the selfie.
31
Similarly, Alise Tifentale writes that the selfie constitutes an
active performance and enactment of the self, “as cases of self-fashioning take place within the
limitations of the genre and with a specific audience in mind” both at the moment that the
photograph is taken and later, when the subject decides which selfies to share on social media.
32

For Adi Kuntsman, selfies are not only images of self-expression but also media objects that do
political work in their networked circulation. In the introduction to Selfie Citizenship, Kuntsman
argues that selfie-taking is a techno-social practice that sits ambivalently within larger
frameworks of in/visibility that govern modern life. Though Kuntsman sees selfies as objects that
make claims to citizenship on behalf of their authors and attend to citizenship “not as a given
condition but as an entity in the making,” she also notes that the circulation of selfies is
inseparable from biometric surveillance and facial recognition software used to police
individuals and communities.
33

In the case of migrant/refugee selfies, the curated, gestural, and self-enacting qualities of
the selfie, as well as its politicization, are amplified by the migrant/refugee selfie's relationship to

30
Paul Frosh, “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory and Kinesthetic Sociability,”
International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1607-1628
31
Ibid.
32
Alise Tifentale, “Art of the Masses: From Kodak Brownie to Instagram,” Networing Knowledge 8, no.
6 (2015): 1-16
33
Adi Kunstman, “Introduction: Whose Selfie Citizenship?” in Selfie Citizenship, ed. Adi Kuntsman
(Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 14-15.

55
photographs, maps, and data visualizations of unauthorized migration produced by journalists,
European civilians, and agencies registering and monitoring migrant/refugee communities.
Unlike the intimacy fostered by migrant/refugee selfies, in which the migrant/refugee returns the
camera’s gaze, outsider photographs often depict groups of migrants/refugees from afar, showing
what appear to be overwhelming masses of people crowding camps, border zones, and rafts.
Many photographs taken by journalists and border monitoring agencies are taken from an aerial
point-of-view or high angle, imbuing the photographer—and by extension the viewer—with an
authoritative presence over the migrants/refugees represented. Likewise, maps and data
visualizations of migration across Europe, like the examples discussed earlier in this chapter,
abstract migrants/refugees into statistical data and visually translate people as circles, dots, and
columns. While such photographs and mapping projects can garner shock and sympathy from the
public by emphasizing the scale of human displacement around the world, they also distance
viewers from migrants/refugees, who become difficult to imagine as individuals.
The stripping of migrants/refugees' individual identities is further exacerbated by the
language used in many news reports, and by a number of European politicians, which have
described migrants/refugees’ movements across Europe with such dehumanizing terms as
“‘influx,’ ‘occupation,’ ‘invasion’, ‘flood,’ and ‘flow.’”
34
This language effectively stokes fear in
European populations while obscuring European states’ own role in creating political and
economic instability in the greater Middle East region through arms trading, wars, economic
sanctions, and austerity measures. By labeling migrants/refugees as an incoming occupying
force, taking photographs of migrants/refugees from a distance, and mapping migration as

34
Ayhan Kaya, interview by Barcin Yinanc. “Treating migrants like natural disasters ‘dehumanizing,’”
Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey), September 7, 2015, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/treating-migrants-
like-natural-disasters-dehumanizing.aspx?PageID=238&NID=88054&NewsCatID=359
56
though it takes place in an uninterrupted, unidirectional flow toward Europe’s core, political
leaders and media producers deepen the perceived divide between the citizen and non-citizen,
and “East” and “West.”
Maps and photographs that emphasize scale demonstrate the power of European
institutions to surveil, secure, and control the continent’s borders, even when they represent
migrants/refugees as a conquering force. By visually illustrating Europe’s ability to see and chart
migrant mobilities across the continent, such maps affirm Europe’s biopolitical authority. When
closer, more intimate photographs are taken of migrants/refugees by journalists, they tend to
emphasize women and children in moments of distress or despair. Though the risks
migrants/refugees are taking to reach Europe certainly speak to their desperation, framing
migrants/refugees in this manner alone reduces them to images of permanent helplessness,
suggesting that they will remain dependent on outside aid for survival indefinitely. Thus,
migrants/refugees are represented either as imminent and uncontrollable threats to the European
continent, or in more liberal treatments, risk being seen only through the lens of victimhood
rather than as active agents with aspirations of contributing to their host countries through
participation in political, social, and economic spheres of life. This limiting subjecthood is
exacerbated further by the fact that, as Kelly Oliver cogently argues, migrants/refugees are
forced to “convincingly testify to the trauma of violence and fear of persecution” in order to gain
legal refugee status and asylum, and they must do so in front of the proper authorities. This
process does not account for mistakes or discrepancies in the translations of their testimonies,
nor does it account for cultural differences which may impact how migrants/refugees’
testimonies are given, interpreted and received.
35

35
Kelly Oliver, Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention (University of Minnesota Press,
2017), 28-29.
57
Within the highly mediated context of the migrant/refugee crisis, I contend that
migrant/refugee selfies become a way for migrants/refugees to reassert narrative control and
authorship over their own stories, and to claim the right to belong in the places they transit
through and resettle in. Migrant/refugee selfies do not just say "see this, here, now" or "see me
showing you me," but rather emphasize "see me, I am here, I exist.” The gesture of the
migrant/refugee selfie, then, in which the migrant/refugee returns the camera’s gaze, is about
more than receiving the reaction of a digital “like” or “share;” it is a demand to be seen with
dignity rather than threat, as having agency rather than being purely a victim, and as an active
participant and contributor to the spaces within which one exists. The everydayness of the
migrant/refugee selfie, despite the precarious context in which it is taken, not only carries with it
a sense of authenticity, but also—through its consistent generic form—accentuates the
migrant/refugee’s relatability, signaling to viewers that perhaps the only thing differentiating the
migrant/refugee from the citizen is legal recognition.
36
It seems to both say, “I am like you,” and
“you could be me,” reminding viewers of the photographs that displacement is not something
that one willingly chooses, but rather an action that is done to people whose homes are made
unlivable by war, political instability, or economic despair. In this way, the migrant/refugee
selfie gestures toward a shared ontological humanity which, while it risks occluding the specific

36
According to Anirban Baishya, selfies communicate authenticity through their amateur quality, in
which the subject is visibly positioning his or her cellphone camera to take a photograph. He writes: “The
connection of the hand to the cell phone at the moment of recording makes the selfie a sort of
externalized inward look, and the point of view of the selfie is not necessarily the external gaze of the
painter’s eye as he steps out of his body to see and render his own form, but that of the hand that has
been extended the power of sight […] the so-called amateur look of the selfie also becomes an index of
the real—the point of view of the selfie seems authentic, because it is as if the human body is looking at
itself. Amateur, therefore, becomes synonymous with the everyday and the evidentiary in the case of the
selfie.” Baishya, Anirban. "Selfies| #NaMo: The Political Work of the Selfie in the 2014 Indian General
Elections." International Journal of Communication [Online], 9 (2015): 1688.

58
historical causes of Europe’s migrant/refugee crisis, also has the potential to make
migrants/refugees legible in a fashion that the sensational images propagated by the mainstream
media cannot. In the context of seeking refugee or asylum status, where the migrant/refugee is
required to perform adequate trauma and victimhood in order to receive humanitarian aid and be
granted resettlement, the act of taking mundane selfies can be read as a refusal to perform
trauma, one that perhaps returns or affirms a sense of dignity to one’s self-enactment. This is not
to say that migrants/refugees have not experienced trauma, or that they are not in any sense
victims, but rather to point out that the requirement that migrants/refugees continuously testify to
and prove their trauma and victimhood is itself an act of violence against them.

Figures 10-12: Amer in Serbia and Germany

Migrant/Refugee Selfies as Cartographic Practice
59

Although publicly shared migrant/refugee selfies are certainly in dialogue with many
other media representations of migrants/refugees traveling through Europe, finding these selfies
is not always easy. Many migrant/refugee selfies are not hashtagged, and if they are, it is rarely
with such tags as “refugee" or “migrant.” When hashtags do appear, they are often in non-
European languages such as Arabic and Farsi, making language a potential barrier for European
citizens and researchers searching for images related to the migrant/refugee crisis as well.
However, I have noticed a trend in migrants/refugees geotagging their selfies on Instagram, and
this practice offers a rich opportunity for scholars interested in theorizing the political and social
import of locative media in relation to experiences of displacement. With the exception of
Amer’s selfies, I found all of the migrant/refugee selfies discussed in this chapter by using the
“Explore Places” feature of Instagram. In the application’s search bar, I entered European
locations that have been frequently mentioned in news articles about the migrant/refugee crisis,
such as the Greek island of Kos, North Macedonia, Serbia, and specific sites in Hungary
including Röszke and Bicske. Generally, the “Explore Places” tab in the Instagram app allows
users to search any location and sift through the public photos tagged with that location. The
upper half of the search results show the user a select range of “Top Posts” from the location,
while the lower half displays the “Most Recent” Instagram photos under a particular geotag. The
“Most Recent” section organizes photos in reverse chronological order, but scrolling through it is
unlimited, meaning users can potentially look through every photo linked to the site that interests
them.
37

37
While scrolling is theoretically unlimited, the Instagram app is subject to instability and sometimes
crashed while I attempted to load photographs from years earlier.
60
Migrant/refugee selfies emerge interspersed with other photographs associated with a
given place. Sometimes, the migrant/refugee selfie is so inconspicuous that it might not be
immediately associated with migrants/refugees at all. This was the case when I searched through
photographs taken in Kos and found a migrant/refugee selfie among the hundreds of images of
tourists and locals enjoying what otherwise seems like a beachside paradise. The selfie shows
two young men posing together at night, with their immediate surroundings unclear. Both are
smiling and one gives the thumbs up; there is nothing particularly telling about the photograph
itself, which easily could have been taken by tourists or local residents. However, it stands out
among the other photos that surround it in the search results, both because it is the only photo
taken at night, and because unlike the other photographs that focus on the sand and sea, this
selfie does not reveal anything about the subjects’ environment. Still, it is not until clicking on
the actual selfie and looking through the user's profile that one might speculate that he is a
migrant/refugee. In this case, the efficacy of the photograph in disrupting a viewer’s sense of
place depends on the viewer’s willingness to click on the user’s profile and search through more
of his posts.
In the other search results, migrant/refugee selfies more easily give themselves away by
showing larger groups of men hiking through empty fields or sitting together wearing bright
orange lifejackets. Migrant/refugee selfies also make themselves apparent when they appear in
close proximity within the search results to other photos of migrants/refugees or refugee camps
taken by civilians. Interestingly, all of the publicly shared migrant/refugee-authored selfies I
have found thus far have been of men, adding another dimension to the relationship between
migrant/refugee-authored digital photography and photographs taken by European civilians or
61
journalists.
38
While there are many selfies taken with migrant/refugee women and children on
sites like Instagram, these selfies tend to be posted by volunteers working with aid organizations
rather than migrants/refugees themselves. The impulse of aid workers to share selfies they have
taken with the young children and women they meet while volunteering is perhaps reflective of
the added value the media has historically placed on images of women and children for
generating sympathy from viewers. In fact, images of women and children are considered so
effective that, in 2015, employees of the Hungarian state-run television network M1 were
instructed not to show children in news footage of refugees crossing the border so as to avoid
cultivating sympathy among the Hungarian public.
39
In this context, migrant/refugee selfies
taken by young men work to disrupt a persistent narrative across right-wing news reporting that
suggests Europe is facing a “migrant invasion” orchestrated by threatening, military-aged men.
Benign photographs of men camping, hiking, or waiting in places of transit offer viewers an
opportunity to engage male migrants/refugees through the shared mundanity of day-to-day life,
and to reconsider the ways in which dominant discourses shape public fears and sympathies in
the process.

38
There are numerous journalistic photographs that portray refugee women in the process of taking
selfies. However, I was not successful in locating women’s selfies through geotags on Instagram. This
suggests that refugee women are likely setting their social media profiles to “private” or sharing selfies to
friends and loved ones through more direct means, such as text messages. An ethnographic study would
be necessary to learn why refugee women are not posting and geotagging media on public accounts like
their male counterparts; such a study is beyond the scope of this chapter.
39
Daniel Nolan, “Hungarian TV ‘told not to broadcast images of refugee children,’” The Guardian,
September 1, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/hungarian-media-told-not-to-
broadcast-images-refugee-children-memo

62

Figures 13-14: Nassim in Serbia and Austria

The “Explore Places” tab on Instagram offers an experiential map to viewers, in that it
provides viewers with any and all images associated with a space or place. To return to Jason
Farman’s argument that “maps are signifying tools for how we think about the world” as well as
“representations of the way we want to practice the world,”
40
the images that are tagged with
locations on Instagram do more than emplace the individual subject represented in (and taking)
the photo. When viewed in relation to all the photographs tagged with the same location, these
geotagged photos create a broader sense of how people believe a certain place should be
imagined. Thus, searching for Kos primarily brings up photographs of sunny days on the beach,
while searching for North Macedonia brings up a number of photos of rivers and hills at sunset.
These search results suggest that even when a visual map of a location is created through
hundreds of subjective, individually produced photographs, this map still “tends to some bodies

40
Jason Farman, “Map Interfaces and the Production of Locative Media Space,” in Locative Media. Eds.
Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 83-93.
63
more than others.”
41
The discovery of the migrant/refugee selfie has an undeniably disruptive
effect on this public imagining of space and place. Its presence reminds viewers of what
ostensibly should not be there and invites viewers to engage with the migrant/refugee’s
subjective experience of migration. As such, migrant/refugee selfies reactively map ‘Europe’ as a
space (re)made by people on the move. Yet questions still remain: what drives migrants/refugees
to produce, geotag, and share these selfies in the first place? How do these selfies circulate, and
what happens when they circulate outside of their original contexts?
A number of scholars have written about the role of the selfie in enacting or performing
the self and authoring a personal narrative,
42
while the process of geotagging media has been
noted for its ability to create new and shared meanings of particular locations.
43
For Larissa
Hjorth and Sarah Pink, locative media is best understood by conceptualizing the producers of
this media as “digital wayfarers.” The digital wayfarer “entangles online and offline as they
move,” creating “an emplaced visuality […] that is part of place and makes place, and […]
traverses and connects the material-physical with the digital-intangible.”
44
Hjorth and Pink’s
notion of emplaced visuality is particularly helpful when considering the function of
migrant/refugee selfies for both producer and consumer; however, the idea of the wayfarer is
perhaps too leisurely a concept to speak to the underlying precarity of the migrant/refugee
condition. For social media users whose life conditions create a different and less stable
relationship to place—both symbolically and materially—the practice of imbuing locations with

41
Sarah Ahmed quoted in Jason Farman, “Map Interfaces and the Production of Locative Media Space,”
in Locative Media. Eds. Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 89-90.
42
See Alise Tifentale, “Art of the Masses: From Kodak Brownie to Instagram.”
43
See Raz Schwartz and Germaine R Halegoua, “The spatial self: Location based identity performance on
social media,” New Media & Society (2014): 1-18
44
Larissa Hjorth and Sarah Pink, “New visualities and the digital wayfarer: Reconceptualizing camera
phone photography and locative media,” Mobile Media & Communication 2, no. 1 (2014): 40-57.
64
new meanings carries high political stakes. As migrants/refugees document their journeys across
Europe, they remake Europe’s spaces by producing shared knowledge about routes, safe houses,
camps, and help sites run by aid workers. These practices reactively map Europe and its
boundaries anew and give way to affective cartographies of the continent that refuse the cold
datafication of migrants/refugees produced by institutional mappings of migration.
In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said argues that “exile, unlike nationalism, is a
fundamentally discontinuous state of being” and that “exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to
reconstitute their broken lives.”
45
He also points to Simone Weil’s articulation that “to be rooted
is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
46
The geotagged
selfie offers an opportunity for the migrant/refugee to re-inscribe himself into place after
becoming stateless. Until late 2016, Instagram offered a map function on every individual user’s
profile that overlayed all of a user's geotagged photos on a world map.
47
This map was
interactive, and as viewers zoomed in to different areas, Instagram revealed more of the users’
photographs to the viewer. For the migrant/refugee, this map function not only becomes a way to
archive his specific migration, it also provides a way of understanding himself in relation to
space during a time period in which he may have no legal legibility to nation-states. As Arjun
Appadurai argues, migrants/refugees are often driven to create various archives as a means of
preserving and making sense of their memories and experiences, as well as to challenge the
narratives created for them by members of their host societies. For Appadurai, “Media plays a

45
Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 177.
46
Simone Weil quoted in Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 183.
47
In September of 2016, Instagram announced that it would be discontinuing its map function on user
profiles. However, users may still geotag their posts, and these posts will continue showing up under the
“Explore Places” search function if the user’s profile is set to “public.”
Emma Hinchife, “Instagram is killing photo maps,” Mashable, September 6, 2016,
http://mashable.com/2016/09/06/instagram-kills-photo-maps/
65
critical role in the construction of the migrant archive” which is “increasingly characterized by
the presence of voice, agency, and debate, rather than of mere reading, reception and
interpellation.”
48
The migrant archive, which increasingly exists online, “becomes a doubly
valuable space for migrants [where] some of the indignity of being minor or contemptible in the
new society can be compensated [and] in which migrants can define the terms of their own
identities and identity-building.”
49
The Instagram Map, as one of many tools through which
migrants/refugees can create an archive, became a way to see the history of one’s movement, and
perhaps, to make sense of it, to find respite in the fact that there is a way forward and a way to
survive. Viewing the Instagram Maps of other refugees also offered encouragement and comfort
to those still at the start of their journeys who had no way of knowing what their migration
attempt would bring.

Figure 15: Nassim’s Instagram map

48
Arjun Appadurai, “Aspirational maps: on migrant narratives and imagined future citizenship,”
Eurozine, February 19, 2016, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2016-02-19-appadurai-en.html
49
Ibid.

66
Continuing routine activities like posting on social media is also perhaps a way to retain a sense
of normalcy during a period of extreme uncertainty. As Heidi Rae Cooley argues in her book
Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era, the pervasiveness and
accessibility of mobile devices encourages constant self-documentation at the level of habit
rather than conscious and deliberate decision making.
50
Still, while taking photographs may be
impulsive, posting photographs to social media sites requires making a number of conscious
decisions. The user must settle on which photo to post, whether or not to manipulate the image
with a filter, and what caption to accompany the image with, among other decisions. The process
requires an active engagement with and curation of one’s digital self and takes time to complete,
suggesting intentionality behind the shared image. With this in mind, I suggest that to see one’s
own self reflected back on screen and emplaced in a location, to see one’s journey mapped out,
and to share this movement with the global online community is to make a public claim to
existence, to claim agency over the authorship of one’s own refugee story, and to resist the
essentializing discourses of victimhood and allegations of criminality, terrorism, and threat laid
against oneself by powerful state actors.
While the geotagging of the selfie attempts to re-inscribe a connection to place, it
simultaneously makes the migrant/refugee’s transience even more visible and pronounced. In
regard to public consumption of such selfies, one must consider the affective impact of
migrant/refugee selfies when they are discoverable in amalgamations of photographs all tagged
under the same location. What does it mean to see the migrant/refugee emplaced on screen when
the migrant/refugee selfie shows up amongst hundreds of photos of European citizens or non-

50
Heidi Rae Cooley, Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era (Hanover,
New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2014)

67
migrant tourists? How might migrant/refugee selfies prompt viewers to reflect on the likelihood
that the migrant/refugee is no longer in the place of the image’s production, and his or her
whereabouts and wellbeing might be entirely unknown to friends and family? By sharing selfies,
the migrant/refugee at once stakes a claim to existing in space and confronts the viewer with the
uncertainties of migrant/refugee existence. To see migrants/refugees’ migrations mapped through
the personal intimacy of selfies requires us to think beyond faceless statistics; instead, we are
asked to hear and see refugees on their own terms, and to reckon with the magnitude of their
situation by engaging with the particular, the personal, and the mundane. Photography produced
by migrants/refugees constructs new meanings of place not visible in the photographs of the
digital wayfarer, who maintains a rooted connection to home and nation. The citizen’s discovery
of the geotagged migrant/refugee selfie among other selfies posted from the same location
creates a moment of disjuncture—inviting the viewer to make sense of the overlapping, merging,
and entangled worlds of the citizen and the stateless in both physical and digital realms.
Social media has come under increasing scrutiny in the assessment of asylum claims,
raising new concerns for migrants/refugees who have geotagged their selfies and used social
media to document their journeys. Though the official policy of the Dublin regulations is to
deport asylum seekers to the first EU country in which they were fingerprinted and registered,
social media posts that reveal migrants/refugees’ trajectories of movement risk being used as
justification for denying asylum requests and deporting an asylum seeker back to the first EU
country he or she self-documented. This was the case in Switzerland, where a Nigerian man’s
asylum request was allegedly denied after Facebook photos revealed he had previously lived in
Spain under a different name.
51
While the selfie genre is generally associated with authenticity,

51
“Authorities want to use social networks in asylum investigations,” Swissinfo, June 3, 2018,
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/identity-check_authorities-want-to-use-social-networks-in-asylum-
68
here, the authenticity of the selfie is used to undermine the authenticity of the asylum claim,
revealing an inherent contradiction in how migrant/refugee selfies, and migrant/refugee-authored
media more broadly, signify. I turn now to an analysis of the circulation and remediation of
migrant/refugee and “migrant-related” selfies beyond their original contexts to consider how
claims of (in)authenticity are mobilized to generate anxieties about the security of Europe’s
spaces and borders.

Global Circulations and Remediations of Refugee Selfies
While I argue that migrant/refugee selfies make a public claim to existence and authorial
agency on the migrant/refugee’s own terms, this claim is often undermined or ignored once the
selfie is remediated by global news networks. Lilie Chouliaraki identifies three key types of what
she terms “migrant-related selfies” that appear in Western news media coverage of the
migrant/refugee crisis: migrants being photographed while taking selfies, migrant selfies with
celebrities, and celebrities taking selfies as if they were migrants in order to express solidarity
with displaced people around the globe.
52
Importantly, she notes that the first two types of
migrant-related selfies are always taken from a third person point-of-view, while the actual
selfies taken by migrants/refugees almost never appear in mainstream news media. This results
in “symbolic bordering,” defined by Chouliaraki as “the systematic elision of the other’s face as
an authentic and agentive presence in Western spaces of publicity.”
53
Chouliaraki argues that

investigations/44164036
See also: “Switzerland wants to use Facebook to investigate asylum claims,” The Local, June 4, 2018,
https://www.thelocal.ch/20180604/switzerland-wants-to-use-facebook-to-investigate-asylum-claims

52
Lilie Chouliaraki, “Symbolic Bordering: the self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital
news.” Popular Communication, Vol 15, No 2, 2017, 78-94.
53
Ibid.
69
photographs taken of migrants/refugees as they are in the process of posing for selfies presents
the act of selfie-taking as though it were unusual. The third-person perspective creates a
distancing effect between the subject taking a selfie and the viewer of the image, and this gives
viewers permission to make public commentary or offer judgment on migrant/refugee behavior,
suspending migrants/refugees between viewers’ sympathy and suspicion. As a result,
Chouliaraki concludes that Western news media find it impossible “to encounter the face of
migrants as staged and photographed by themselves, that is as a sovereign act of self-
representation rather than as forensic material for the study of digital authenticity.”
54

The tension between the authenticity signified by the generic selfie and the public’s
skepticism toward the authenticity of migrants/refugees is illustrated by the profusion of anti-
migrant Internet memes that circulate on social media. Images of migrants/refugees taking
celebratory selfies upon arriving to European shores have been appropriated by those with anti-
migrant stances to undermine the veracity of migrant/refugee subjects’ asylum claims. Captions
such as “You know you’ve been had when the ‘refugees’ pull out a selfie stick” point to a belief
that migrants/refugees, by virtue of fleeing violence and being in need of protection and aid,
should not have access to smartphones.
55
In the view of users making and circulating anti-
migrant memes, migrants/refugees with smartphones are inherently untrustworthy. In memes
such as the ones depicted below, the act of taking selfies is used against the migrant/refugee
subject to cast migrants/refugees as what Hannah Arendt calls pariahs and parvenus: those who
suck up resources that could go to rightful citizens, and those who are not genuinely fleeing

54
Ibid.

55
Iona Literat, “Refugee Selfies and the (Self-)Representation of Disenfranchised Social Groups,” Media
Fields Journal, No. 12 (2017), http://mediafieldsjournal.org/refugee-selfies/
70
violence or trauma but are rather social climbers migrating for a better life abroad.
56
If
migrant/refugee selfies function to reinscribe the migrant/refugee subject into a relationship with
place, the appropriation of migrant-related selfies for anti-migrant meme-making threatens that
emplacement through an attack on the migrant/refugee’s authenticity. These memes alert viewers
to bodies that ostensibly do not “belong” in Europe by linking the image of the migrant/refugee
selfie to acts of deception. They aim to make migrants/refugees feel unwelcome and, once again,
out of place.

Figures 16-17: Anti-migrant memes circulated on Twitter and Facebook
Another, more extreme instance in which a migrant-related selfie was misappropriated
involves the image of a Syrian refugee named Anas Modamani. Modamani first became publicly
visible in 2015 when a Reuters photographer captured him posing for a selfie with German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. The photo initially became a symbol of Merkel’s open-door policy

56
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1968), 54-89.

71
for Syrian refugees. However, the image went viral on social media when users began falsely
identifying Modamani as Najim Laachraoui, one of the suicide bombers who attacked the
Brussels airport in 2016, and alleged that Merkel had “taken a selfie with a terrorist.”
57
The
virulent manner in which anti-migrant media seeks to link migrants/refugees to terrorism affirms
Kuntsman’s assertion that selfies are not only an act of playful celebration, but also “a field of
potential violence and contestation.”
58
As Allan Sekula reminds us, photography has from its
inception been entwined with practices of policing and identifying criminality. “Every proper
portrait,” he writes, “has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.”
59
In other
words, we might say that the inverse of every selfie is the mugshot. If, as I have argued, the
encounter with migrant/refugee selfies prompts viewers to contend with the precarity of
migrant/refugee existence through a disruptive affective charge, anti-migrant memes and
disinformation campaigns that link migrant-related selfies to the terrorist mugshot appropriate
this disruptive charge and redirect it toward their audiences to suggest it is the citizen, and not
the “inauthentic” refugee, who lives in precarity and danger. Underlying these remediations is
the belief that it is the European citizen who is truly at risk of being displaced or killed by a
terrorist attack, while the migrant/refugee is figured as an imminent threat to society. Anti-
migrant memes that appropriate migrant-related selfies are evidence of a reactionary desire to
reestablish a hierarchy of looking, in which only European citizens can enact digital agency
through producing and circulating images online. This desire to reestablish a hierarchy of
looking extends to the practice of mapping as well. The focus on cell phones across multiple

57
Stephanie Ott, “How a selfie with Merkel changed Syrian refugee’s life,” Al Jazeera, February 21,
2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/02/selfie-merkel-changed-syrian-refugee-life-
170218115515785.html
58
Kunstman, 17.

59
Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, Vol.39 (1986): 7.
72
anti-migrant memes suggests European anxieties over migrants/refugees’ access to technologies
that allow for mapping, navigating, and documenting Europe on migrants/refugees’ own terms.
While the remediation of migrant/refugee selfies in Western news networks and across
anti-migrant social media accounts are troubling, two examples of migrant/refugee selfie
remediation that successfully amplify the authorial agency of migrants/refugees can be found in
the 2017 art exhibit, It is obvious from the map. The exhibit, which first opened at the REDCAT
in Los Angeles and later traveled internationally, was curated by Thomas Keenan and Sohrab
Mohebbi to examine “the role of maps and map-making in the movements of large numbers of
people from the conflict zones of the Middle East and Africa toward Europe.”
60
Included in It is
obvious was a fifteen-minute video installation piece, Traces of Exile, by Belgian photographer
Tomas van Houtryve. In Traces, van Houtryve films key sites along the migrant trail as he
follows the “digital breadcrumbs” left by migrants/refugees on the move.
61
He then uses the
augmented reality app Layar to superimpose photos posted to Instagram by migrants/refugees
over scenes of the locations he films.
Traces opens with a large, illustrated map of the world. At first, we see only the
silhouettes of white continents on a black background, but after a few moments, the borders of
nation-states fade into view like fractures spreading across a ceramic plate. The symbol for a
geotagged location pin appears over Kabul, Afghanistan, and a small, square frame opens below
it. Inside this interior frame, a series of Instagram posts are displayed. The location pin and

60
Thomas Keenan and Sohrab Mohebbi, It is obvious from the map, March 25-June 4, 2017, REDCAT,
Los Angeles, California.

61
Nicolas Niarchos, “Europe’s Migrant Trail Through the Instagrams of Refugees,” The New Yorker,
January 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/portfolio/following-europes-migrant-trail-through-
the-instagrams-of-refugees

73
square frame jump together from Afghanistan to Iran, then Iraq, and finally to Turkey, where
they settle on Izmir.

Figure 18: Still image from Traces of Exile (Tomas van Houtryve, 2016-2017)
The map slowly gives way to a location shot of Izmir’s coastal waters, and once there, the
Instagram posts of migrants/refugees appear in different areas of the frame for a few seconds
each before fading away, while the sounds of ocean waves, traffic, conversations, and other
ambient noise envelop the viewer through the piece’s accompanying headphones. This process
repeats as van Houtryve’s camera takes us from the Greek island of Lesbos to the border town of
Idomeni, and then to Calais, France. In each location, van Houtryve’s camera is static, while the
superimposed Instagram posts fade in and out unpredictably.
74

Figure 19: Van Houtryve films the Port of Chios in Athens, Greece and overlays the image with
geotagged migrant/refugee selfies. (Traces of Exile, Tomas van Houtryve, 2016-2017).

Through this play on stillness and motion, wherein the moving images shot by van Houtryve are
nearly static, and the still photographs posted to Instagram are made to move, van Houtryve
amplifies the subjectivities of migrants/refugees who were once—but are perhaps no longer—in
the locations he films. Through ambient sounds, vast landscape shots, and banal images collected
from social media, van Houtryve offers viewers a sensual experience that foregrounds the
intersections between the digital and material, and the migrant/refugee and the citizen, and
rejects the discourse of crisis circulated by global news media reporting on irregular migration to
Europe.
Though van Houtryve’s Traces of Exile easily stands on its own, its conceptual
engagement with presence, absence, and movement was enriched by the larger context of
Keenan and Mohebbi’s curation. Traces was situated among a number of other traditional and
mixed media projects, including a series of hand drawn maps made by Djordje Balmazovic, in
75
collaboration with migrants/refugees at an asylum center in Serbia. Unlike the maps generated by
Instagram, these illustrated maps do not maintain geographical integrity; for example, one places
Turkey north of Serbia and Hungary, while another depicts a non-contiguous Bulgaria split by
Serbia.

Figures 20-21: Maps created by Djordje Balmazovic of Škart Collective with Grupa 484 and in
collaboration with asylum seekers (2013 – 2015)

By placing countries arbitrarily along the page, the maps discursively challenge the notion that
borders are natural and stable entities. The maps also contain information on how many days,
months, and even years refugees waited to cross from one country to another; they show
journeys that wind back and forth as refugees are detained or deported, upending assumptions
that refugees are able to make uninterrupted journeys from point A to B. In this way, the
illustrated maps also reinscribe the migrant/refugee subject’s relationship to place and reflect
76
reactive mapping as a process: migrants/refugees’ individual experiences of attempted transit
across the Balkan Route are translated into a visual remapping of Europe’s borders in
Balmazovic’s project.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the exhibit format to productively remediating
migrant/refugee-authored media was its ability to provide important historical information
alongside the artifacts it displays. It is obvious from the map situated the contemporary European
migrant and refugee crisis within a longer history of European colonialism in Africa and the
Middle East and explained the role of EU border control agreements with non-European
countries in fomenting increasingly dangerous methods of irregular migration. Through
thoughtful curation, Keenan and Mohebbi implicated viewers of the exhibit in the larger social
and political structures responsible for global displacement, and in doing so, brought viewers
into a direct relationship with the refugees represented in It is obvious.
Ida Danewid, in her essay “White Innocence and the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality
and the Erasure of History,” argues that the common focus on abstract humanity and a universal
shared vulnerability “turns questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and
structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality,” and “removes from view
the history of colonialism and the way in which it continues to structure the present.”
62
She
argues that this process allows European subjects with liberal views to feel good about their
acceptance of migrants and refugees, without needing to acknowledge or be held accountable to
Europe’s imperial history and its current foreign policies that helped to create the
migrant/refugee crisis in the first place. By contextualizing and historicizing migrant/refugee

62
Ida Danewid, “White Innocence and the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History.”
Third World Quarterly, Vol 38, No 7, 2017, 1675.

77
authored media, It is obvious from the map made these linkages clear; however, by turning
viewers’ attention to Europe’s culpability in its own refugee “crisis,” the exhibit additionally
offered viewers the ability to enact what Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezzani, and Maurice Stierl call
a “disobedient gaze.” For Heller et al., disobedient gazing appropriates surveillance tactics used
by border control agents, such as biometric data collection, GPS tracking, mapping, and
photography, and uses them to reveal state-sponsored acts of violence.
63
In this sense, the
exhibition offered a politically salient remediation of migrant/refugee authored media that
worked to compliment, rather than undermine, the authorial agency of migrants/refugees and the
authenticity of their testimonies.
Although migrant/refugee selfies enact a public claim to existence, they are not
necessarily created with European or western audiences in mind. The fact that many of these
photos are primarily discoverable through geotags rather than hashtags suggests that these selfies
primarily serve the purpose of self-affirmation, rather than a call for public recognition. In the
case of my interlocutors Amer and Nassim, many of their social media posts deliberately made
use of the location “check-in” feature on Facebook and Instagram to notify friends and family of
their whereabouts and safe arrival to a new city. Their purposeful use of locational tagging
suggests that it is likely that many migrants/refugees are using these features primarily to update
their social circles. The migrants/refugees who have been interviewed by journalists about their
photographs tend to give similar reasons for taking them; they feel that these photos preserve
their memories and help share their stories.
64
These sentiments were echoed by Amer and

63
Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezzani and Maurice Stierl, “Disobedient Sensing and Border Struggles at the
Maritime Frontier of Europe,” Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures 4 (2017): 1-15
64
Patrick Witty, “See How Smartphones Have Become a Lifeline for Refugees,” Time Magazine, Oct 8,
2015, http://time.com/4062120/see-how-smartphones-have-become-a-lifeline-for-refugees/
See also: “Smartphones more important than food for Syrian migrants,” Middle East Online, August 9,
2015, http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=72746
78
Nassim when I asked them why they took selfies during their migrations. When I asked Nassim
whether he worried his public Instagram posts would compromise his safety, he replied by
saying “I don’t worry about the details of this situation. Yes, it was a dangerous journey, but
danger is only felt by those who live it. I left Iraq because it was dangerous, and now I’m safe.”
65

Nassim added that taking photos in each new country he passed through was a way to retain
optimism, while Amer noted that taking selfies is a form of entertainment for him and his
friends.
66

Such responses affirm that there is a pleasure in seeing oneself represented on screen and
crafting one’s own digital image; however, in the case of migrants/refugees, these pleasures are
arguably amplified by the heightened precarity of the migrant/refugee’s existence. The risks
inherent with sharing selfies publicly are apparent in both the increasing attention paid to social
media by border control and the vitriolic appropriation of images by anti-migrant social media
users circulating memes. In these situations, the demand to be seen that is enacted by the selfie
results in potentially dangerous overexposure. Despite these risks, migrant/refugee selfies offer
an effective way of seeing oneself in relation to space and time, as well as in relation to others
both in the physical and digital realms, and thus work to affirm the refugee’s survival, existence,
and resilience. To feel that one has a story and history to tell, and to have access to a medium
that allows one to tell it on one’s own terms, as and when one wishes, is perhaps one of the
foremost driving impulses behind documenting one’s migration through public selfies.
This chapter has traced processes of reactive mapping across institutional, artistic, and
migrant/refugee media practices. I have argued that Europe’s conceptual and material borders are
continuously remapped through, and in relation to, migrants/refugees unauthorized and

65
“Nassim,” text message to author, November 7
th
, 2016.
66
“Amer”, email message to author, February 7
th
, 2016.
79
autonomous movements and the documentation of these movements in the media. Practices of
reactive mapping variously constitute the Balkan Route as a threatening infrastructure of
contagion and as a site of encounter where borders become visible as markers that attach or
detach from specific bodies. As such, they work collectively to unsettle Europe’s conceptual and
material borders and illuminate how these borders are always in continuous flux. In the next two
chapters, I turn my attention to Hungary as a specific node of the Balkan Route where Europe’s
borders are actively being contested and revised. I examine how Hungary mobilizes the Balkan
Route as a threatening infrastructure in order to advance its performance of the counter-terror
security state—a performance, I argue, that evidences ongoing anxieties about the country’s
place in Europe, and a subsequent overidentification with Europeanness and whiteness.

80
Chapter 2. Producing Crisis and a New Internationalism of the Far-Right
In June of 2018, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó sat down for a
televised interview with BBC Newsnight reporter Emily Maitlis to discuss the Hungarian
government’s position on migration. The interview became contentious when Maitlis alleged that
the Hungarian government is “inventing something that doesn’t exist anymore” when it talks
about a migrant crisis in Hungary.
1
Indeed, after Hungary sealed its southern border with an
electrified, razor wire fence in 2016, the number of irregular migrants and refugees transiting the
country drastically declined. In 2018, the Hungarian Parliament further restricted migration by
passing stringent amendments to its Fundamental Law and Asylum Act. These amendments limit
the right to apply for asylum to only those applicants who have not passed through a “safe third
country” prior to their arrival, allowing for the systematic denial of the vast majority of asylum
claims made in Hungary.
2
As a result, the number of asylum applications to the country dropped

1
Péter Szijjártó, interviewed by Emily Maitlis, BBC Newsnight, June 26th, 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8itF62yIJg&feature=youtu.be
2
The amendment to the Fundamental Law added a new section to Article XIV addressing the asylum
procedure in Hungary, which reads: “Hungary shall, upon request, grant asylum to non-Hungarian
citizens being persecuted or having a well-founded fear of persecution in their native country or in the
country of their usual residence for reasons of race, nationality, membership of a particular social group,
religious or political belief, if they do not receive protection from their country of origin or from any other
country. Any non-Hungarian citizen arriving at the territory of Hungary through a country where he or
she was not exposed to persecution or a direct risk of persecution shall not be entitled to asylum.” The
Hungarian Parliament also adopted an amendment to the Asylum Act that introduced new grounds for
inadmissibility. The Asylum Act now states that any applicant who “arrived via a country where he or she
is not subjected to persecution as defined by Subsection (1) of Section 6, or to serious harm as defined by
Subsection (1) of Section 12, or [who can avail him/herself of] an adequate level of protection in the
country through which he or she arrived to Hungary” is ineligible to apply for asylum in Hungary. These
amendments strategically combine elements from the European Union’s Dublin Procedure, which
requires that asylum seekers apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter, and the notion of “safe
third countries,” which argues that asylum seekers should apply for asylum in the first “safe” country they
enter after fleeing their country of origin. Because the Hungarian government considers Serbia a “safe
country,” the vast majority of asylum claims made at the Hungarian-Serbian transit zone are denied. See:
The Government of Hungary, “Bill No. T/333 amending certain laws relating to measures to combat
illegal immigration,” translated by Hungarian Helsinki Committee (Legal Document, Hungary, 2018), 1-
12. https://www.helsinki.hu/wp-content/uploads/T333-ENG.pdf; Hungarian Helsinki Committee, “One
Year After: How legal changes resulted in blanket rejections, refoulement, and systematic starvation in

81
from a high of 177,135 in 2015 to just 500 in 2019.
3
When Maitlis pushed Szijjártó to explain
why harsh anti-migrant policies continue to be passed into Hungarian law despite the significant
decline in migrants transiting across Hungary’s borders, his response, in part, was as follows:
“There are tens of millions around Europe who can hit the road at any time […] tell me, if the
Western Balkan Routes get activated again, who will stop the illegal migrants? The first defense
line is still Hungary […] because the countries south from us either do not have the capacity, or
do not have the willingness, to stop such influxes […] We Hungarians, we do have the right, and
no one can take that away from us, we have the right to make our own decision whom we would
like to allow to enter the territory of Hungary, and who we do not allow to enter the territory of
Hungary” [sic].
4

Szijjártó’s choice of words here is noteworthy, from the simultaneously imminent and unending
temporality of threat suggested by the phrase “at any time,” to the accusation that countries south
of Hungary are unwilling to stop this threat and protect Europe’s borders, to finally, the
invocation of Hungary’s sovereignty as justification for its xenophobic policies. His response
frames the Hungarian government’s violent bordering tactics as an urgent necessity, a
consequence of the failure of other nations, and an inalienable right of the Hungarian people.
Yet, what is most striking to me about this interview is the malleable quality Szijjártó assigns to
the Balkan Route itself. What does it mean to envision the Balkan Route as a site that can be
activated (and by this logic, deactivated as well), able at any moment to unleash “tens of
millions” of migrants toward western Europe? Who is imagined to be doing the activating, and
what does Szijjártó’s framing of Hungary as the first line of Europe’s defense tell us about
shifting conceptualizations of Europe’s boundaries, as well as Hungary’s place within them?
Maitlis’s claim that Hungary is “inventing” a migrant crisis is a provocative one, to be

detention” (Policy Report, Hungary, 2019), 1-4. https://www.helsinki.hu/wp-content/uploads/One-year-
after-2019.pdf
3
“Asylum Seekers in Hungary and Persons Granted International Protected Status (2000—2019),”
Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), accessed October 15th, 2020,
https://www.ksh.hu/docs/eng/xstadat/xstadat_annual/i_wnvn003.html
4
Szijjártó, interviewed by Emily Maitlis, BBC Newsnight.

82
sure, but it merits serious consideration. In this chapter, I begin from her allegation of invention
in order to investigate how the Hungarian government visually produces and mediates a state of
ongoing crisis to its citizens. Where my previous chapter examined how practices of mapping the
Balkan Route mediate multiple anxieties about Europe’s material and conceptual borders, the
next two chapters focus on Hungary as a specific node of the Balkan Route, one that has actively
disrupted the route’s geographic pathway through policy decisions and shifted public perceptions
of the route through aggressive anti-migrant media campaigns. I assess how the Hungarian
government mobilizes the Balkan Route as a threatening—but also strategic—infrastructure in
order to cohere public support for increasingly identitarian and anti-democratic policies
domestically, while presenting Hungary as the most successful security state in the European
Union (EU) to publics at home and abroad. In doing so, Hungary has risen to international
attention as an “illiberal democracy” in the heart of Europe and made tangible the contradictions
between stated European values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality and human
rights,
5
and EU policies that encourage increasing securitization, surveillance, and policing of
Europe’s exterior borders.
Hungary has garnered increased attention in global news media since the high point of
the migrant/refugee crisis in 2015 due to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s emergence as
a leading figure of far-right populist politics across the world. In the past decade, Orbán has
successfully consolidated his Fidesz party’s control over parliament and the judiciary, overseen
multiple amendments to Hungary’s constitution, implemented increasingly autocratic policies,

5
The list of European values, as understood by the European Union, can be found on the EU’s webpage.
The full list includes human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law, and human rights. The
rule of law value exists in tension with the rest of the EU’s values as it is used to justify violent bordering
tactics in service of securing the nation-state and upholding immigration policy. See: “The EU in Brief,”
European Union, November 24
th
, 2020, https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-in-brief_en

83
and mobilized populist sentiment against EU leadership.
6
He has also extensively changed media
laws in the country in order to privilege pro-government media outlets and muffle dissenting
voices. Government control over and dissemination of media within Hungary plays a vital role in
maintaining Orbán and Fidesz’s power, and Europe’s migrant/refugee crisis has provided a
salient narrative of impending danger for Orbán to play against. Hungary’s location at the
exterior of the European Union’s Schengen Zone allows Orbán to cast the country in the role of
Europe’s defender, thereby justifying Hungary’s callous anti-migrant policies, while the Balkan
Route—a pathway that is continuously reshaped by migrants and refugees on the move—is
figuratively mobilized in Hungarian media as an agentive infrastructure, one that poses an
existential threat to Hungarian and European civilization. In flouting EU and international human
rights laws, Hungary has presented Europe with an uncomfortable dilemma: on the one hand,
Hungary’s hardline stance against open borders maintains the EU’s externalized bordering
regime and protects its core from further unwanted migration, making any disciplinary action
against Hungary counterproductive. On the other hand, Hungary’s democratic backsliding and
overt refusals to follow dictates from EU policymakers undermines the myth of a united Europe
acting as a global champion of human rights and liberal democracy. As such, Hungary’s policy
initiatives and media strategies illuminate how the Balkan Route, as a mediated and mediating
infrastructure, gives shape to competing visions for, and anxieties about, Europe’s configuration
in an age of mass migration and displacement.
Though I begin from Maitlis’s premise of invention, I do not mean to suggest that the
forced displacement of millions of people around the globe is not an actually existing political

6
Kim Lane Scheppele details these developments and describes Orbán’s political strategies as a form of
“autocratic legalism,” wherein “electoral mandates plus constitutional and legal change are used in the
service of an illiberal agenda.” Kim Lane Scheppele, “Autocratic Legalism,” The University of Chicago
Law Review vol. 85, no.2 (March 2018): 548.

84
and humanitarian challenge demanding urgent attention, nor do I mean to deny the existence of
thousands of asylum seekers currently within Europe’s borders who are in need of ongoing
protection. My aim in this chapter is rather the following: to deconstruct how, and to what effect,
the Hungarian government continues to “see” and relate a migrant crisis to its citizens despite the
low numbers of migrants and refugees living in, or transiting across, the country; and to
investigate how Hungary’s mediated crisis is not unique to the Hungarian political context but
rather produced dialogically within larger, transnational networks of the far-right. In the process,
I show how the aggressive recentralization of media networks in the country and expansion of
Hungarian pro-government media beyond Hungary’s borders amplify Hungary’s performance of
the counter-terror security state. This performance, which marries narrative frameworks from
both the Cold War and War on Terror, coheres a far-right, nationalist Hungarian public around
the fortification of Hungary’s territorial and demographic borders as well as the protection of (an
imagined to be pure) white Christian European civilization at large—a civilization in which
Hungary firmly locates itself. It also situates Hungary as a major player in the international far-
right and elevates Hungary’s visibility in the geopolitical field.
Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, two highly regarded political scientists and experts of
the Eastern European region, argue that the turn toward illiberalism in Europe’s east is the result
of Eastern Europeans’ refusal to continue imitating western liberal dictates.
7
While their analysis
is often convincing, I take issue with the claim that Eastern Europe has “turned away” from the
west. Instead, I argue that Eastern European nations’ representations of themselves as counter-
terror security states and bulwarks of Europe demonstrate a continued over-identification with
core western European nations in a post-9/11 landscape. If, as Anikó Imre argues, cultural

7
Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: Why the West is Losing the Fight for
Democracy, (New York: Pegasus Books, 2020).

85
admission to Europe is conditioned on a continuous compulsion to “prove one’s right to belong”
by out-performing the host culture’s whiteness, political admission to Europe functions through
an analogous compulsion: peripheral European states out-perform Europe’s whiteness through
aggressively securitizing their borders to prevent unwanted (non-white, poor, uneducated,
Muslim) migrants and refugees from entering the European body.
8
This performance
demonstrates how the Balkan Route, as a conduit for migrants and refugees journeying toward
western Europe, mediates Eastern European anxieties about demographic changes in their region
and their own contingent location in the European imagination.
9
In other words, the Balkan
Route mediates the unsettled business of the Cold War—Eastern Europe’s still incomplete
unification with Europe proper—through anxieties about security, ideology, and race that are
reanimated and mobilized by the global War on Terror.
These anxieties long predate the Cold War, but the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the
subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to a potent narrative of transition and
reunification that suggested Eastern Europe would be fully integrated with Europe proper and,
through that reunification, have its whiteness affirmed. The promise of reunification, however,
continues to come up against revitalized narratives of east-west divisions which attribute Eastern
Europe’s violent bordering tactics and anti-migrant policies to the region’s communist history
and once again demarcate Eastern Europeans as not quite European (and not quite white)
subjects. At the same time, Eastern European nations eagerly appropriate the War on Terror

8
Anikó Imre, “The Cosmopolitan Media Cultures in Europe,” in Postcolonial Transitions in Europe:
Contexts, Practices and Politics, eds. Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani (London: Rowan &
Littlefield International, 2016), 318.
9
Eastern Europe’s long history as Europe’s imagined internal “Other” is cogently argued by both Larry
Wolff and Maria Todorova. See: Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the
Mind of the Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Maria Todorova, Imagining
the Balkans, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

86
narrative in order to justify autocratic policies and discriminatory practices,
10
claiming that they
are simply upholding Europe’s rule of law. This move speaks to the ways in which aligning with
the War on Terror is understood as a prerequisite for building alliances with western powers and
entry into the imagined sphere of modern nations. As George W. Bush declared at a 2001 joint
press conference with then French President Jacques Chirac, “A coalition partner must do more
than just express sympathy, a coalition partner must perform. That means different things for
different nations […] But all nations, if they want to fight terror, must do something. […] You’re
either with us or against us in the fight on terror.”
11
For Eastern Europe, then, performing the
counter-terror security state is a necessary component of Europeanization, and its frustrated
attempts to do so along the Balkan Route evidence how Cold War narrative frameworks that
mark Eastern Europe as politically and ideologically suspect continue to inflect international
politics and analyses of the region.
My analysis of Hungarian state media campaigns is therefore situated within recent
public and academic debates about Europe’s so-called migrant/refugee crisis that resurrect Cold
War frameworks of an internal divide between Europe’s east and west. Liberal criticisms of
Central and Southeastern Europe’s response to the migrant/refugee crisis often frame post-
socialist states as uniquely hostile to migrants and refugees and suggest that Europe’s post-
socialist region has failed to absorb the tenets of western liberal democracy. While it is true that
Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European states have expressed overt ethnonationalist

10
In one compelling study of this phenomenon, Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volčič found that Serbian
intellectuals recontextualized George W. Bush’s War on Terror discourse in order to retroactively justify
Serbian violence against Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars in the 1990s. See: Karmen Erjavec and Zala
Volčič, “‘War on terrorism’ as a discursive battleground: Serbian recontextualization of G.W. Bush’s
discourse,” Discourse & Society, vol. 18, no. 2, 2007, 123-137.
11
“‘You are either with us or against us,’” CNN News, November 6
th
, 2001,
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/

87
sentiments in response to the migrant/refugee crisis, analyses that attribute the resurgence of
nationalist politics solely to the region’s historic inexperience with non-European migration and
representative democracy, or to centuries-old ethnic hatreds,
12
ignore the role of transnational
actors in fomenting far-right nationalist movements across the globe. I trace the transnational
networks of some of the far-right political consultants and organizations that influenced the
Hungarian government’s media strategies between 2014 - 2020 to show how Hungary served as
a testing ground for far-right, populist media tactics. Through analyzing the political economy of
the Hungarian media landscape, I show that Hungary’s nationalist, anti-migrant media
campaigns are not the result of a presumed post-socialist “backwardness,” but rather emerge
from strategic international collaborations with organizations and actors that seek to incite a
global right-wing revolution. Hungary’s anti-migrant policies and media campaigns are therefore
not anomalies out of line with Europe’s “liberal democratic” values, as many writers across
public and academic discourses have suggested; rather, they are complimentary to, and logical
consequences of, the “global market for security,” neoliberal economic policies,
13
and the
European Union’s externalized bordering regime, all of which propel, and are propelled by, far-
right ideologies.
14

12
The Yugoslav Secession Wars of the 1990s were often framed through the reductive lens of ancient
tribalisms in international media, and references to current expressions of ethnonationalism in the region
risk reproducing these well-worn tropes. As Neda Atanasoski compellingly argues, “By envisaging the
ambiguously European Balkans as the point of origin of all twentieth-century European violence,
including terrorism and Nazism, and by reducing the Balkans to a space of ethnic conflict and ethnic
cleansing, U.S. political and media discourses distanced the West from its own racial thinking and racist
violence that have been constitutive of Euro-American modernity.” Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian
Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 131.
13
As Adam Fabry argues, state capture and corruption are not distinct characteristics of Orbán’s Hungary
and other post-socialist governments, but rather “an increasingly systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism
tout court.” Adam Fabry, “Neoliberalism, crisis and authoritarian-ethnicist reaction: The ascendancy of
the Orbán regime,” Competition & Change, vol. 23 no. 2 (2019): 168.
14
Liz Fekete argues that the global market for security is both a consequence of far-right ideologies as
well as a driver of far-right ideologies. See: Liz Fekete, Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the
Right, (London: Verso, 2018), 39.

88

The Resurrection of Cold War Frameworks and the expansion of the Security State Model
Over the past five years, western liberal news reports and commentaries addressing the
migrant/refugee crisis have consistently invoked Cold War divisions between Europe’s east and
west and suggested they are partially to blame for the European Union’s failure to organize a
cohesive response to irregular migration across the continent. After Hungary, Poland, and
Slovakia announced in 2015 that they would refuse to comply with the European Union’s
proposed refugee resettlement quotas, headlines such as “Demokratie muss gelernt werden
[Democracy has to be learned]” in Austria’s ORF(Austrian Broadcasting Corporation)
15
, “Auch
Osteuropa muss Solidarität zeigen: Entlang des einstigen Eisernen Vorhangs geht der tiefste Riss
in der europäischen Asyldebatte [Eastern Europe must also show solidarity: the deepest crack in
the European asylum debate runs along the former Iron Curtain],” in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher
Zeitung
16
, and “Healing Europe’s east-west divide is central to a lasting refugee solution” in the
United Kingdom’s The Guardian proliferated.
17
Writing in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Meret
Bauman argues that “It is precisely the countries whose dissenters were accepted in Western
Europe during the time of their communist dictatorships, and who have received a lot of support
since joining the EU a good ten years ago, that are now refusing to show solidarity in the refugee
crisis. If Europe shows many cracks in the debate about a binding distribution quota for asylum
seekers, the one along the line of the former Iron Curtain is the deepest.”
18
Similarly, The

15
“Demokratie muss gelernt werden,” ORF, August 10
th
, 2016. https://orf.at/v2/stories/2352553/2352583/
16
Meret Bauman, “Auch Osteuropa muss Solidarität zeigen: Entlang des einstigen Eisernen Vorhangs
geht der tiefste Riss in der europäischen Asyldebatte,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 10
th
, 2015.
https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/auch-osteuropa-muss-solidaritaet-zeigen-1.18610703?reduced=true
17
Natalie Nougayrède, “Healing Europe’s east-west divide is central to a lasting refugee solution,” The
Guardian, September 3
rd
, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/03/europe-east-
west-divide-refugee-eu-leaders
18
Bauman. The original German reads: “Ausgerechnet diese Länder, deren Regimekritiker während der

89
Guardian’s Natalie Nougavrède laments, “Ten years after many eastern European countries
joined the EU, a political and cultural gap divides the continent – and its scale may well have
been underestimated. It’s not new.”
19

Accompanying these articles are photographs and illustrations that further emphasize a
distinct difference between Western and Eastern Europe. Nougavrède’s op-ed, for example, is
framed by an illustration that shows a fractured EU flag (see Figure 1). On the left-hand side of
the image, seven yellow stars are arranged in a half circle on a familiar blue background. The
stars are divided from the EU flag’s other half by a razor-wire fence. On the right-hand side of
the fence, the five remaining stars appear disassembled, as though they refuse to go to their
positions to complete the image of a united circle. As a result, the stars comprising the western
half of the flag, and thus representing western Europe, appear open and inviting, ready to uphold
the values enshrined in the European Union’s constitution. The stars in the eastern half of the
flag, however, are stubbornly huddled together behind their iron curtain, which Nougavrède
reminds readers is “not new.”

Zeit der kommunistischen Diktatur in Westeuropa Aufnahme fanden und die seit dem EU-Beitritt vor gut
zehn Jahren viel Unterstützung erfuhren, verweigern nun in der Flüchtlingskrise die Solidarität. Zeigt
Europa in der Debatte um einen verbindlichen Verteilschlüssel für Asylsuchende auch viele Risse, so ist
jener entlang der Linie des einstigen Eisernen Vorhangs doch der tiefste.”
19
Nougayrède, The Guardian.

90

Figure 1: An illustration of the EU flag divided by a border fence published in The Guardian.

North American news outlets likewise circulated articles and op-eds that revive Cold War
epistemic frameworks in their analyses of the migrant/refugee crisis: “Eastern Bloc’s Resistance
to Refugees Highlights Europe’s Political and Cultural Division” in The New York Times
20
,
“Refugees face frosty reception in Europe’s ex-Communist east” in Reuters
21
, and “Refugee
Crisis exposes a deep divide in the European Union” in The Los Angeles Times are just some
examples.
22
Rick Lyman argues in The New York Times that although post-socialist member
states of the EU pledged to support European values upon accession
the reality is that the former Communist states have proved sluggish in actually absorbing many
of these values and practicing them. Oligarchs, cronyism and endemic corruption remain a part
of daily life in many of the countries, freedom of the press is in decline while rising nationalism

20
Rick Lyman, “Eastern Bloc’s Resistance to Refugees Highlights Europe’s Political and Cultural
Division,” The New York Times, September 13th, 2015.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/europe/eastern-europe-migrant-refugee-crisis.html
21
Tatiana Jancarikova, “Refugees face frosty reception in Europe's ex-Communist east,” Reuters,
September 9
th
2015. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-east/refugees-face-frosty-
reception-in-europes-ex-communist-east-idUSKCN0R90BR20150909
22
Henry Chu, “Refugee crisis exposes a deep divide in European Union,” Los Angeles Times, September
21
st
, 2015. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-europe-migrants-eu-20150921-story.html

91
and populist political movements have stirred anti-immigrant tensions.
23

Lyman’s article is illustrated with four photographs. In the first, Hungary’s oppressive
electrified razor-wire border fence stretches across the frame. A refugee is visible in the
background and seems to be running away from the fence. In the foreground, we see a police
officer flanked by two soldiers—their backs to the camera—running to apprehend the refugee. A
second photograph shows a young woman with her hands clasped in the sign of a prayer,
surrounded by men waving the Polish flag. The caption for the image reads, “A woman in
Warsaw reacted to a protest against accepting refugees.” Interestingly, while Lyman’s article
focuses entirely on Eastern European attitudes to refugee resettlement, the final two photos
printed alongside his reporting show images from the western region of the continent. An aerial
photograph of hundreds of people gathered in a town square is captioned, “A huge rally in
Copenhagen on Saturday to show support for refugees,” while the final photograph shows an
elderly woman in Madrid holding a sign that reads “Welcome Refugees!” These photographs
function to create the misleading impression that there is wide support for refugee resettlement in
Western Europe, and it is in Eastern Europe that the problem of anti-migrant policies and public
sentiment runs rampant. The juxtaposition of decontextualized photographs from pro-refugee
demonstrations in Denmark and Spain with images of anti-migrant protesters in Poland and
police chasing refugees along Hungary’s militarized border suggest that Eastern European
nations remain behind a psychic iron curtain, if not a literal one: they appear insular and hostile,
unable or unwilling to transform into fully democratic open societies.
In “Refugees, Communism and Nationalism,” journalist Sintia Radu advances this logic
by stating “observers are debating whether Central and Eastern European political currents are

23
Lyman, “Eastern Bloc’s Resistance,” emphasis mine.

92
tilting toward the right. Yet experts warn this is not a new trend, but rather a consistent problem
in a region troubled by a growing number of populist governments that seem to want to push
back against EU values.”
24
Similarly, in a commentary piece for Project Syndicate, sociologist
Jan T. Gross writes that “the states known collectively as ‘Eastern Europe’ […] have revealed
themselves to be intolerant, illiberal, xenophobic, and incapable of remembering the spirit of
solidarity that carried them to freedom a quarter-century ago,”
25
while political analyst Paul
Hockenos, in an essay for Foreign Policy, alleges “it seems tolerance and civic values in these
countries are less advanced than we assumed.”
26

Whether these articles admonish or apologize for the region’s harsh anti-migrant policies
and attitudes, they share a key assumption; for these writers, Eastern Europeans’ xenophobia and
alleged failure to uphold western European values appear to be caused by the region’s inability
to move beyond its communist history and its unwillingness to adapt to the modern present. The
repeated invocation across articles of a political and cultural divide reveals the deep-seated
cultural racism and balkanism
27
that continues to frame popular discourses about Eastern Europe.

24
Sintia Radu, “Refugees, Communism and Nationalism,” U.S. News, October 13th, 2017.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-10-13/how-communism-and-a-refugee-crisis-
brought-about-nationalism-in-central-europe. Emphasis mine.
25
Jan T. Gross, “Eastern Europe’s Crisis of Shame,” Project Syndicate, September 13th, 2015.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/eastern-europe-refugee-crisis-xenophobia-by-jan-gross-
2015-09?barrier=accesspaylog#lKJ0Wb2TyUthtEVq.99
26
Paul Hockenos, “The Stunning Hypocrisy of Mitteleuropa,” Foreign Policy, September 10th, 2015.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/10/the-stunning-hypocrisy-of-mitteleuropa-refugees-poland-hungary-
czech-republic/. Emphasis mine.
27
Maria Todorova coins this term in her seminal book Imagining the Balkans. For Todorova, balkanism
shares similarities with, but is distinct from, Orientalism. For Todorova, while Said’s Orient and Occident
are intangible in nature, balkanism is premised on the “historical and geographic concreteness of the
Balkans.” The region not only has clear spatial dimensions, it is also marked by imagined temporal
differences. Todorova argues, “Because the geographic east of Europe and the world situated to the east
was lagging behind Europe primarily in economic performance, East came to be identified more often,
and often exclusively, with industrial backwardness, lack of advanced social relations and institutions
typical for the developed capitalist West, irrational and superstitious cultures unmarked by Western
Enlightenment. This added an additional vector in the relationship between East and West: time, where
the movement from past to future was not merely motion but evolution from simple to complex,

93
The authors’ descriptions of the region as “sluggish,” “less advanced,” having a “consistent
problem” and “yet to learn democracy”
28
reproduce tropes that temporally fix Eastern Europe in
the past and frame Eastern Europe as intrinsically less civilized than its western counterparts. At
the same time, these essays take western Europe’s hospitality as a given, glossing over, if not
completely ignoring, the direct role the European Union plays in funding border securitization
projects at Europe’s peripheries,
29
as well as the backlash to multiculturalism that western
European politicians have encouraged for over a decade.
30
These assumptions are reproduced in,
and disseminated through, the images and illustrations that circulate within news media, which
emphasize border fences, police brutality, and anti-migrant protests in Eastern Europe as though
they are longstanding, distinctly eastern phenomena. What are we to make then of public and
academic debates that speak of a “renewed divide”
31
between Europe’s east and west, and
Eastern Europe’s “illiberal turn?” How does the discursive resurrection of Europe’s Cold War-
era divisions mask the connections between illiberalism in Eastern Europe and the increasing
sway of far-right populist parties worldwide, including in western European countries like
France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland?
32

backward to developed, primitive to cultivated. The element of time with its developmental aspect has
been an important, and nowadays the most important, characteristic of contemporary perceptions of East
and West.” Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 11-12.
28
“Demokratie muss gelernt warden,” ORF.
29
Ana Antic elaborates this point in her essay for The Reluctant Internationalists. Ana Antic, “At the
Gates of Europe: The Eastern European Refugee Crisis,” The Reluctant Internationalists, November 2nd,
2015. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists/blog/at-the-gates-of-europe-the-eastern-european-
refugee-crisis-2/
30
Liz Fekete, “Establishing Norms: The Cultural Revolution from the Right,” Europe’s Fault Lines:
Racism and the Rise of the Right, London: Verso, 2018.
31
As one example, see: Ivan Krastev, “Utopian Dreams Beyond the Border,” Eurozine, June 24
th
, 2016.
https://www.eurozine.com/utopian-dreams-beyond-the-border/
32
In the 2019 European Parliament elections, far-right parties won 26% of the vote in Austria, 25.6% of
the vote in Switzerland, 15% of the vote in Spain, 13% of the vote in France, and 12.6% of the vote in
Germany. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party became the sole far-right party in power in western
Europe after entering into a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats and Chancellor Sebastian
Kurz’s People’s Party in 2017. In Germany, the far-right AfD party is the biggest opposition party in the

94
Recent scholarship on Europe’s migrant/refugee crisis has sought to address these
questions from various disciplinary and methodological frameworks. Anthropologist Dace
Dzenovska compellingly argues that left and liberal commentaries accusing Eastern Europe of
lacking compassion for refugees ultimately function to reaffirm the political and moral
superiority of the western European core. For Dzenovska, western liberal Europeans
problematically expect compassion to be deployed as a political virtue rather than private
sentiment. When Eastern European nations invoked their prior experiences with occupation and
population transfers as valid reasons for enacting their sovereign right to refuse the resettling of
refugees within their borders, the region
emerged as an ideal type—an unsympathetic not-quite-European subject mired in racialized
paranoia about foreigners, exaggerated concerns about self-determination and self-preservation,
and timeworn claims of historical suffering. […] Disagreeable politics and attitudes were traced
to moral failures, which amount to failed Europeanness.
33

Dzenovska argues that Eastern Europe’s alleged “compassion deficit” toward new migrants and
refugees marks a contradictory predicament for the region; on one hand, the proper European
subject is imagined as one that can extend hospitality and charity toward those in need, by virtue
of the fact that she is not in need herself. Thus, in order to prove their Europeanness—and by

Bundestag, while in Spain, the far-right Vox party recently doubled its parliamentary seats and is now the
third largest party represented in the Spanish government. France’s far-right politician Marine Le Pen lost
sizably to Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 French Presidential election; nevertheless, her National Rally
party (formerly the National Front) has a strong base and the potential to grow. In the United Kingdom,
the far-right UKIP party was instrumental in convincing voters to pull the UK out of the European Union.
Its current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, while not a member of UKIP, also backed Brexit and
campaigns on far-right populist sentiments. See: “Europe and right-wing nationalism: A country-by-
country guide,” BBC News, November 13
th
, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36130006

See also: Andrew Sullivan, “Boris’s Blundering Brilliance,” New York Magazine, December 6
th
, 2019,
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/boris-johnson-brexit.html
33
Emphasis mine. Dace Dzenovska, “Eastern Europe, the Moral Subject of the Migrant/Refugee Crisis,
and Political Futures,” Near Futures Online 1 “Europe at a Crossroads,” March 2016.
http://nearfuturesonline.org/eastern-europe-the-moral-subject-of-the-migrationrefugee-crisis-and-
political-futures/

95
extension, their equality to western Europeans as political agents, rather than “humans-in-
need”—Eastern European nations should transcend their historical traumas and show solidarity
with the rest of the EU by agreeing to share responsibility for caring for refugees. On the other
hand, Dzenovska notes that Eastern European nations have relied on their historical injuries in
order to make political claims in the present. However, by asserting an ongoing victim status
within these political claims, one that is often importantly tied to national identities, they have in
fact undermined their inclusion into full European (and by extension universal) subjecthood:
In the context of the migration/refugee crisis, [Eastern Europe] is expected to show compassion
towards the suffering of others—the refugees—rather than claim that it cannot do so because of
its own injurious pasts’ claim on the present and the future. Insofar as it is unable or refuses to do
so, it is perceived as post-socialist and not European.
34

Eastern European nations are therefore doubly chastised by their western neighbors; they are
criticized for making political demands on the basis of their own national suffering and
condemned for failing to show compassion toward vulnerable others. Their “failed
Europeanness” functions to reaffirm western Europe’s superior cosmopolitan subjectivity and
position as the leader of civilizational progress and allows western Europe to continue displacing
the ills of nationalism eastward.
35

For noted political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, Eastern Europe’s
compassion deficit and turn toward illiberalism arises from an active rejection of western
Europe’s moralistic dictates. Krastev and Holmes argue that the narrative of European
reunification in 1989 marked a thirty-year “Age of Imitation,” in which the “Western-dominated
unipolar order made liberalism seem unchallengeable in the realm of moral ideals.”
36
In their
view, Eastern European populists are rebelling against the absence of alternatives to liberalism,

34
Ibid., 4-5.
35
Imre, 319.
36
Krastev and Holmes, The Light that Failed, 5

96
and what they see as “the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy.”
37
Drawing
on postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis, Krastev and Holmes contend that post-socialist states
initially engaged in a mimicry of western political, economic, and cultural models with great
enthusiasm; however, this enthusiasm soon turned to resentment as the economic crisis of 2008,
along with two decades of widespread corruption and rising social inequality, undermined the
promise of freedom, mobility, and progress that the transition to free-market capitalism was
meant to fulfill.
38
Central to Krastev and Holmes’s resentment theory is the role the European
Union plays in imposing conditions on Eastern European states seeking EU membership. The
requirement that Eastern European states uphold “European values,” the shifting definitions of
which are always determined and assessed by the western European core, amounts to a “political
and moral ‘shock therapy’” that ultimately “evokes feelings of shame and resentment” when East
European nations are judged negatively. Furthermore, it “stokes fears of cultural erasure” within
the region.
39
For Krastev and Holmes, the external monitoring of Eastern Europe’s “progress”
cannot but lead to a reactionist rejection of liberalism.
Krastev and Holmes’s notion of the imitation imperative and the feelings of alienation
that result from mimicry are certainly compelling. Yet, an important contradiction emerges in
both their framework and Dzenovska’s focus on compassion, one that all of the aforementioned
authors leave unexplored. Though the proper European subject is imagined as one who upholds
European values such as respect for human dignity, equality, and human rights through the
expression of sentiments such as compassion, the proper European state is imagined to be first
and foremost a secure one. Admission into the European Union requires that candidate states

37
Ibid.
38
Ibid., 20.
39
Ibid., 9-10.

97
meet the EU’s established political and economic criteria, and that they demonstrate
“administrative and institutional capacity to effectively implement the acquis” of the Union,
including “measures relating to [the EU’s] common foreign and security policy.”
40
In the
introduction to its 2016 Communication on EU Enlargement Policy, the European Commission
writes:
A continued commitment to the principle of ‘fundamentals first’ remains essential for the
enlargement countries. The Commission will continue to focus efforts on the rule of law,
including security, fundamental rights, democratic institutions and public administration reform,
as well as on economic development and competitiveness. [...] accession negotiations [...] are
part of a wider process of modernisation and reforms. The governments of the enlargement
countries need to embrace the necessary reforms more actively and truly make this their political
agenda - not because the EU is asking for it, but because it is in the best interest of their
citizens.
41

As the Commission Report demonstrates, security is fundamental to Europe’s imagination of a
proper state; security is the first measure listed within the concept of “rule of law,” followed by
fundamental rights and democratic institutions. Here, the privileging of security ahead of rights
and democratic institutions speaks to how pervasively the global “War on Terror,” as an
ideological project, has shaped political and popular understandings of “Europe” and
Europeanization despite the war’s origin in US foreign policy. The ability to successfully
contribute to the securitization of the EU is of the utmost importance to the Union when
considering candidate states. Importantly, the measures listed above, to which candidate states
must commit, are framed by the Commission as part of a “process of modernisation,” reminding
us that candidate states continue to be framed as temporally lagging behind core EU member
states which retain their monopoly on representing modernity and assessing the progress of

40
European Commission, “Accession Criteria” and “Acquis,” EUR-Lex Glossary of Summaries,
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary.html
41
“Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, The European
Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions,” European Commission
(Communication on EU Enlargement Policy, Brussels, Belgium, 2016), 2.

98
global others. The same report contains a section dedicated to migration, in which the
migrant/refugee crisis is listed as a key reason for the “strategic relevance of enlargement policy”
in the Western Balkans region.
42
We may conclude, then, that the Commission’s openness to
incorporating the Western Balkans into the European Union is not due to the belief in a shared
and equal “Europeanness” but rather the result of a strategic need for peripheral European
nations to continue executing the dirty work of enforcing Europe’s borders and managing the
flows of migration to and from the continent.
In 2019, the Commission released another report on EU Enlargement Policy. This report
details The Western Balkans Strategy, adopted by the EU and six states in the Western Balkans
on February 6
th
, 2018, as well as the Sofia Priority Agenda, adopted on May 17
th
of that same
year. The report summarizes the six “Flagship Initiatives” agreed upon by both parties, listed as:
1) Strengthening support to the rule of law 2) Reinforcing engagement on security and migration
3) Supporting socio-economic development 4) Increasing connectivity 5) Digital Agenda for the
Western Balkans 6) Supporting reconciliation and good neighborly relations. Of particular
interest here is Flagship Initiative 2, which groups together security and migration. The
Commission defines the initiative as follows: “Reinforcing engagement on security and
migration concerns engaging with the region to address common security threats, including
terrorism, violent extremism, radicalisation, organised crime, trafficking of human beings and
firearms, hybrid-threats, as well as building the capacity of the partners to deal with challenges
related to migration and security.”
43
After briefly summarizing an agreement between the
Commission and six Western Balkans partner states on a “Joint Action Plan on Counter-

42
Ibid., 4.
43
“Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European
Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions,” European Commission
(Communication on EU Enlargement Policy, Brussels, Belgium, 2019), 43. Emphasis mine.

99
Terrorism,” the report continues:
On migration, the Commission, in cooperation with relevant EU agencies and international
organisations, continues to pursue ambitious projects in the field of migration management,
building the partners’ capacity in management of mixed migration flows, establishing asylum
procedures, return mechanisms and information exchange. […] In order to achieve better
synergies in the field of security and migration, the Commission has been facilitating greater
involvement of JHA [Justice and Home Affairs] agencies in the Western Balkans. This included
the signature of a working arrangement between the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and
Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the signature of a cooperation agreement between Eurojust and
Albania (following those already in place with Montenegro and North Macedonia), and
completion of the European Border and Coast Guard Status Agreement negotiations with the five
countries of the region that share a border with the EU. […] The total 2018 allocation for actions
related to rule of law, security and migration amounted to over EUR 145 million.
44

By directly linking migration and security to a previously agreed upon counter-terrorism action
plan, the 2019 report on EU Enlargement Policy makes strikingly clear how the War on Terror
shapes the EU’s policies and its response to the migrant/refugee crisis. The migrants in question
here are preemptively presumed to be terrorists seeking to infiltrate Europe, and as the report
elucidates, the EU is more than willing to allocate exorbitant sums of money to the mitigation of
migrant flows across the continent.
The focus on liberal values that Eastern European states have purportedly failed to absorb
masks the reality that western European countries have long encouraged and enforced repressive
measures against migrants, from the construction of Spain’s border fences in Ceuta and Melilla
to the outsourcing of EU border enforcement to non-member states in Europe’s east, as well as
countries in North Africa and west Asia, through the European Neighborhood Policy.
45
The
surge in far-right populism in Eastern Europe must be understood as part and parcel of a
neocolonial dynamic between western Europe and post-socialist states recently admitted or still

44
Ibid., 43-44. Emphasis mine.
45
For a further contextualization of the EU’s outsourcing of border management, see: Tyler Morgenstern,
Krista Lynes and Ian Alan Paul, “Introduction: In and Against Crisis” in Moving Images: Mediating
Migration as Crisis, eds. Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern and Ian Alan Paul, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2020)

100
seeking membership in the EU who are tasked with securing Europe’s borders.
46
This dynamic is
often overlooked in news reports and think pieces that allege there is a “renewed divide”
between western and Eastern Europe and reproduce Cold War stereotypes in the process. It is in
this sense that the Balkan Route comes to mediate between the Cold War and War on Terror, as
post-socialist states take on the task of securitization in an attempt to “Europeanize” and
“modernize” themselves, while simultaneously coming under fire from western observers for a
failure to uphold European values. With this in mind, rather than the outright rejection of
mimicry Krastev and Holmes identify, I argue that Eastern Europe’s mimicry of the west has
merely shifted in form. The emergence of securitization and crisis management as two of the
leading enterprises in what Naomi Klein terms our current era of “disaster capitalism”
47
—an era
that begins under the Cold War and is amplified through the War on Terror—has led to a new
form of mimicry. This mimicry is visible through an identification with, and over-performance
of, the counter-terror security state and far-right populist politics.
I turn now to an analysis of Hungary’s media centralization and the state’s collaboration
with international far-right figures in order to demonstrate how changes in the country’s media
ecology have fomented Hungary’s performance of the counter-terror security state and served as

46
Maurice Stierl convincingly states that arguments about “EUropean” and “un-EUropean” ways of
governing migration contain a false dichotomy that unfairly paints southern and Eastern European nations
as less humane than their western counterparts while ignoring the violence of the European Union at
large. Stierl claims that the deep entanglements across national and supranational forms of migration
governance have given form to a distinct “EUropean border regime.” However, these entanglements are
elided through the displacement of the EU’s border violence to peripheral EU member states or third
countries, where it is discursively renationalized. By rearticulating border violence as a national issue, the
myth of the European Union as a “peaceful, postnational, and transborder polity” is upheld and the
illusion of national sovereignty is maintained, even as the EU exerts significant influence on national
migration and border policies. If we consider, alongside this, the economic dependencies in post-socialist
Europe, and the significant financial assistance the EU offers these states in exchange for securing
Europe’s borders, we can begin to see how border securitization functions through a neocolonial dynamic.
Maurice Stierl, “Reimagining EUrope through the Governance of Migration,” International Political
Sociology, vol. 13, no.3, 2020, 252-269.
47
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Picador, 2008.

101
a testing ground for far-right, populist media tactics that may be reproduced elsewhere. Crucially,
Hungary’s public performance of its sovereignty and securitization has relied heavily on the
state’s successful centralization of control over print and broadcast media—a process that, in
addition to enriching businessmen loyal to Orbán, functions to display the state’s command over
the visual field—as well as market research practices that reinforce the government’s line of
thinking. And yet, while the Hungarian state has, in effect, renationalized the majority of its
media corporations and infrastructures under the auspices of supporting “national
entrepreneurs,”
48
its media strategies emerge through considerable and sometimes surprising
processes of collaboration with transnational political consultants. Understanding these networks
of collaboration is vital to making sense of Hungary’s political policies and media strategies (the
ways in which it “sees” crises) as well as its mediation of the Balkan Route as a weaponized
passageway.

Centralizing Command over Visuality
In 2010, Viktor Orbán was re-elected as Hungary’s Prime Minister eight years after his
first term in office. That same year, Orbán’s Fidesz party successfully won a two-thirds majority
in Parliament. Parliamentary majority provided Orbán with the optimal conditions for beginning
his incremental and systematic overhaul of Hungary’s constitution and its legal, economic, and
social policies. These changes ensure that Orbán and Fidesz will be difficult to remove from
power; they also create the foundations necessary for the right-wing “cultural counter-
revolution” Orbán claims Europe needs.
49
Much has been written over the past decade about

48
Gábor Polyák, “Media in Hungary: Three Pillars of a Illiberal Democracy,” Public Service
Broadcasting and Media Systems in Troubled European Democracies (eds. Eva Połońska and Charlie
Beckett), Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 279-303.
49
Henry Foy and Neil Buckley, “Orbán and Kaczynski Vow ‘Cultural Counter-Revolution’ to Reform

102
Hungary’s democratic backsliding, corrupt institutions, and cozy relationship with other
autocratic states (namely Russia and China). In recent years, scholars have turned their attention
to Hungary’s media policies and state propaganda as well; however, much of this work focuses
on Hungary as a contained, national example of state media capture, treating it as both a
European anomaly and evidence of the illiberal tendencies of post-socialist European states.
Such analyses elide the transnational influences and advisors that have helped mold Hungary’s
media strategies. In order to understand how Hungary utilizes media to perform the ideal
counter-terror security state—a performance, I argue, of mimicry—we must first examine the
processes of media consolidation and centralization that have provided the foundations for the
government’s demonstration of its command over the visual field (and by extension, of
Hungary’s territorial and demographic borders) and that have helped to shape Hungary’s image
as a haven for the international far-right.
After reclaiming his seat as Prime Minister, Orbán and the Fidesz controlled Parliament
passed new media laws in the country,
50
some of which were ostensibly designed to support
Hungarian investors and entrepreneurs in the media sector over foreign business interests. These
amendments to media laws have effectively stifled media diversity in Hungary and consolidated
Orbán’s control over print, broadcast, and web-based journalism as well as domestic advertising
companies, while maintaining a façade of independent media production. In 2010, the
government established the Media Council as an independent body within the National Media
and Infocommunications Authority. The official role of the Media Council is to oversee and

EU,” Financial Times, September 7
th
, 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/e825f7f4-74a3-11e6-bf48-
b372cdb1043a
50
The laws were adopted through “Act CLXXXV of 2010 on Media Services and Mass Communication,”
hereafter referred to as the Media Act, and “Act CIV of 2010 on the Freedom of the Press and the
Fundamental Rules of Media Content. See: Mérték Media Monitor, “Centralised Media System: Soft
Censorship 2018,” Mérték Booklets, Budapest: Mérték Media Monitor Nonprofit Ltd., 2019.

103
approve mergers and acquisitions, the trading of terrestrial frequencies, and the application of
Hungary’s media laws in order to curtail media concentration. In short, the Media Council’s
decisions directly impact market entry and expansion within the country.
51
The purpose of the
Media Council is, in theory, to help ensure fair competition in concert with the Hungarian
Competition Authority. However, its structure ensures Orbán and Fidesz can exert undue
influence on the application of media laws.
The chair of the Media Council is directly appointed by the Prime Minister and
confirmed by the President. The Council consists of five members nominated by Fidesz for nine-
year terms, and an additional four members appointed by an ad hoc committee comprised of MPs
from across the various parties in Parliament. However, “the parliamentary parties’ respective
share of MPs in the committee reflects [the ratio] of their representation in Parliament,” giving
Fidesz a higher number of representatives on the committee. Technically, a unanimous vote is
required to appoint the four Media Council members chosen by the ad hoc committee; however,
in the event a unanimous vote cannot be reached, a simple two-thirds majority seals a candidate’s
nomination.
52
As a result, Fidesz is ensured an oversized influence on the Council as long as the
party maintains its Parliamentary majority.
By gerrymandering the Media Council, Orbán has been able to successfully use the
Council to apply Hungary’s media laws in his favor and to reshape the country’s media
landscape in the process. The Council has denied broadcasting license renewals to radio stations
critical of the government, approved mergers and acquisitions that enriched Orbán’s close friends
and allies, and denied acquisition requests that would have left critical newspapers, magazines,

51
Polyak.
52
Ibid., 7.

104
and websites financially viable.
53
Hungary’s media laws strictly regulate the distribution of
political campaign materials, yet the enforcement of these regulations is arbitrary and ultimately
functions to limit the ability of opposition parties to campaign effectively against Fidesz.
According to the 2010 Media Act, political advertisements, defined as any program that
“promotes or advocates support […] for the government” or political parties may only air on
television or the radio during election periods or ahead of an officially approved referendum.
54

However, the Media Act makes exceptions for public service advertisements, defined as “any
communication or message with a public purpose, which does not qualify as a political
advertisement, is not for profit and does not serve advertising purposes […] and which aims to
influence the viewer or the listener of the media service in order to achieve the goal of public
interest” and public service announcements, defined as “any announcement released without
consideration […] which provides specific information of public interest for the purpose of
attracting the attention of the viewers or the audience, and does not qualify as political
advertisement.”
55
Because these definitions remain relatively vague, Orbán—acting as the
representative of the whole of government—has been able to keep Fidesz propaganda in near-
constant circulation under the auspices of acting in the public’s interest.
For example, Mérték Media Monitor, an independent media watchdog, filed multiple
complaints to the Media Council about the government’s television advertisements during non-
election periods, arguing that they violated Hungary’s media regulations. The advertisements
carried slogans such as “The Hungarian Reforms Are Working!” and “We Told Brussels: 98%

53
Polyak, Mertek. See also: Yigal Schleifer, “Hungary at the Turning Point,” Slate, October 3rd, 2014.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/10/viktor-orbans-authoritarian-rule-the-hungarian-prime-
minister-is-destroying-his-countrys-democracy.html
54
Polyak, 21.
55
Mérték Media Monitor, 43-44.

105
NO! to the forced resettlement [of refugees].” The Council’s response to Mérték was
illuminating. To date, it has simply ignored Mérték’s complaint about the “We Told Brussels:
98% NO! to forced resettlement” campaign, which the government circulated after its 2016 non-
binding referendum vote on refugee resettlement was invalidated due to poor voter turnout. As
for Mérték’s complaint about the “Hungarian Reforms are Working!” campaign, the Council
determined that the complaint was illegitimate because the government’s messaging material did
not use the orange color scheme associated with the Fidesz party and its “intelligible, simple and
objective” language did not correspond to the “formal linguistic methods of propaganda.”
Therefore, the Council argued that the advertisements constituted a public service announcement
that “highlight[ed] tangible economic accomplishments” of the government and “alert[ed]
affected social groups [to] possibilities that might be available to them.”
56

Figure 2: Image from the Hungarian government’ s 2016 campaign, “The Hungarian Reforms
are Working!” The advertisement reads, “We do not want illegal immigration!”

56
Ibid., 45-46.

106

Figure 3: Image from the Hungarian government’ s 2016 campaign, “The Hungarian Reforms
are Working!” The advertisement reads, “Economic growth is higher here than in the EU!”

A closer inspection of advertisements from the government’s “The Hungarian Reforms
are Working!” campaign reveals just how generous the Council’s interpretation of a public
service announcement is. While some of the campaign advertisements make claims such as “The
minimum wage will grow again next year!” and “My children will be able to eat for free in
kindergarten!,”
57
they provide no specific information about the rate of wage growth or
eligibility conditions for the government’s economic programs. In other advertisements, like the
ones pictured above, the claim that the government’s reforms are working is supported by
opinion statements such as “We do not want illegal immigration!” and the somewhat self-
contradictory announcement that “Economic growth is higher here than in the EU!”
58
In both of
these latter two advertisements, a white, presumably ethnic Hungarian
59
is pictured looking

57
For more images from “The Hungarian Reforms are Working!” campaign, see: Budapest Beacon Staff,
“‘Hungarian reforms are working’ campaign enriched pro-government media,” The Budapest Beacon,
February 5
th
, 2016. https://budapestbeacon.com/hungarian-reforms-are-working-campaign-enriched-pro-
government-media/
58
Considering Hungary is a member of the European Union, it is unclear to me what this advertisement
means by “higher here than in the EU,” though I assume the government is using a per capita ratio to
compare growth in Hungary to growth in the EU at large. In any case, the advertisement has the effect of
drawing a distinction between Hungary and the EU, which Orbán has framed as an exterior threat to the
country for over five years now.
59
I write “presumably ethnic Hungarian” here because the Hungarian government has licensed stock
photographs featuring international models for some of its campaigns in the past. Most notably, it used

107
confident and happy, suggesting the public should be optimistic about Hungary’s future.
Neither of these statements provides tangible information that the public can act upon.
Instead, they encourage the public to engage in acts of imagination. Viewers of these campaign
materials are asked to reimagine Hungary as a place of prosperity, free from unwanted migrants
and refugees, where (heteronormative, nuclear) families are prioritized, and borders are kept
secure. They are asked to trust in Orbán’s leadership and to buy into the idea that life is better in
Hungary than elsewhere in Europe—an idea the government actively pushes not only to
strengthen support for Orbán but also in the hopes of attenuating the significant number of
Hungarians emigrating out of the country.
60
These invitations not only work to help cohere a far-
right public in support of Fidesz policies, they are also part and parcel of Hungary’s performance
of the counter-terror security state which seeks to manage public affect by alternately invoking
imminent future threats to the nation and demonstrating the state’s ability to preempt and
neutralize these threats. Because the “Hungarian Reforms are Working!” campaign ran during
the same time period as the government’s anti-migrant campaigns advertising the referendum on
refugee resettlement—a campaign I discuss in detail in chapter three—it must be considered as

images from the stock photo set associated with the viral “Distracted Boyfriend” meme to promote its
Family Protection Action Plan in 2019. Nevertheless, the models featured in government campaigns are
always white and I have yet to see a campaign that uses non-white Hungarian citizens as part of its
messaging. For more on the Hungarian government’s use of the “Distracted Boyfriend” stock images, see:
Eszter Zimanyi, “Family b/orders: Hungary’s Campaign for the ‘Family Protection Action Plan,’”
Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (2020): 305-309
60
Emigration and low birth rates remain a considerable concern for the Hungarian government. Hungary
has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, and the OECD’s International Migration Outlook reports that
“emigration of Hungarians to OECD countries increased by 2.1%, to 87,000” in 2019. See: OECD,
International Migration Outlook 2019, OECD Publishing, Paris, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1787/c3e35eec-
en

See also: Leah Green, Ekaterina Ochagavia, Noémi Varga, Katie Lamborn and Charlie Phillips, “Pressure
to procreate: Inside Hungary’s baby drive—video,” The Guardian, February 23
rd
, 2021,
https://www.theguardian.com/news/video/2021/feb/23/pressure-to-procreate-inside-hungarys-baby-drive-
video

108
part of the Hungarian state’s visual production of the migrant crisis along the Balkan Route and
Orbán’s many invocations of the migrant crisis as an existential threat to the nation. The
campaign emphasizing the “success” of the government’s policy reforms bolsters Hungary’s
image as a counter-terror security state by evidencing Hungary’s ability to avert the undesirable
future represented by the arrival of migrants and refugees in other European countries.
With new laws and a friendly Media Council in place to provide legal legitimacy to
Orbán’s propaganda campaigns and market manipulations, the Prime Minister and his party
began systematically consolidating government control over Hungary’s media ecology. The 2010
Media Act established Hungary’s public service media organization, MTV A (Media Service
Support and Asset Management Fund), to both produce and support the production of public
service broadcasting material, as well as maintain ownership over public service media assets.
Though MTV A’s television broadcasts rank low in public surveys about preferred news sources,
its hourly news updates find wide distribution through commercial partnerships. The
organization produces news packages and distributes them to commercial radio stations in
Hungary at a low price, filling in for many local radio stations that cannot afford to produce their
own news segments. These partnerships ensure that government propaganda circulates across
multiple public and commercial platforms.
61

In the private sector, for most of the 2010s, media consolidation happened through
Orbán’s close friends and allies strategically investing in media companies and buying up
newspapers, radio stations, TV channels, advertising companies, and online publications. By
2018, domestic media ownership was concentrated in the hands of sixteen private investors, with
billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros holding the majority of companies. However, in September of 2018,

61
Mérték, 54-55.

109
Hungary’s media oligarchs surprised many observers by donating their private ownership of a
combined 476 media outlets to a newly created non-profit organization named Central European
Press and Media Foundation (CEPMF). According to Hungarian independent media watchdog
Átlátszó, the initial donation of media outlets to CEPMF gave the organization, which is headed
by five pro-Fidesz lawyers and journalists, control over “112 newspapers, online media outlets,
outdoor advertising companies, radio and TV stations,” including all local and regional
newspapers.
62
These local and regional papers are importantly the most accessible print news
sources for Hungarians living in small municipalities and rural areas and are widely consumed
across the country.
63
The official aim of CEPMF is “to promote those activities of the print,
radio, TV , and online sections of the Hungarian mass media which serve to build values and
strengthen Hungarian national consciousness.”
64
In a statement published on CEPMF’s website,
Chairman of the Board Miklós Szánthó further argues that the goals of CEPMF are
to counteract fake news and disinformation from progressive sources; to take action against
political correctness, and to strengthen the national-civic side, so that truly conservative-
Christian thinking can be present in public discourse with the same force as its left-liberal
counterpart. The media outlets owned by the Foundation will serve this epoch-building goal in
the interests of Hungary and in the service of the public—and with united forces [sic].
65

Although this extreme concentration of media outlets should have violated Hungary’s market
competition laws, in December of 2018, the government declared CEPMF to be of “national
strategic importance” and exempted the organization from media competition regulations.
66

62
Atilla Bátorfy, “Data visualization: this is what the pro-government new media looks like,” Átlátszó, 30
June 2019. https://english.atlatszo.hu/2019/06/30/data-visualization-this-is-what-the-pro-government-
news-media-looks-like. Accessed 20 September 2019.
63
Mérték Media Monitor, 52-53.
64
“The Foundation’s aims by its Articles of Association,” Central European Press and Media
Foundation, accessed December 10
th
, 2020. https://cepmf.hu/#sectionGoals
65
Miklós Szánthó, “With United Forces: On the mission and goals of the Central European Press and
Media Foundation,” Central European Press and Media Foundation, February 6
th
, 2019.
https://cepmf.hu/#sectionAnnouncement
66
Pál Dániel Rényi, “Orbán kivonta a szabályok alól a kormányzati médiaalapítványt, nem lesz

110
(In)direct media centralization by the state, achieved through alliances with government-
friendly media oligarchs, is central to Fidesz’s political strategy. Independent news outlets are
starved of advertising revenue and pressured to close down or sell to government allies, while
Fidesz exerts increasing influence over information flows within the country.
67
Hungarian
journalists working for public broadcaster MTV A report receiving direct instructions from the
prime minister’s offices on what stories to report.
68
The popular independent newspaper
Népszabadság was abruptly shut down in 2016,
69
and in 2020, the entire staff of the top
independent news website, Index, resigned in protest when the chairman of the Foundation for
Hungarian Progress, which owns Index, dismissed the publication’s editor-in-chief.
70
The
Internet remains uncensored in Hungary, but for those who lack proficiency in other languages
and/or do not have regular access to the Internet there are few alternative news sources available.
While government-friendly publications are subsidized by generous advertising contracts,

versenyjogi vizsgálat [Orban exempted the government media foundation from regulations, it will not be
subject to competition laws],” 444, December 5th, 2018. https://444.hu/2018/12/05/orban-
nemzetstrategiai-jelentoseguve-minositette-a-kormanyzati-mediaalapitvanyt-nem-lesz-versenyjogi-
vizsgalat. Accessed 18 September 2019.
67
Patrick Kingsley, “Orbán and His Allies Cement Control of Hungary’s News Media,” The New York
Times, November 29th, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/world/europe/hungary-orban-
media.html. Accessed 22 September 2019.
68
Zselyke Csaky, “Hungary and Serbia have found new ways to smother the media,” The Washington
Post, June 5th, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/05/hungary-serbia-have-found-
new-ways-smother-media/
69
Helen Bienvenu, “Newspaper Closes in Hungary, and Hungarians See Government’s Hand,” New York
Times, October 11
th
, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/world/europe/hungary-newspaper-
nepszabadsag.html
70
In 2020, Index’s editor-in-chief, Szabolcs Dull, was dismissed by László Bodolai, chairman of the
Foundation for Hungarian Progress which owns Index.hu Inc. As a result, the entire 70 person staff of
Index resigned in protest and have since launched a new, crowd-funded publication for investigative
journalism, Telex. See: Shaun Walker, “Hungarian journalists resign en masse after complaints of
political interference,” The Guardian, July 24
th
, 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/24/hungarian-journalists-resign-en-masse-after-claims-of-
political-interference
See also: Joanna Kakissis, “Hungarian Journalists Launch Independent News Site Amid Tightening
Government Control,” NPR, October 23
rd
, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/23/927015192/hungarian-
journalists-launch-independent-news-site-amid-tightening-government-co

111
independent journalism depends increasingly on reader donations to survive. Mérték Media
Monitor reports that 79.3% of the news and public affairs media sector is now directly or
indirectly controlled by the Hungarian government. Szánthó’s declaration that the CEPMF will
serve an “epoch-building goal,” along with the government’s classification of CEPMF as an
organization of national strategic importance, makes clear the Hungarian government’s intention
to use media for the purposes of cohering a far-right public loyal to Orbán and the Fidesz party.
The government’s legal and economic tactics of soft-censorship establish an ideal environment
for performing the counter-terror security state without inhibition. By controlling the majority of
news and public affairs media in the country, Orbán and Fidesz are able to demonstrate the
government’s command over the visual field and its authority to “see” on behalf of its citizens.
This “exclusive claim to be able to look,” what Nicholas Mirzoeff terms “visuality,” is a
necessary component of the counter-terror security state.
71
Visuality, or the ability to visualize
and shape history through the assemblage of information, images, and ideas, is a “complex” that
imbues the visualizer with the authority to decide what can be seen, known, or ignored in pursuit
of a greater vision for society. It is an inherently violent process that arises out of strategies of
warfare in which the commander’s ability to visualize the battlefield determines the likelihood of
an army’s success against its enemies. Visuality functions by classifying, segregating, and
aestheticizing different groups of people in order to maintain epistemic control over narrative
discourses as well as material control over the state’s subjects, objects, and territories.
72

Domestically, the recentralization of media outlets ensures that the Hungarian government’s
visuality dominates the public sphere. It is meant to demonstrate that the state is in full command

71
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke University Press,
2011, 2.
72
Ibid., 1-35.

112
of shaping Hungary’s past, present, and future. To supranational bodies like the European Union,
this visuality signals Hungary’s national sovereignty (a necessary element of the proper
European state) and its control over Hungary’s, and Europe’s, borders—a requirement of the
ideal counter-terror security state and thus of admission to “Europe.” To migrants, refugees,
Roma and other targeted minority groups like the unhoused and LGBT+ residents, as well as
civil society groups and NGOs that advocate on behalf of such groups, the public display of
visuality is meant to assert the idea that there is no way to see outside of the state’s vision,
nowhere to hide or escape from the state’s watchful eye. Finally, to people around the world
aligned with far-right ideologies, Orbán’s command of visuality and aggressive anti-migrant and
anti-liberal statements present Hungary as a pristine, utopic land where white, Christian
civilization is protected from multicultural contamination.

A New Internationalism: How Hungary Became a Testing Ground for Media Strategies of
the Global Far-Right
Hungary’s recentralized media landscape and practices of soft censorship provide the
necessary backbone for putting visuality on display. As the CEPMF’s website attests, this
visuality aims to revitalize a nationalist, “conservative-Christian” Hungarian population in
opposition to the allegedly hedonistic and oppressively “politically correct” multicultural society
liberals seek to advance. To this end, government media campaigns and pro-government news
reports propagate a nativist vision of Hungary that emphasizes the country’s right to national
sovereignty. They frequently frame “Brussels bureaucrats” as part of a conspiratorial, global
liberal elite led by one of the far-right’s favorite boogeymen: Hungarian-American financier and

113
philanthropist George Soros.
73
Hungarian propaganda suggests this elite group of liberal
globalists plans to overrun Europe with Muslim migrants and destroy not only Hungary but
western civilization at large. Within this imagined narrative, it is only by securing Hungary’s
borders, strengthening national consciousness, and producing more Hungarian children
74
that
such a dystopian future can be avoided, and it is only Orbán who is willing to ensure Hungary
avoids this unwanted future by protecting the country from external threats and standing up to
EU politicians in Hungary’s best interests.
In response to the alleged liberal internationalist conspirators seeking to undermine
Hungary’s national sovereignty and traditional culture, Fidesz has promoted Hungarian national
consciousness building—achieved through media production and education—as the solution to

73
Hungary made international headlines for its extensive “Stop Soros” policies and accompanying media
campaigns, which mobilized anti-Semitic tropes and suggested Soros is behind a global conspiracy to
flood Europe with Muslim migrants. The “Stop Soros” law, passed in 2018, criminalizes any individual
or group found to be facilitating “illegal immigration” and restricts the ability of NGOs to help with
asylum cases; it also makes it more difficult to claim asylum in Hungary. Any asylum seeker who has
passed through a “safe third country” prior to arriving at Hungary’s borders is considered ineligible for
asylum. In addition, the Hungarian Parliament passed a constitutional amendment affirming that no “alien
population” may be settled in Hungary as a rebuke to proposed EU refugee resettlement quotas for
member states. The government’s years-long organized attack on Soros and his Open Society Foundation
led to the effective expulsion of Central European University from the country in 2019. The Open Society
Foundation also relocated its headquarters from Budapest to Berlin due to government hostility.
See: Rachel Donadio, “How Hungary Ran George Soros Out of Town,” The Atlantic, May 15
th
, 2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/orban-european-union-soros/560480/

See also: Marton Dunai, “Hungary approves ‘STOP Soros’ law, defying EU, rights groups,” Reuters,
June 20
th
, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-soros/hungary-approves-stop-soros-law-
defying-eu-rights-groups-idUSKBN1JG1VN
74
To this end, the Hungarian government launched the seven-point “Family Protection Action Plan” in
July of 2019. This plan, which financially incentivizes Hungarian women to birth more children, was
accompanied by extensive government sponsored media campaigning for “procreation over
immigration.” Fidesz has been actively championing itself as one of the few European countries tackling
its demographic decline through the protection, support, and growth of its national populace rather than
through the EU’s supposed “population replacement” programs, like refugee resettlement. The material
securitization of Hungary’s geographic borders is thereby embedded in its “family protection and
support” narrative, which mobilizes demographic concerns in order to reassert the primacy of
heteronormative nuclear families and traditional gender roles and to advance a far-right agenda. See: Edit
Inotai, “Hungary’s Family Plan Seeks to ‘Save the Nation,’” Balkan Investigative Reporting Network,
August 6
th
, 2019. https://balkaninsight.com/2019/08/06/hungarys-family-plan-seeks-to-save-the-nation.

114
this ideological and cultural threat.
75
Orbán has more than once insinuated that liberals
76
are
rebranded communists. Like many other conservatives invested in the narrative of an ongoing
“culture war,” Orbán suggests that liberal ideology is a type of “cultural Marxism” that has been

75
Orbán has increasingly cracked down on academic freedom in Hungary over the past few years. In
2018, Hungary banned the teaching of gender studies at Hungarian-accredited universities. Then, in 2019,
the Hungarian government restructured the independent Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), which
had until that point overseen 15 research centers in the country. All fifteen research centers were stripped
from the HAS and handed over to a newly formed state research organization, the Eötvös Loránd
Research Network (ELRN). Six of the ELRN’s twelve board members are appointed by the government’s
Ministry of Technology and Innovation. The remaining six are nominated by the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences. The President of the Network is jointly nominated by the Ministry and the HAS but must be
approved by the Prime Minister. It is now the ELRN that oversees the budgets of the country’s research
centers, while a second new governmental body, the National Scientific Policy Council, oversees “the
general directions of scientific research” which should be in the national interest. The government has
also interfered with K-12 education by mandating teachers use government approved textbooks which
emphasize a strong national identity and the dangers of migration.

For information on the banning of gender studies, see: Elizabeth Redden, “Hungary Officially Ends
Gender Studies Programs,” Inside Higher Ed, October 17
th
, 2018.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/10/17/hungary-officially-ends-gender-studies-programs

For information on changes to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, see: Zoltán Kovács, “Hungarian
Academy of Sciences Stripped of its Research Network,” Index, July 2
nd
, 2019.
https://index.hu/english/2019/07/02/hungarian_academy_of_sciences_research_network_taken_away_aca
demic_freedom_ministry_of_innovation_and_technology/

For information on changes to Hungary’s educational curriculum, see: Nick Thorpe, “Hungary’s new
patriotic education meets resistance,” BBC News, February 25
th
, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-51612549
76
Up until 2020, Orbán’s public comments tended to refer to liberálisok, a direct Hungarian translation of
“liberals.” Orbán began publicly referring to liberals as libernyákok in 2020, a pejorative term that can be
roughly approximated to the English “libtards,” but which carries multiple connotations, including,
according to some critics, anti-Semitic and homophobic undertones. The term has since been picked up
and used widely by pro-government news media. An online Hungarian slag dictionary at one point
defined libernyák as “a 21
st
-century follower of the post-communist (neo-liberal, neo-Marxist) doctrines;
a former communist or someone educated in communist surroundings; a person who only seemingly
broke with Marxism; an ex-communist.” However, the word has since been removed from the dictionary
and replaced with libernyákság, defined more broadly as those with a “neoliberal, neo-Marxist, new left
attitude.”
See: Eva S. Balogh, “Viktor Orbán and His Enemies, the ‘Libernyákok,’” Hungarian Spectrum, July 25
th
,
2020. https://hungarianspectrum.org/2020/07/25/viktor-orban-and-his-enemies-the-libernyakok/

See Also: Sándor Czinkóczi, “Orbán Viktor felébredt, és libernyáknak nevezte a brüsszeli vitapartnereit,”
[Viktor Orbán woke up and called his Brussels debate partners ‘libernyáks’] 444, July 24
th
, 2020.
https://444.hu/2020/07/24/orban-viktor-felebredt-es-libernyaknak-nevezte-a-brusszeli-vitapartnereit

115
externally imposed on the country by outside agitators.
77
In statements such as these, Orbán
collapses contemporary liberal and leftist politics into one easily dismissible and ostensibly
discredited ideology (communism), while contrasting socially progressive values
78
with the
“Christian culture [Hungary] has inherited.”
79
These comparisons function to cast Hungary’s
socialist past as an aberration, one that was also externally imposed on the country by an
imperial Soviet Union, while affirming Hungary’s “authentic” Christian heritage and, thereby,
Hungary’s Europeanness. Although scholars are increasingly reevaluating Russia’s expansionism
via the Soviet Union through the lens of imperialism and colonialism,
80
Orbán’s fervent and
reductive anti-communism is better understood as a reflection of broader Eastern European
anxieties about the region’s European belonging than as a genuine attempt to nuance Hungary’s
history. By disavowing Hungary’s socialist period and emphasizing Christian heritage as an
inseparable part of Hungarian identity, Orbán locates the country firmly in the imagined
geography denoted by “western civilization” and asserts Hungary’s vital role in protecting the
borders of “Christian Europe.”

77
For an illuminating example of this, see “Europe Uncensored,” a virtual “debate” about the future of
Europe with Orbán and fellow far-right leaders Janez Janša, Prime Minister of Slovenia, and Aleksander
Vučić, President of Serbia. Notably, “Europe Uncensored” was moderated by the French far-right
politician and philosopher François-Xavier Bellamy. The event was held on July 8
th
, 2020 and the
recording can still be accessed online. François-Xavier Bellamy, Janez Janša, Viktor Orbán, and
Aleksander Vučić, “Europe Uncensored: European Leaders on the Future of Europe,” July 8
th
, 2020,
virtual event, MPEG-4, 1:16:19, https://europeuncensored.com/
78
In another illuminating example of this, after the Hungarian government banned the teaching of gender
studies, Bence Rétvári, the undersecretary to the Minister of Human Resources Zoltán Balog, explained
this decision by stating that “Gender Studies—similar to Marxism-Leninism—can be called an ideology
rather than a science, and therefore it is doubtful that it attains the scientific level expected” at
universities. See: Eva S. Balogh, “The Orbán Regime Feels Threatened by Gender Studies,” Hungarian
Spectrum, August 10
th
, 2018. https://hungarianspectrum.org/2018/08/10/the-orban-regime-feels-
threatened-by-gender-studies/
79
Bellamy et al, “Europe Uncensored.”
80
See for example: Romina Istratii, Márton Demeter, and Zoltán Ginelli, The Return of the Colonial:
Understanding the Role of Eastern Europe in Global Colonisation Debates and Decolonial Struggles – A
Summary and Future Roadmap, London: SOAS University, 2020.
https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/34222/1/Workshop%20Summary%20and%20Roadmap_17.11.2020.pdf

116
According to Liz Fekete, Europe’s extreme right and center political wings have
converged around four key interests in the past three decades: the securitization of asylum and
immigration policies, nativist protections for social services, arguments against multiculturalism,
and crime and punishment.
81
These convergences have paved the way for a revitalization of Cold
War narratives, which Fekete identifies in anti-totalitarian frameworks that group communism,
fascism, and Islamism together under the category of “evil ideologies.”
82
Arun Kundnani argues
that conservatives and liberals have knowingly embraced Cold War frameworks in the post-9/11
era and used them to prop up a “discourse of ideological warfare.”
83
Orbán’s relationships with
the global far-right evidence how these converging interests have paved the way for a new
internationalism in Eastern Europe, one that disavows the region’s history of socialist
internationalism with the “Third World” during the Cold War. This new internationalism aims to
situate “Central Europe”—a term Orbán often uses as another distancing mechanism from
“Eastern Europe” and its connotations of a periphery—in the imagined community of Europe
proper by building alliances with far-right parties and public figures across the globe, and by
portraying countries like Hungary as model conservative states, recognizable through their
emphasis on security, traditional Christian values, and a strong national (code for white) identity.
For international observers, Hungary is the prototype of the “illiberal state.” The country
increasingly attracts the attention of far-right speakers and communities around the globe. White
nationalists from western Europe and North America have been steadily moving to Hungary’s
capital city of Budapest over the past decade, forming an ex-pat community of identitarians. The
city is now home to Arktos Media, a publishing house known for being the “preeminent

81
Fekete, 31-34.
82
Fekete, 64.
83
Kundnani in Fekete, 64.

117
publisher of the alt-right.”
84
The company translates canonical far-right texts into English and
was the first publisher to distribute full-length English translations of Russian philosopher
Alexander Dugin’s work (Dugin, for his part, is known as “the intellectual guru of Putinism” and
is a strident ethnonationalist).
85
Arktos is owned by Daniel Friberg, a Swedish businessman with
known ties to Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Friberg and Arktos’s American editor-in-chief,
John B. Morgan, both relocated with the company to Budapest in 2014 and quickly integrated
themselves in Hungary’s political scene.
86
Other far-right figures have followed. Michael
Polignano, the co-founder of Counter-Currents—which the Southern Poverty Law Center
describes as “the white nationalist publishing house [at the] epicenter of ‘academic’ white
nationalism”—moved to Budapest in 2016.
87
Nick Griffin, the far-right former leader of the
British National Party who has ties to the extremist group Knights Templar International, has
also spent extensive time in Budapest. Griffin publicly announced that he planned to
permanently relocate to Hungary in 2017; however, the Hungarian government ultimately
flagged Griffin as a “national security threat” and ordered his deportation.
88

The growing number of far-right, ethnonationalist immigrants to Hungary, whom Orbán
unironically refers to as “refugees” from liberal countries,
89
is of little surprise considering the

84
Carol Schaeffer, “How Hungary Became a Haven for the Alt-Right,” The Atlantic, May 28
th
, 2017.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/how-hungary-became-a-haven-for-the-alt-
right/527178/
85
Ibid.
86
Friberg developed relationships with leading members of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, which was
for many years known for openly anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, and homophobic rhetoric. In recent years,
Jobbik has sought to rebrand itself as more family friendly. Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, War For Eternity:
Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: Dey Street Books, 2020).
87
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Polignano as “a racist geneticist and neo-Nazi
afficionado.” See: “Extremist Files: Greg Johnson,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed December
21
st
, 2020. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/greg-johnson
88
Christian Keszthely, “Ex-BNP Extremist expelled from Hungary,” Budapest Business Journal, May
26
th
, 2017. https://bbj.hu/budapest/culture/history/ex-bnp-extremist-expelled-from-hungary
89
Euronews Staff, “Hungarian PM: we welcome refugees fleeing Germany, France and Italy,” Euronews,
February 11
th
, 2017. https://www.euronews.com/2017/02/11/hungarian-pm-we-welcome-refugees-

118
Hungarian government actively courts attention from conservative public figures. In recent
years, Hungary has invited conservative intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson, Chris DeMuth,
Milo Yiannopolis, and Yoram Hazony to speak at conferences, and offered in-residence
fellowships to conservative writers such as John O’Sullivan and Rod Dreher.
90
Likewise, in
2017, Budapest hosted the annual World Congress of Families conference, where Orbán
provided the opening keynote. The World Congress of Families (WCF) is a global network of
ultra-conservatives that aims to strengthen the influence of religious institutions while
advocating against abortion, sex education, and same-sex marriage. It is considered a hate group
by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
91
Open Democracy reports that Fidesz officials have
consistently attended and given speeches at international conferences organized by WCF over
the years, affirming Hungary’s deep investment in cultivating a new internationalism with the
global far-right.
92

Although Orbán publicly condemns the supposed international interference of the left in
national politics, he has in fact formulated his own media and policy strategies through extensive
international collaboration with far-right figures, making visible an influential, transnational
network of hardline conservatives in the process. Understanding how Hungary’s relationship
with international conservative and far-right figures has developed over Orbán’s reign is
necessary in order to complicate simplistic narratives that figure Hungary’s, and Eastern

fleeing-germany-france-and-italy#vuukle-comments-357612
90
Zach Beauchamp, “The American right’s favorite strongman,” Vox, August 10
th
, 2020.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/21/21256324/viktor-orban-hungary-american-conservatives
91
Robert Tait, “Hungary’s prime minister welcomes ‘anti-LGBT hate group,’” The Guardian, May 26
th
,
2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/26/hungary-lgbt-world-congress-families-viktor-
orban
92
Nandini Archer and Claire Provost, “Revealed: Dozens of European politicians linked to US ‘incubator
for extremism,’” Open Democracy, March 27
th
, 2019. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-
dozens-of-european-politicians-linked-to-us-incubator-for-extremism/

119
Europe’s, democratic backsliding as fundamentally “un-European.” Just as Hungary’s
democratic backsliding cannot be easily blamed on the country’s socialist past, its rise in
international visibility as an example of “illiberal democracy” has not happened in a vacuum.
Orbán’s elevation in global news media as a “model” for far-right leaders elsewhere
93
risks
ignoring how his political strategies have long been shaped through dialogic relationships with
likeminded political actors in other nations, including in North America and western Europe.
Orbán has relied on key advisors and hired consultants to craft his policy and propaganda
tactics since as early as 2002, when he lost his first re-election campaign for Prime Minister.
94

His longtime unofficial chief strategic advisor, Árpád Habony, is frequently credited as one of
the primary architects behind Orbán’s most successful media campaigns. Habony, a Hungarian
businessman with multiple media investments, is an elusive figure who avoids the spotlight and
is rarely photographed. He is kept off the government’s payroll and does not hold an official
government position. Though government spokesmen refuse to confirm his relationship to

93
These sentiments are visible in headlines such as “American Orbánism: The Path to Autocracy” in The
Atlantic and “As west fears the rise of autocrats, Hungary shows what’s possible” in The New York Times.
In a 2019 interview with the pro-government Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, well-known
American conservative political theorist Patrick Deenan stated that in American conservative intellectual
circles, Hungary is seen as a model for how to pursue an anti-globalist, national-conservative state. His
statement was later picked up and recirculated in American news media.
See: Patrick Deenan interviewed by Imre Csekő, “Új arisztokráciát alkot a liberális elit [The liberal elite
is creating a new aristocracy],” Magyar Nemzet, November 19
th
, 2019.
https://magyarnemzet.hu/belfold/uj-arisztokraciat-alkot-a-liberalis-elit-7502915/

See also: Ben Rhodes, “American Orbánism: The Path to Autocracy,” The Atlantic, June 15
th
, 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/american-orbanism/612658/

Patrick Kinglsey, “As west fears the rise of autocrats, Hungary shows what’s possible,” The New York
Times, February 10
th
, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/world/europe/hungary-orban-
democracy-far-right.html

Beauchamp, “The American right’s favorite strongman.”
94
Atilla Körömi, “Polgári társadalom vagy Kádár rendszer [Civil society or Kádár regime],” Magyar
Nemzet, April 18
th
, 2017. https://magyarnemzet.hu/archivum/velemeny-archivum/polgari-tarsadalom-
vagy-kadar-rendszer-3891293/

120
Orbán, Habony’s integral role as one of Orbán’s key media strategists and close collaborators is
widely known.
Habony is frequently referred to in the international press as Hungary’s Steve Bannon
and has successfully helped cultivate Hungary’s relationship with international far-right figures
over the past decade.
95
In 2017, the independent Hungarian investigative news site 444 revealed
that Habony had quietly established a consulting firm with prominent U.S. Republican Party
consultant, Arthur J. Finkelstein.
96
The firm, called Danube Business Consulting, was
incorporated in 2015 in London, where Habony is now based. Since Finkelstein’s death in 2017,
Habony has been the sole owner. Though it does not make its client list public, Danube Business
Consulting reportedly earned over £130,000 (approximately $178,000) in 2016.
97
Habony has
reportedly offered consulting services to countries in the Balkans in recent years and has also
privately invested in Balkan media companies, a topic I will return to later.
98

Finkelstein, for his part, began advising Orbán in 2008 after playing a sizeable role in the
successes of a number of conservative leaders internationally, from the United States’ Ronald
Reagan and Richard Nixon to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Under the advisement of Finkelstein
and George Birnbaum (another American consultant and protegee of Finkelstein’s), Orbán
launched a new re-election campaign, one that would usher him back into power in 2010 and
cement Fidesz’s control over the country for the foreseeable future.
99
Finkelstein famously used a

95
J. Lester Feder and Rebeka Kulcsar, “Meet the Mystery Man Who is the Power Behind the Throne in
Hungary,” Buzzfeed News, April 4
th
, 2018. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/hungarys-
steve-bannon. See also: Csaba Tibor Tóth, “Ma ötvenéves Habony Árpád, a Fidesz szellemi agytrösztje
[Árpád Habony, Fidesz’s intellectual think tank, is fifty years old today],” Mérce, January 1st, 2018.
https://merce.hu/2018/01/01/ma-otveneves-habony-arpad-a-fidesz-szellemi-agytrosztje/
96
Pál Dániel Rényi, “Ez nem újságírás, ez politikai nehézfegyverzet [This is not journalism, it’s political
warfare],” 444, May 18
th
, 2017. https://tldr.444.hu/2017/05/18/fideszmedia
97
Feder and Kulcsar.
98
Rényi, “Ez nem újságírás, ez politikai nehézfegyverzet.”
99
Hanness Grasseger, “The Unbelievable Story of the Plot Against George Soros,” Buzzfeed News,

121
marketing strategy known as “microtargeting to identify specific groups of potential supporters
of a candidate regardless of their party affiliation.”
100
He is credited with turning “liberal” into a
“dirty word” and advocated for the relentless repetition of negative information to spur what he
called “rejectionist voting.”
101
Finkelstein believed voters are more likely to vote against a
candidate or policy that they dislike than for a candidate or policy that speaks to their needs, and
he also believed that it is easier to win an election by demoralizing voters than by motivating
them. His strategy was to polarize the public as much as possible and rely on third party
candidates to funnel votes away from his primary opposition.
In Hungary, Finkelstein advised Fidesz to conduct large-scale surveys of the public
through a variety of formats including telephone calls, mailed forms, and focus groups in order
to assess public opinion on various issues. This research helps determine the most effective
words and phrases to use in order to induce strong negative feelings from undecided voters about
topics such as migration, the European Union, and NGOs operating in Hungary.
102
In other
words, Fidesz uses Finkelstein’s traditional market research strategies in order to predictively
model public affect in Hungary. The results are deployed in an effort to construct a future public
open to (or at least apathetic to) keeping Orbán and his party in power and to supporting
increasingly authoritarian governance. Finkelstein’s campaign methods continue to influence
political actors across continents. Prior to his passing, Finkelstein was known to be a close
advisor to a number of right-wing politicians across Eastern and Central Europe, including in

January 20
th
, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-
finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu
100
Sam Roberts, “Arthur Finkelstein, Innovative, Influential Conservative Strategist, Dies at 72,” The
New York Times, August 19
th
, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/us/politics/arthur-finkelstein-
innovative-influential-conservative-strategist-dies-at-72.html
101
Ibid.
102
Rényi, “Ez nem újságírás, ez politikai nehézfegyverzet.”

122
Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, North Macedonia and
Albania.
103
His protegees, referred to as “Arthur’s kids,” occupy prominent positions in think
tanks, lobbying groups, and consultancy firms around the world.
104
Much like Milton Friedman’s
neoliberal “Chicago boys,” an entire school of thought based on Finkelstein’s polling and market
research tactics influences contemporary political consulting and lobbying.
Finkelstein’s influence on political research and campaign strategies, particularly for
conservative and far-right leaders, informs the ways in which international political consultancy
firms mobilize data mining in our contemporary, digital age. In gathering data on the affective
impact of different phrases, slogans, and topics of interest, we might conceive of Finkelstein’s
research methods as part of a broader practice of social code building. I conceive of social code
building as a set of practices that uses predictive models of public affect and behavior in order to
execute targeted media campaigns across physical and digital spaces of distribution with the aim
of bringing (in this case) right-wing nationalist publics into being. While Fidesz’s initial research
strategies reportedly relied on traditional survey methods, by 2017 the party expanded its
practices to include a “virtual army” tasked with influencing public opinion. The “army” consists
of teams of volunteers who actively share political memes and Fidesz propaganda on Facebook
and other social media platforms. According to 444, these unpaid volunteers are organized
through CAP, an internal messaging system that provides daily instructions on how many and
what types of posts to make under mandatory deadlines. V olunteers are monitored for their
progress and social media impact and encouraged to recruit more volunteers into the system.
105

103
Craig Shirley, “Not Just Good at National Politics, but the Best,” National Review, January 26
th
, 2017.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/01/arthur-finkelstein-republican-political-consultant-strategit-
conservative-libertarian/
See Also: Grasseger.
104
Shirley.
105
Haszanz, “A Fidesz egyik Facebook-katonája elmesélte, milyen virtuális hadsereget hozott létre a párt

123
The daily tasks mobilize public affect by animating a fantasy of direct connectivity between
everyday people and Orbán/Fidesz and cement political affiliations with Fidesz in the process.
As Nitin Govil and Anirban Kapil Baishya argue, “sociopolitical experience through
technological fantasies of virtual access, affective mobilization, and political action” shapes
contemporary “right-wing populist technoculture,” where digital media and right-wing populism
enjoy a constitutive relationship, rather than simply a contextual and coincidental one.
106
Fidesz’s
mixture of traditional and new media campaign tactics demonstrates how social code building
coheres, organizes, and mobilizes far-right publics that may otherwise remain dispersed and
disconnected. Importantly, these practices of assembling political constituencies are made all the
easier today thanks to the seemingly endless amounts of personal data available to third parties
through big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon and Google, and the
digital troll armies ready to exploit and further polarize social media users.
A number of right-wing politicians have reportedly relied on data mining social media
networks in the past five years to plan and execute digital campaigns. The infamous British
political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, co-founded by Steve Bannon, provides the most
prominent example of the logic of social code building at work in political campaigns.
Cambridge Analytica garnered international attention when a company whistleblower,
Christopher Wylie, confirmed Cambridge Analytica had secretly gathered personal data from
millions of Facebook users without consent and used that data to manipulate voting habits.
107

[One of Fidesz’s Facebook soldiers recounts what kind of virtual army the party has created],” 444,
January 30
th
, 2018. https://444.hu/2018/01/30/a-fidesz-egyik-facebook-katonaja-elmeselte-milyen-
virtualis-hadsereget-hozott-letre-a-part
106
Nitin Govil and Anirban Kapil Baishya, “The Bully in the Pulpit: Autocracy, Digital Social Media, and
Right-wing Populist Technoculture,” Communication, Culture and Critique, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2018, 69.
107
Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war
whistleblower,” The Guardian, March 18
th
, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-
war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

124
According to Wylie and a second employee, Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica used
harvested data to create psychological profiles of Facebook users and to identify “persuadable”
voters. These voters were then micro-targeted with the political advertisements deemed most
likely to generate online engagement and influence their behavior.
108
In 2018, Cambridge
Analytica executives admitted that the firm, along with its parent company Strategic
Communication Laboratories, had worked on more than two hundred elections across five
continents.
109
Two years later, in January of 2020, Kaiser released over 100,000 pages of
Cambridge Analytica’s internal documents that verified the firm’s role in prominent political
campaigns in sixty-eight different countries.
110

Public attention focused heavily on Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the United
Kingdom’s “Leave.EU” campaign, which ultimately led to the UK’s exit from the European
Union, as well as Donald J. Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign. However,
Cambridge Analytica has also been tied to the 2014 election of Narendra Modi in India, the 2016
election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, as well as to campaigns in multiple countries in
Eastern Europe.
111
In 2018, the British public news broadcaster Channel 4 organized a meeting
between Cambridge Analytica executives Alexander Nix and Mark Turnbull and an undercover
investigative journalist posing as a Sri Lankan man interested in hiring the consulting firm. Their
exchange, captured on film, is worth quoting at length. After Nix lists off some examples of how
Cambridge Analytica can help secretly undermine the man’s supposed political opponents, he

108
Amy Goodman, “Meet Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Releasing Troves of New
Files from Data Firm,” Democracy Now!, January 7
th
, 2020.
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/7/the_great_hack_cambridge_analytica
109
BBC Staff, “Cambridge Analytica: The data firm’s global influence,” BBC News, March 22
nd
, 2018.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43476762
110
Goodman.
111
BBC Staff, “Cambridge Analytica.”

125
states, “So often we set up, if we are working, then we can set up fake IDs and websites. We can
go in [to different countries] as students doing research projects attached to the university, we
can be tourists, there’s so many options we can look at.” Turnbull then adds, “We’ve just used a
different organization to run a very, very successful project in a Eastern European country where
they [the Cambridge Analytica consultants] did a really, no one even knew they were there. They
just drift, they were just ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out and produced really, really good
material” [sic].
112
Though Turnbull never reveals the Eastern European country in question,
Hungarian observers have speculated about whether it is in fact Hungary, where between 2017
and 2018 Orbán campaigned for reelection and ultimately won a third term in office, while
Fidesz once again captured a two-thirds Parliamentary majority.
113

Neither Cambridge Analytica nor the Hungarian government has confirmed whether
Fidesz has a direct relationship with the political consultancy firm, and definitively naming the
connections between high-level, international political consultants, lobbyists, and far-right
leaders is often an incredibly difficult task that depends on the continued work of dedicated
investigative journalists. Though the exact relationship between Hungary and Cambridge
Analytica remains unknown, Kaiser’s leaked documents of Cambridge Analytica’s internal
communications show that the firm had planned a September 2016 meeting with Péter Szijjártó,
Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, in order to discuss Hungary’s 2018 elections.
114
It is

112
Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks, Channel 4
News, March 19
th
, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ
113
Gergő Varga, “Minden jel arra mutat, hogy Habony is a Cambridge Analyticaval dolgozik [Every sign
shows that Habony is working with Cambridge Analytica],” Medium, March 28
th
, 2018.
https://medium.com/tett/minden-jel-arra-mutat-hogy-habony-is-a-cambridge-analyticaval-dolgozik-
8c705c71dcf5
114
Márton Sarkadi Nagy, “Szijjártó Péter neve is előkerült a Cambridge Analytica kiszivárogtatott
emailjeiben [Péter Szijjártó’s also name appeared in leaked Cambridge Analytica emails],” Átlátszó,
January 8th, 2020. https://blog.atlatszo.hu/2020/01/szijjarto-peter-neve-is-elokerult-a-cambridge-
analytica-kiszivarogtatott-emailjeiben/

126
unclear whether the meeting ultimately took place, though Átlátszó reports Szijjártó was in the
United States to attend meetings at the United Nations during the time period in question.
115

Hungary’s relationship with notorious far-right political consultant, media investor, and
Cambridge Analytica co-founder Steve Bannon also seems to have publicly blossomed in 2018,
adding to suspicions that there may be an ongoing relationship between Fidesz and Cambridge
Analytica. In May, Bannon received a twenty-thousand-dollar honorarium, funded by taxpayer
money, to speak at a conference in Budapest organized by the Mária Schmidt Foundation
(headed by the eponymous controversial historian and close Orbán ally), the Fidesz Party
Foundation, and the Foundation for a Civic Hungary.
116
At the conference, themed “The Future
of Europe,” Bannon praised Hungary for being “two years ahead of the United States on
migration policy and preserving conservative values,” and credited Orbán with being “Trump
before Trump.”
117
Átlátszó reports that Bannon secretly visited Budapest again in September,
and by November 2018, Bannon had publicly announced he planned to work with Orbán ahead
of European Parliament elections.
118

While the extent to which Cambridge Analytica or Bannon may have been involved in
Hungarian politics prior to 2018 remains unknown, there are strong parallels between Fidesz’s
campaign research and media strategies, which since 2015 have relied on relentless negative
messaging about migrants and the European Union, and the UK Independence Party’s

115
Ibid.
116
Tamás Bodoky, “Húszezer dollárért lépett fel Steve Bannon Budapesten, a számlát az adófizetők állták
[Steve Bannon appeared in Budapest for twenty-thousand dollars, the bill was paid by taxpayers],”
Átlátszó, August 21
st
, 2018. https://atlatszo.hu/2018/08/21/huszezer-dollarert-lepett-fel-steve-bannon-
budapesten-a-szamlat-az-adofizetok-alltak/
117
Ibid.
118
Reuters Staff, “Ex-Trump strategist Bannon says to work with Hungary PM Orban: media,” Reuters,
November 16
th
, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-orban-bannon/ex-trump-strategist-
bannon-says-to-work-with-hungary-pm-orban-media-idUSKCN1NM07X

127
“Leave.EU” campaign as well as Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Notably, Trump’s
campaign was crafted not only by Bannon, but also by a number of Finkelstein’s mentees and
friends, including Larry Weitzner, Tony Fabrizio and Roger Stone.
119
These parallels suggest
Hungary may have served as a testing ground for far-right campaign methods well before similar
tactics were deployed in western Europe and North America, as younger consultants like
Birnbaum and Habony built their portfolios. In other words, Orbán’s successful campaigns serve
as proof-of-concept for political consultants like Birnbaum and Habony, who continue to work
for conservative and far-right politicians internationally. Yet just as international far-right figures
point to Hungary as an example of successful campaign strategy, Orbán and his allies also
continue to look toward international models for ideas on how to sustain their power. Under this
new internationalism, political advisement is not a clear-cut, unidirectional process. Rather,
global far-right actors are engaged in an ongoing feedback loop, testing each other’s methods,
drawing from each other’s playbooks, and courting each other’s favors.
During the same time period that Bannon’s relationship to Orbán became public, Árpád
Habony reportedly met with Bannon to discuss launching an Eastern European version of
Breitbart, the far-right news network which Bannon led to great success from 2012-2016.
120

Breitbart’s parent company, Breitbart Holdings Inc. had already registered the domain name
Breitbart.hu in Hungary a year prior to Habony and Bannon’s meeting, but the project never
came to fruition.
121
Then, in April of 2019, Habony launched a new international news network:

119
Grasseger.
120
Patrick Kingsley, “Safe in Hungary, Viktor Orban Pushes His Message Across Europe,” The New York
Times, June 4
th
, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/world/europe/viktor-orban-media-
slovenia.html
121
The domain name has since expired. See: Zsolt Sarkadi, “Bejegyezték a breitbart.hu domaint [They
registered the breitbart.hu domain],” 444, February 3rd, 2017. https://444.hu/2017/02/03/bejegyeztek-a-
breitbarthu-domaint

128
V4 News Agency (V4NA). Habony’s V4NA is based in London and claims to publish “the latest
news and information from the V4 (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) and other
EU countries.” Its website further states V4NA will “give a conservative, right-wing perspective
of the key political, economical and other news that are critical to our life in Europe and around
the world.”
122
The website publishes articles in English, French, and Hungarian, with more
languages to be added at a future date. The agency advertises itself as an independent news
source employing a team of fifty journalists and aims to compete with other wire services like
Reuters and the Associated Press. Its ownership structure, however, is suspect. Hungarian
journalist Anita Komuves reports that the Hungarian New Wave Media Group Kft. owns a fifty-
seven percent stake in the agency, while Habony’s Danube Business Consulting Ltd. owns forty
percent and Hungary’s ambassador to the UK, Krisztóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky owns three
percent.
123
New Wave Media Group Kft. was one of the 476 media outlets donated to the Central
European Press and Media Foundation in late 2018. As such, despite its assertions of
independence, the majority share of Habony’s V4NA is in the hands of Orbán and the Hungarian
government.
Because V4NA is a subscription news service, most of the content produced by the
agency is not free to view on its website. Nevertheless, what is visible on V4NA closely aligns
with the sensationalist reporting of Breitbart. V4NA’s website shows a left-hand column of
running headlines updated throughout the day, while the main body of the page contains
previews of full-length articles accompanied by images. Some recent headlines include:
“Thousands of migrants tried to enter Great Britain last year” (January 16
th
, 2021); “Migration

122
V4 Agency, “V4NA – News from the V4, by the V4,” V4NA, April 9
th
, 2019.
https://v4na.com/en/v4na-news-from-the-v4-by-the-v4
123
Anita Komuves, “When the Government Needs its Own News,” VSquare, April 11
th
, 2019.
https://vsquare.org/when-the-government-needs-its-own-news/

129
and coronavirus biggest threats to security of Hungary and Europe this year” (December 29
th
,
2020); “Janez Janša: Soros’s dirty money will ruin democracy” (December 13
th
, 2020); and
“Hungary-Serbia relations have never been as good as today” (December 18
th
, 2020). After its
launch, V4NA attracted attention from other news networks for allegedly being Orbán’s
international mouthpiece. France’s Le Monde, as just one example, described V4NA as a “post-
truth laboratory” and marveled at the agency’s “global innovation” of being “the first site to
charge for fake news.”
124
The website peddles typically alarmist headlines about crime, migrants,
Muslims, and George Soros conspiracies while uncritically promoting the policies of V4 leaders.
V4NA is now one of the top three suppliers of international news to widely read
Hungarian pro-government media outlets, including Magyar Nemzet, Origo, 888, and Hungary’s
regional newspapers.
125
It has also been cited by Hungarian state television broadcaster MTV .
Yet it is the international quality of Habony’s new media venture that most clearly illuminates his
and Orbán’s desires to expand Hungary’s media empire beyond the country’s borders. V4NA not
only provides international news to Hungarian news outlets; it is also cited by news outlets in the
Balkans, most prominently in Slovenia and North Macedonia.
126
The spread of V4NA’s reach is
aided by the fact that Hungarian media oligarchs loyal to Orbán have made numerous
investments in media outlets outside of Hungary’s borders in recent years. In 2017, three
Budapest-based companies—Modern Media Group (formerly co-owned by Habony, now under
CEPMF), Ridikul, and Ripost—purchased Slovenia’s Nova24TV , a media outlet co-owned by

124
Blaise Gauquelin, “Viktor Orban lance sa propre agence de presse international [Viktor Orban
launches his own international press agency],” Le Monde, April 10
th
, 2019.
https://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2019/04/10/viktor-orban-lance-sa-propre-agence-de-
presse-internationale_5448273_3236.html
125
Márton Sarkadi Nagy, “London based V4 Agency is Orbán’s propaganda machine disguised as global
media product,” Átlátszó, May 25
th
, 2020. https://english.atlatszo.hu/2020/05/25/london-based-v4-agency-
is-orbans-propaganda-machine-disguised-as-global-media-product/
126
Ibid.

130
members of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), which is currently headed by Slovenia’s far-
right Prime Minister and Orbán ally Janez Janša. Then, in 2018, Modern Media Group and
Ripost transferred ownership of their shares in Nova24TV to two companies, Hespereia and
Okeanis. These companies were reportedly founded by Péter Schatz and Ágnes Adamik, two
former senior executives of Hungary’s public broadcaster MTV .
127
Schatz then acquired a
majority stake in Nova obzorja, the publisher of Slovenian conservative political weekly
Demokracija as well as the tabloid paper Škandal24.
128

In North Macedonia, Schatz and Adamik set up separate business interests in order to
strategically acquire major shares in local media firms, many of which have ties to right-wing
party VMRO-DPMNE.
129
These media firms control over half a dozen local media outlets in
North Macedonia, including Netpress, Denesen, Infomax, and Kurir, among others. In April of
2017, Schatz opened a company named Target Media to provide consulting services, and in June,
his company acquired a ninety percent share in CHS Invest Group, the North Macedonian
company that controls the television station Alfa TV .
130
In October of 2020, Hungarian investors
purchased the Slovenian state-controlled Planet TV for nearly five million euros.
131

The expansion of Hungarian business interests in the Balkan media sector has caused
alarm in the region as well as in EU Parliament. Prior to Janša’s assumption of office in March of

127
Lenart Kucic, Natasa Stojanovska, Zoran Jovanoski and Anita Vorák, “Hungarian Media Expansion in
Balkans Raises Worries but Lacks Impact,” Balkan Insight, December 4
th
, 2020.
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/12/04/hungarian-media-expansion-in-balkans-raises-worries-but-lacks-
impact-2/
128
OCCRP staff, “Right-Wing Hungarian Media Moves into the Balkans,” Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project, May 9th, 2018. https://www.occrp.org/en/spooksandspin/right-wing-
hungarian-media-moves-into-the-balkans
129
Former VMRO-DPMNE leader Nikola Gruevski was controversially given asylum in Hungary in
2018. Sarkadi Nagy, “London Based V4 Agency.”
130
OCCRP.
See also: Sarkadi Nagy, “London Based V4 Agency.”
131
Kucic et al.

131
2018, the outgoing Slovenian government appointed a special parliamentary counsel to
investigate whether Hungarian-controlled media companies were used to illegally finance the
SDS’s election campaign and interfere with Slovenia’s democratic process.
132
Similar allegations
have been made about flows of money between Hungary and North Macedonia. In August of
2019, the North Macedonian financial police requested that the Public Prosecutor’s Office freeze
the assets of Schatz’s Target Media on the suspicion that it was being used for money laundering;
however, the Public Prosecutor’s Office declined to do so. The financial police ultimately
charged Schatz with tax evasion in 2020.
133
In February of 2020, four members of European
Parliament submitted questions to the EU Commission under the subject title “Hungarian
interference in the media in Slovenia and North Macedonia.” Their questions allege that Hungary
is involved in “an international operation” that seeks to undermine democratic processes in other
countries.
134
Vice-president of the EU Commission, Vera Jourova, responded to the MEPs’
concerns in a November 25
th
plenary debate on the same subject, stating:
The Commission attaches great importance to freedom of expression, media pluralism and

132
Kucic et al.
133
Ibid.
134
The questions were submitted by MEPs Kati Piri, Tanya Fajon, Tonino Picula, and Andreas Schieder
on behalf of the S&D Group. They accompanied their questions with the following allegation:
“Hungarian leaders, using Slovenian banks and helpers, put together an international operation to gather
political intelligence and support for media outlets that have connections with the North Macedonian
opposition party VMRO-DPMNE. The goal of this operation is to topple the government of Prime
Minister Zaev in the elections of 12 April 2020 and to end the Prespa Agreement. The owners of several
Hungarian media outlets close to Janez Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), which are funded by
companies with close ties to Prime Minister Orbán, played a key role. Necenzurirano received data and
information proving that at least three companies close to Fidesz made EUR 4 million at one stage of their
operations as of August 2018, of which EUR 1.5 million remained in Slovenia and EUR 2.5 million was
transferred to North Macedonia. The Slovenian Journalists’ Association found that attempts to discredit
the North Macedonian Government and the intensity of attacks have gone so far as to become a threat to
media freedom and democracy.”

See: Kati Piri et al, “Hungarian interference in the media in Slovenia and North Macedonia,”
(Parliamentary questions submitted for oral answer to the Commission, O-000017/2020, European
Parliament, February 21
st
, 2020). https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/O-9-2020-
000017_EN.html

132
freedom of the media in the EU Member States as well as in the EU candidate countries and
potential candidates. Free and pluralistic media is essential to democracy. […] Concerning North
Macedonia, the Commission and the EU delegation are following the developments in the media
sector in the country very closely. The Commission reports on these issues in its regular
enlargement packages, including in its latest 2020 report on North Macedonia. This report
assessed that greater transparency on media ownership and possible illegal media concentration
is required.
135

Despite the Commission’s expression of concern, no direct action has been taken against
Hungarian media expansion into the Balkans as, in theory, the process adheres to EU principles
of the free movement of capital. Slovenia and North Macedonia’s domestic investigations into
money laundering are ongoing and have yet to come to any formal conclusions.
My aim in tracing these Balkan media ownership structures is not to definitively confirm
financial corruption or Hungarian interference in foreign elections. Rather, my aims are twofold:
to demonstrate how Hungary’s calculated media centralization and expansion, built through
extensive collaboration with international far-right actors, coopts the Balkan Route in order to
amplify Orbán’s propaganda to wider audiences in the region and strengthen Hungary’s
appearance as a counter-terror security state; and to draw attention to the various anxieties about
democracy, media freedom, and the growing popularity of far-right political parties that
Hungarian media expansion along the Balkan Route animates in both the European Union and
the Balkans. Here, the Balkan Route must be understood as an infrastructure that mediates the
flows of not only migrants and refugees, but of information and commodities as well.
136
The

135
“Hungarian interference in the media in Slovenia and North Macedonia (debate)” (European
Parliament, Brussels, November 25
th
, 2020). https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/CRE-9-
2020-11-25-ITM-011_EN.html
136
Hungary, for example, has partnered with China on its Belt and Road Initiative which seeks to develop
investment relationships with Central and Eastern European countries. In 2020, China provided Hungary
with a $1.855 billion loan to begin construction on a railway that will link Hungary’s capitol, Budapest, to
Serbia’s capitol city of Belgrade. This railway will ultimately link Budapest to the Chinese-run Port of
Piraeus in Greece and help transport Chinese goods to western Europe. Eighty-five percent of the funding
for this project comes from China, while Hungary is providing fifteen percent of the funding through tax-
payer money. In April of 2020, the Hungarian government passed legislation to classify all documents

133
ability to influence these flows along the Balkan Route is therefore of great strategic value for
any actor seeking to gain a strong political-economic foothold in Europe. As migrants and
refugees moved northward along the Route, Hungarian investors loyal to Orbán pushed
southward, capturing media infrastructures in an attempt to reshape images and narratives that
circulate across the region. This media expansion importantly functions to amplify the Hungarian
government’s display of visuality beyond its own borders and extend the reach of Orbán’s
propaganda. As such, it is an assertion of Hungary’s ontopower: “a changing ‘ecology of powers’
[that] incite and orient emergence.”
137
For Brian Massumi, an orientation toward the future is
what distinguishes the War on Terror from the Cold War. Where the Cold War was structured by
mutual deterrence of nuclear annihilation, in which both the United States and the Soviet Union
stockpiled nuclear weapons to threaten each other with, the War on Terror is marked by a logic of
preemption, in which unknowable threats must be acted upon before they emerge as a clear and
present danger.
138
If the governing logic of the counter-terror security state is to preempt danger
before it occurs, ontopower is the means through which the state brings danger into being in
order to perform this preemption.
For a military power like the United States, ontopower is expressed through actions such

relating to the railway project for ten years. While a deeper analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative is
beyond the purview of this chapter, I mention it here in order to demonstrate how the Balkan Route
functions as an infrastructure along multiple axes: economic, environmental, mediated, and migrated.

See: Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves, “UPDATE 3- Hungary, China sign loan deal for Budapest-
Belgrade Chinese rail project,” Reuters, April 24
th
, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/hungary-china-
railway-loan/update-3-hungary-china-sign-loan-deal-for-budapest-belgrade-chinese-rail-project-
idUSL5N2CC6A0

See also: “China’s Investments in the Western Balkans,” Strategic Comments, vol. 26, no. 10, 2020, iv-vi.
DOI: 10.1080/13567888.2020.1868206
137
Ibid., viii.
138
Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2015), vii.

134
as drone strikes against suspected potential terrorists. In the case of Hungary, the performance
that incites the emergence of danger is primarily achieved through visually producing and
sustaining the event of crisis in the media, and it is within the context of media centralization that
Fidesz is able to legislate the visible and to conjure into view an always-imminent migrant
invasion. In other words, the success of Hungary’s performance of the ideal counter-terror
security state hinges, I argue, on the ability to maintain control over not only what the public sees
but how it sees. By having his allies invest in foreign media outlets, Orbán is able to visually and
discursively amplify the threat posed by the “migrant crisis,” promote himself as a leader willing
to preempt this threat and protect the sanctity of Europe and cohere far-right publics within and
beyond Hungary in the process.
The global far-right’s idealization of Hungary is, of course, not accidental. Neither is it
attributable to Orbán’s singular genius. Fidesz’s entanglements with international far-right
political consultants, public figures, and activists reveals how the Hungarian government’s
mobilization of ethno-nationalism cannot simply be attributed to post-socialist countries’
supposedly insular and incurious societies. Hungary’s transformation over the 2010s has raised a
number of anxieties about the durability of democracy that dovetail with broader anxieties about
Eastern Europe’s place in Europe and its (in)ability to assimilate to western liberal norms. Yet,
the anxious focus on individual “rogue states” like Hungary also often misses the integral role
international consultants from both the east and west play in crafting Eastern European political,
economic and media policies, and consequently limits the public’s understanding of how far-
right populist publics are organized and mobilized. These transnational networks of consultants
and media oligarchs draw upon shared tactics to cohere conservative populist publics in
individual nation-states and have helped plan and execute multiple successful propaganda

135
campaigns, paving the way for the far-right’s grip on power in multiple countries.
I opened this chapter with Emily Maitlis’s contention that Hungary is “inventing
something that doesn’t exist anymore” when it speaks of a “migrant crisis.” While I do not agree
that the crisis of mass displacement is anywhere near over, I share Maitlis’s belief that Hungary’s
ceaseless anti-migrant campaigning and continued securitization of its borders, despite the
significantly lower numbers of migrants and refugees arriving to Hungary, evidences a process of
invention. Through building collaborative alliances with international far-right figures,
centralizing the media to emphasize the power of the government’s visuality, and engaging in
social code building to consolidate a far-right public supportive of Orbán’s leadership, the
Hungarian government has effectively reinvented Hungary as a successful counter-terror security
state on the frontline of Europe’s borders. The performance of the counter-terror security state
demonstrates a continued over-identification with “the west” made through an eager alignment
with the ideological aims of the War on Terror. In the next chapter, I explore how this process of
invention seeks to distance Hungary from its socialist past, which is today framed as an
aberration by Hungarian leaders, and rewrite Europe’s modernity timeline. By performing the
counter-terror security state, Hungary aims to situate itself (and by extension the rest of Eastern
Europe) not as ‘backwards’ states unable to learn the tenets of democracy but rather as the true
leaders and defenders of European progress.

136
Chapter 3. Recursive Mediations: Rewriting Counter-terror Histories and Futurities
“We used to think that Europe was our future; today we know that we are the future of Europe” –
Viktor Orbán, State of the Nation Address, February 16
th
, 2020

“Once you control (the idea of) ‘time’, you can control subjectivity and make the many march to
the rhythm of your own time” – Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global
Futures, Decolonial Options

On March 6
th
of 2018, Viktor Orbán’s then Chief of Staff, János Lázár, posted a short
video to his official Facebook page. The video—titled simply “Bécs” (the Hungarian name for
Vienna)—opens on what looks like an unremarkable European city street. A woman pushes her
baby in a stroller, a family waits at a crosswalk for a tram to pass by, and teenagers stroll along
the sidewalk. People are bundled in hats and coats and puddles of rainwater are visible in cracks
on the pavement. On its own, the footage seems entirely banal. However, as the video
progresses, it becomes clear that we are meant to feel something about this environment is amiss.
Somber notes of a piano accompany the soundtrack of soft rain—a sonic element that has
presumably been added in post-production, as there is no visible rain in the video footage—and a
vignette effect is used to darken the edges of the frame, making the city appear dingy and grey.
The first three shots in the video are significantly slowed down, extending the direct gazes of
passerby. An elderly Sikh man appears particularly menacing as he looks into the camera.

Figures 1-2: Still shots from Lázár’s “Bécs” video show a vignette darkening the edges of the
frame. Slowed down footage of passerby looking into the camera makes otherwise mundane
images feel ominous.

137

Twelve seconds into the video, Lázár’s voice begins narrating from off-screen. As he speaks, we
learn that what we are watching is a eulogy for the imperial city of Vienna. Lázár announces that
“we” are standing in Favoriten, “a once renowned part of Vienna [where] twenty years ago there
wasn’t a single immigrant.” Today, we are told, the city is unrecognizable.
Lázár’s voice over informs viewers that “the number of immigrants in Austria has
increased by seven-hundred-thousand” and “today, only elderly, white Christian pensioners live
in this neighborhood; everyone else is an immigrant.” When we finally see Lázár’s face, more
than half a minute into the video’s two-minute-and-twenty-three-second run time, he is framed in
a static close-up shot as he stands on a nondescript street corner. As the video cuts back and forth
from Lázár to B-roll footage of passerby, we hear Lázár describe how the streets have become
“visibly dirtier.” He claims that “it is evident that the neighborhood is poorer and there is a much
higher crime rate,” and laments that when he tried to ask some immigrants how they feel about
living in Vienna, “no one could answer because none of them speak German.” Lázár buttresses
this allegation with the warning that “these immigrant communities are entirely altering the
city’s old appearance.” Then, in a direct address, Lázár claims that “the immigrants [have taken]
control of this neighborhood.”

138

Figure 3: A still frame Lázár’s video ostensibly showing the “visibly dirtier” streets of Vienna.

Figure 4: Former Chief of Staff to the Hungarian Prime Minister, Jánós Lázár, is framed in
close-up while directly addressing the camera. He warns, “The white Christian Austrians moved
out and immigrants took control of this neighborhood.”

“Bécs” is filled with misleading and alarmist warnings about life in Vienna,
1
illustrated
predominantly through Lázár’s matter-of-fact delivery of his observations and punctuated by

1
The video’s content is so offensive that Facebook initially removed the video from its platform for
violating the service’s community guidelines. However, the video was reinstated within twenty-four
hours, after Facebook determined the video was “newsworthy, significant or important to the public
interest.” See: “Facebook removes, then restores anti-immigrant video in Hungary,” Reuters, March 7th,
2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-migrants-hungary-austria/facebook-removes-then-
restores-anti-immigrant-video-in-hungary-idUKKCN1GJ2HR

139
melodramatic music and editing. As Lázár speaks, he describes his surroundings as though he
has witnessed the irrevocable loss of the past. While Lázár claims “the few [white] Viennese that
still live here told me the crime rate is much higher and they live in great fear,” we hear no other
voices in the “Bécs” video. Instead, the video is framed entirely through Lázár’s narration and
dramatized footage of people walking down the street.

140

Figures 5-7: Still images from Lázár’s “Bécs” video demonstrate a fixation on Muslim women
wearing hijab, and in particular, on Muslim mothers.

The camera noticeably fixates on Muslim women wearing hijab, and in particular,
Muslim mothers pushing strollers and walking with young children. These images serve to
emphasize Lázár’s not-so-subtle insinuation that white, Christian Austrians are being “replaced”
by Muslim immigrants.
2
One short clip of two Muslim women walking toward the camera is in
fact repeated twice, almost as though the creators worried that they did not capture enough
footage of Muslims in Vienna to adequately frighten viewers.

2
This visual insinuation gives a nod to the “Great Replacement” theory, which suggests that Muslims are
actively trying to “outbreed” and “replace” white Christians in order to destroy “western civilization.”
The Great Replacement theory has been consistently referenced by far-right politicians, intellectuals, and
reactionary groups for decades and partially inspired mass murderers Anders Breivik, Patrick Crusius,
and Brenton Tarrant. See: Andrew Brown, “The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went
mainstream,” The Guardian, August 16, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-
myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream; Jasmin Mujanović, “The Balkan
Routes of the Far Right’s ‘Great Replacement’ Theory,” Newlines Magazine, March 12, 2021,
https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-balkan-roots-of-the-far-rights-great-replacement-theory/

141

Figures 8-9: Still shots from Lázár’s video show the same sequence of images appears at the
0:28 and 1:25 marks.

Yet, if we were to strip the video of its music and desaturated coloring, Lázár’s footage of
Vienna would look much like any other major European city. Residents and tourists of all ages
mill about, and Burger King and McDonald’s signs are visible alongside local shops in a bustling
neighborhood that, in fact, looks incredibly clean.
The visual and discursive tactics employed in the “Bécs” video are, in many respects, par
for the course in right wing, anti-migrant media. Lázár’s “Bécs” address is nevertheless useful as
an object of study. The video—which was posted a few weeks before Hungary’s April 2018
parliamentary elections—succinctly illustrates the Hungarian government’s investment in
visually producing and sustaining the “migrant crisis” in the media as a means of tautologically
evidencing the success of its own policies and security measures, in what I argue is part of its
performance of the counter-terror security state. Though the video was published on Facebook,
Lázár’s mode of address distinctly mimics the style of television journalists reporting live on
location. He repeatedly shifts between first person I signifiers and the second person plural, we,
as he describes his surroundings, reproducing the conventions of face-to-face communication
that Margaret Morse argues function to create a sensation of liveness even when broadcasted
images are not technically live. For Morse, the television news anchor’s mode of address

142
produces a sensation of liveness by creating an illusion of shared space and time.
3
While Lázár’s
video appropriates conventions of the live news report and encourages the sensation of shared
space (he tells us “we” are “here”), the video importantly disrupts the sensation of
contemporaneous temporality between Hungary and Austria. Here, the “Bécs” video’s
documentary images of Vienna are not meant to represent what daily life is like in the city as
much as they are meant to represent a view into Hungary’s dystopian future—a future that
threatens to arrive at any moment but has not yet unfolded.
As discussed in the introduction and chapter one, Vienna marks the western-most end of
the Balkan Route and symbolizes arrival to the “real Europe” for many migrants and refugees.
This conceptual division between a “real Europe” and the less desirable nations that make up the
Balkan Route, despite a number of those Balkan Route nations holding EU member status,
evidences the reach and staying power of narratives that fix Eastern Europe in an inferior
position to Europe’s core. Such narratives are also temporal in nature; the region is understood as
one that is still “in transition,” perpetually trying—and struggling—to “catch up” to its western
half, while the latter sets the parameters for what is understood as “modern” and properly
European. Of these transition narratives, Anita Starosta writes:
From within, the normative account [of the transition narrative] is the familiar story of heroic
resistance of dissident intellectuals and rebellious workers, their efforts rewarded with a long-
awaited, if still incomplete, ‘return’ to Europe. From without, the less sentimental account is built
on the logic of development, which organizes humankind according to a hierarchy of stages along
a more or less linear, progressive, upward path—a logic according to which ‘it seems that in many
respects postcommunist Europe is following [the trajectory] of the West, probably with a delay of
some two or three decades.’ […] In both normative accounts of the transition—from within and
from without the region—the West, or Europe, or advanced capitalism, is already fixed, while it
is Eastern Europe that moves. Eastern Europe is that which has been in transition, that which has
undergone internal transformation in order to close the gap that separates it from the norm. The
system as a whole is secured in place by the presumed stability of the center.
4

3
Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998), 36-67.
4
See: Anita Starosta, “Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Transitions,” boundary 2, vol.41, no.1, 2014, 216,

143

While I find Starosta’s assessment of transition narratives compelling, her suggestion that it is
“Eastern Europe that moves” while the center is presumed stable risks giving the impression that
the norms established by the center do not themselves shift with time. Starosta is correct that the
“norms” of modernity are affixed to the West, but it is the attachment of the two that is
conceptually stable, not the norms themselves. In other words, while Eastern Europe is imagined
to be moving toward a complete reunification with the West (and thereby modernity), the West is
also always progressing “forward,” setting new expectations for economic and social
development that Eastern Europe must continue to strive for. As a result, Eastern Europe is
figured by a seemingly eternal delay between becoming (transitioning) and being European.
In the “Bécs” video, this conceptual and temporal division is inverted: Vienna does not
evince a desirable future to strive toward, marked by advanced technology, higher wages, a
better standard of living, and an open, pluralistic society. Rather, it represents a future in which
European customs, traditions, and languages are eradicated by unassimilable immigrants, and
more specifically Muslims, who “take over” the cities in which they settle. Early on in the video,
Lázár directly addresses the camera and states: “We can see what Budapest will look like twenty
years from now if the opposition parties allow immigrants into Hungary, maybe like this. We
[Fidesz] are working to prevent this phenomenon.” This statement reframes development reports
and think pieces that situate Eastern Europe as “two to three decades” behind (western) Europe’s
present and instead articulates Eastern Europe’s temporal location as the present from which an
undesirable future (represented by the decaying west) can be seen and avoided. Lázár warns
Hungarians that opposition parties in Hungary will open the path to the country’s destruction—a
destruction that is visually represented by images that make Vienna look dark and minacious—

DOI 10.1215/01903659-2409730

144
while emphasizing the work Fidesz is doing to prevent Hungary’s “invasion” by migrants. The
warning is repeated again at the video’s closure, when Lázár concludes, “Hungarian city-
dwellers stand before an important decision. If we let [immigrants] in, and if they are going to
live in our cities, then crime, poverty, filth, and an impossible urban environment will be the
consequence. If we let them in, this process will be unstoppable.” By closing the video with an
appeal to the “important decision”—with potentially irreversible consequences—that Hungarians
must make about their future, Lázár guides viewers to affirm Fidesz’s leadership and Orbán’s
anti-migrant policies.
Lázár’s assertion that Fidesz is “working to prevent this phenomenon” not only alludes to
the Hungarian government’s decisive action to secure Hungary’s borders and prevent migrants
and refugees from resettling in Hungary; it also evokes the government’s ontopower—its ability
to incite and orient the emergence of threats
5
—by suggesting Fidesz is able to detect and
preempt this dangerous, unwanted future before it unfolds. The sensation the “Bécs” video
creates is therefore not one of coeval time between Hungary and Austria, but one in which
Lázár—who, here, represents the state—has travelled forward in time to broadcast future images
back to the Hungarian present. Rather than acting as a “live report” from a contemporaneous
Vienna, then, the “Bécs” video maps an undesirable future onto foreboding images of the city.
As such, Lázár’s report from Vienna advances Hungary’s performance of the counter-terror
security state by both visualizing potential coming threats (through the use of manipulated
documentary footage) and emphasizing the country’s ability to anticipate and eliminate those
threats.
This chapter’s argument extends from Chapter 2 and focuses on how Hungary mobilizes

5
Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2015).

145
the Balkan Route as a threatening infrastructure in state-sponsored and government-friendly non-
fiction media in order to advance its performance of the counter-terror security state and rewrite
Europe’s modernity timeline. I analyze how Hungarian politicians, state-sponsored media, and
government-friendly news organizations manufacture the Balkan Route as a weaponized
passageway and deploy images of an always-imminent migrant “invasion” in order to cohere
public support for increasingly identitarian and anti-democratic policies domestically, while
presenting Hungary as the most successful counter-terror security state in Europe to publics at
home and abroad. Importantly, Hungary’s mediation of the Balkan Route allows the government
to reinvigorate the antemurale myth: a narrative that casts certain nations—in this case, in
Central and Southeast Europe—as bulwarks of Christianity and the historic defenders of Europe
against a “Muslim invasion.” The antemurale myth plays a central role in affirming Hungary’s
whiteness by emphasizing the country’s Christian culture and identification with Europe. In this
chapter, I read Orbán’s contemporary reinvigoration of the antemurale myth alongside his
projections of discourses of counter-terrorism onto the country’s historical experiences under
Ottoman rule, Nazi occupation, and as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. By revitalizing a
narrative that places Hungary at the gates of Christian Europe, the Hungarian government is able
to collapse these histories into a long continuum of externally imposed “terror” that Hungarians
have suffered, resisted, and survived against all odds. These reductive narratives function to
distance the country from its socialist past—a past that is now framed as an aberration that
unjustly separated Hungary from its rightful place in Europe proper, and its rightful inclusion in
the family of whiteness. By mobilizing the logics of counter-terrorism in historically revisionist
narratives and speculative futures, Hungary recasts itself and the rest of New Europe
6
not as

6
New Europe is understood here as the formerly socialist republics of the European continent that
transitioned into capitalist economies following the collapse of the Soviet Union and that have expressed

146
“backward” states unable to assimilate to western liberal norms but as the legitimate leaders and
defenders of European civilization, culture, and progress.
Through a textual analysis of the Hungarian government’s anti-migrant media campaigns
and Hungarian broadcast news reports, and a discursive analysis of Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán’s public speeches and interviews, I demonstrate how the Hungarian government’s
performance of the counter-terror security state hinges on the production of the contemporary
migrant crisis in non-fiction media. I close-read Hungary’s anti-migrant and anti-EU media
campaigns to demonstrate how they function as technologies that seek to unsettle the spatial and
temporal boundaries that demarcate ‘Europe,’ and consider how they aim to re-shape political
orientations of Hungarians in the process. This unsettling takes place through a process I term
recursive mediations. I define recursive mediations as audiovisual discourses that construct a
present moment of extended crisis through mapping national and regional traumas of the past
onto a soon-to-be-realized, but still avoidable, future. I argue that these mediations trouble
modern linear time consciousness—a key component of what Walter Mignolo calls the
modern/colonial world system
7
—and seek to establish new hierarchies of “time-as-space”
8
that

a desire to join the European Union.
7
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
8
Here, I am influenced by the writing of Bliss Cua Lim, who, in her fascinating book Translating Time:
Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, argues that cinematic narratives that employ elements of
the supernatural, fantastic, occult, and horror genre are able to disrupt and contest modern time
consciousness. Modern time consciousness arises out of imperial discourses that inscribe “time-as-space”
by imagining certain geographic regions as “pre-modern” or “less developed” than others. While my
objects of analysis are nonfiction, Lim’s claim that cinema can reveal the many pluralities of our
existence and “provoke a critical reassessment of modern time consciousness” by “unhinging the unicity
of the present by insisting on the survival of the past or jarring coexistence of other times” inflects my
conceptualization of nonfiction recursive mediations. Importantly, however, I argue that rather than
challenging modern time consciousness at large, the Hungarian state’s deployment of recursive
mediations functions to establish a new temporal hierarchy that places Hungary (and by extension the rest
of Central and Eastern Europe) at the forefront of modern progress. In other words, Hungary’s recursive
mediation of the Eurocentric modernity timeline, which reframes the west as emblematic of an
undesirable, dystopic, but still avoidable future, does not seek to resist the hierarchization of time-as-

147
situate the New Europe at the head of European progress. In doing so, Hungary’s recursive
mediations function as a process of racialization that affirms Hungary’s whiteness by
emphasizing its Europeanness.

Temporalizing race: coloniality, modernity, and the contingent whiteness of Eastern Europe
Before expanding on the concept of recursion, it is necessary to situate how time as a
concept operates as a racializing mechanism within modern/colonial systems of knowledge and
governance. According to Walter Mignolo, “time” emerged in the eighteenth century as a central
category used to differentiate culture from nature, and by extension, modernity from tradition.
“History as ‘time,’” he writes, “entered into the picture to place societies in an imaginary
chronological line going from nature to culture, from barbarism to civilization, following a
progressive destination toward some point of arrival.” This temporal scale “relocated the spatial
distribution of continents (Asia, Africa, America, and Europe) in a chronological order that
followed a certain directionality of history, from East to West. The planet was all of a sudden
living in different temporalities, with Europe in the present and the rest in the past.”
9
As such,
Mignolo argues that “‘time’ became a fundamental concept of coloniality at large.”
10
From the
nineteenth century onward, the European colonial project worked to translate geography into
chronology. This translation of space into/as a marker of time advanced an ideology of
“progress” that also underlies twentieth century discourses about development and
underdevelopment. Time is therefore a central component of how cultures come to perceive and

space so much as Hungary’s “lagging” location within it. Thus, by using images of crisis in western
Europe as a warning of the potential future to come, the Hungarian state imagines a new timeline that
places Hungary at the forefront of Europe’s progress. See: Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the
Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 11.
9
Mignolo, 151.
10
Ibid., 152.

148
conceive of the world at large, as well as their own location within it.
11

Conceptions of time-as-space not only mark certain regions as “less developed” or “less
advanced,” they are also part and parcel of the processes of racialization, marking certain peoples
and cultures as “primitive” and “sub-human.” Barnor Hesse compellingly builds from Mignolo’s
framework to argue that modernity itself is racial. For Hesse, scholarly work in race and
modernity studies has too often ignored the “the formative signifier of Europeanness, as a
defining logic of race in the process of colonially constituting itself and its designations of non-
Europeanness, materially, discursively and extra-corporeally.”
12
Hesse develops the concept of
racialized modernity to trouble the ways in which the focus on biological difference as a marker
of race has overdetermined our understandings of how racial difference is produced, legislated,
administered, and naturalized. Hesse’s argument for the utility of thinking modernity as race is
worth quoting at length:
The idea of racialized modernity allows us to interpret modernity as a historical and discursive
‘European’ / ‘non-European’ colonial process. It considers the ways in which an established yet
indeterminate geographical Christian entity coalesced as ‘Europe,’ becoming culturally,
economically and politically marked white in relation to its designations and marking of a ‘non-
Europe.’ From the sixteenth century onwards peoples (nations/tribes), identities
(Christians/pagans), ecologies (landscapes/wildernesses), cultures (civilized/savage), histories
(progressive/arrested), corporealities (superior/inferior) were embodied through Euro-Onto-
Colonial structures and discourses as either ‘white/European’ or ‘non-white/non-European.’
13

Hesse’s formulation of racialized modernity as a colonial process, and his attention to “Europe”
as an unstable conceptual idea, rather than a fixed geographical location, is helpful for making
sense of Eastern Europe’s contingent location in the European (racial) imaginary. Although the
region is geographically part of the European continent, it has long been constituted as Europe’s

11
Ibid.
12
Barnor Hesse, “Racialized modernity: an analytics of white mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies,
vol.30, no.4, 2007, 646. Emphasis in original.
13
Ibid., 659-660.

149
internal other: a regressive site of barbarism, violence, poverty, and contamination.
14
According
to Larry Wolff, Eastern Europe is a “demi-Orientalized” space; the region has historically been
imagined as a mediator between Europe and (its imagination of) the “Orient.” It is a liminal
space between Europe and its outsides that also functions to affirm western Europe’s
superiority.
15
Unlike their western neighbors, Eastern European powers did not maintain colonies
in Africa, Asia, or the Americas. To borrow the words of Catherine Baker, in the age of empires,
Eastern Europe was “a subject not protagonist of imperial rule.”
16
Consequently, Eastern
Europeans have, to varying degrees, been racialized as not-quite-European and not-quite-white,
always in the position of “catching up” to their western counterparts. And, as Baker’s work
shows with respect to Yugoslavia, the region has also oscillated between identifying as white and
disavowing whiteness at various historical conjunctures.
17

If we accept Hesse’s argument that Europeanness is a defining logic of race, the promise
of a “return to Europe” entailed by the post-Cold War narrative of transition was also a promise
of Eastern Europe’s (eventual) inclusion into the full privileges of whiteness. Yet, EU
assessments of Eastern Europe’s progress toward modernization continue to mark this transition
as one that is not yet complete. The contemporary insistence on being European by countries

14
Larry Wolff traces the emergence of “Eastern Europe” as an imagined geography distinct from western
Europe to travelogues, fiction, and other writing produced during the eighteenth century. Larry Wolff,
Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994).
15
Ibid.., 7.
16
Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial?
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 10.
17
In chapter 3 of her book, Baker traces the shifting conceptualizations of race in Yugoslavia, noting, for
example, that when watching films from the western genre, state socialist subjects recounted identifying
with the natives in the films rather than the settlers. Yugoslavia itself was the filming location for West
Germany’s Winnetou films (1962-1968) and the East German “Indianerfilme” (1966-77), both
appropriations of the western genre which cast locals from Yugoslavia as Native American characters.
These cultural productions demonstrate the ambiguous racial identifications available to Southeastern
European entertainers. Ibid., 102-103.

150
such as Hungary therefore betrays ongoing anxieties about the region’s location in the global
racial imaginary. Eastern Europe’s ambiguous racialization and semi-peripheralization animates
what critical geographer Zoltán Ginelli calls a “frustrated whiteness” in the region. This
“frustrated whiteness” is expressed in the ways the region has often aligned itself with, yet been
excluded from, the institutions and imperial frameworks that give whiteness/Europeanness its
power.
18

Recent revitalizations of the antemurale myth in response to the migrant/refugee crisis of
2015 further evidence this “frustrated whiteness;” while western European politicians,
journalists, and commentators criticized Eastern European nations for their lack of solidarity
with the rest of the EU with regards to proposed refugee resettlement quotas for each member
state, Eastern European leaders insisted that they were upholding European rule of law and, in
the words of Viktor Orbán, protecting Europe from an uncontrolled “Muslim invasion” of
migrants.
19
I read Orbán’s emphasis on Hungary’s position as a frontier state of Europe’s
Schengen borders and his repeated statements that Hungary “understand(s) border defense better
than anyone in Brussels or any international organization”
20
as an attempt to recenter Hungary in
the grand narrative of European history, which generally privileges the histories of Europe’s
colonial powers. Such statements reveal a deeper desire to confirm Hungary’s belonging in, and
relevance to, Europe—understood here as both a global power and a conceptual framework that
undergirds the modern/colonial world system.

18
David Karas and Zoltán Ginelli, “Episode 04 -The Transperiphery Movement Exhibition: Towards a
Global History of Peripheral Connections,” April 24, 2021, in Poliko: Conversations on Political
Economy, podcast, MP3 audio, 1:00:18, https://poliko.buzzsprout.com/1725887/8391996.
19
Emily Shultheis, “Viktor Orban: Hungary doesn’t want ‘Muslim invaders,’” Politico, January 8, 2018,
https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-hungary-doesnt-want-muslim-invaders/
20
AFP, “Hungary’s Orban vows to oppose EU border-guard plan,” France 24, September 17, 2018,
https://www.france24.com/en/20180917-hungarys-orban-vows-oppose-eu-border-guard-plan

151
Since 2015, Hungary has framed its violent bordering processes through an antemurale
narrative, tying its current anti-migrant policies to a mythological history in which Hungary has
always protected Christian Europe from the expansion of “Islamic civilization.” The antemurale
myth is, according to Maria Todorova, “one of the most important European mental maps” to
exist. This portable myth allows Europe’s imaginary frontline against Islam to shift across space
and time, from the Habsburg-Ottoman wars to the Spanish Reconquista, and even beyond
Europe’s geographical borders to its settler-colonies in the post-9/11 era.
21
What is novel about
Hungary’s contemporary invocation of the antemurale myth, however, is the way the Hungarian
government uses the myth to redraw the conceptual boundaries of Europe around Eastern
Europe, excising the western core from the very myth that was invented to protect it. In the
Hungarian government’s anti-migrant and anti-EU campaigns, “western Europe” becomes
representative of a dystopian future within which mass immigration has already eradicated
(white, Christian) European customs and cultures. I argue that this conceptual move relies on
recursive mediations that seek to create a new modernity timeline with Hungary, and by
extension Eastern Europe, at the forefront of European progress.
Fascinatingly, in these recursive mediations, western Europe’s demise is attributed to its
colonial legacy, a legacy which the Hungarian government is eager to claim it does not share.
Through a strategic appropriation of both anti-colonial and anti-terror discourses, the Hungarian
government attributes its lack of transcontinental colonies to its clairvoyance as a counter-terror
security state, one that has always foreseen the danger that imperialism and mass migration
would bring to Europe’s shores. As Orbán remarked in a 2017 speech addressing the Hungarian
nation:

21
Maria Todorova, “Spacing Europe: what is a historical region?,” East Central Europe, vol. 32, no.1-2,
2005, 59-78.

152
We have reached the point at which Central Europe is the last migrant-free region in Europe.
This is why the struggle for the future of Europe is being concentrated here. […] Now it is being
decided whether we can bring back our great old Europe: the Europe that existed in the days
before multiculturalism. We want a Europe that is safe, just, civic, Christian, and free.
22

Recursive mediations: the makings of a new modernity timeline
On October 23
rd
, 2018, Viktor Orbán walked onto a large outdoor stage in front of The
House of Terror Museum on Budapest’s famed Andrássy Street. As he stepped up to the podium,
Orbán was greeted by a sea of people excitedly waving Hungarian flags and cheering his arrival.
The crowd had gathered to hear the Prime Minister speak on the occasion of the 62
nd
anniversary
of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—a revolution that was ultimately violently crushed by the
Soviet Union
⁠ .
23
October 23
rd
marks the first day of the Hungarian uprising and is, expectedly, a
national holiday in the country. The Prime Minister gives a public address as part of the
celebrations each year, and since 2015, Orbán’s speeches have followed a predictable format:
they reflect on the bravery and courage of the Hungarian people throughout history and warn of
the challenges that lie ahead for the country. Hungarians young and old are asked to reflect on
the sacrifices their 1956 compatriots made in the hopes of obtaining Hungary’s independence,
and to ready themselves for new battles on behalf of Hungary’s hard-earned freedom.
In 2018, six months into his third consecutive reelection to office and on the heels of the

22
Unless otherwise noted, the translations of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speeches are taken from the
official English transcripts provided by the Hungarian government on its website. The original Hungarian
is as follows: “Oda jutottunk, hogy Közép-Európa maradt az utolsó európai migránsmentes övezet. Ezért
van az, hogy az Európa jövőjéért folyó küzdelem éppen ide összpontosul. […] Most dől el, sikerül-e
visszahoznunk a régi, multikulturalizmus előtti, nagyszerű Európánkat. Biztonságos, méltányos, polgári,
keresztény és szabad Európát akarunk.” For the English transcript, see: Viktor Orbán, “Speech on the 61
st

anniversary of the 1956 Revolution and Freedom Fight” (Budapest, Hungary, October 23
rd
, 2017),
https://2015-2019.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-
viktor-orban-s-speech-on-the-61st-anniversary-of-the-1956-revolution-and-freedom-fight
23
Over 2,500 Hungarians were killed during the uprising, which lasted from October 23
rd
to November
10
th
, 1956, and approximately 200,000 Hungarian refugees fled the country as a result of the violence.

153
EU Parliament’s historic vote to trigger Article 7 sanctions procedures against Hungary for
“failing to uphold EU values,”
24
Viktor Orbán gave an impassioned speech that reflected on the
future of Europe. He declared, unequivocally, that European imperialism is once again leading
the continent down a dark path:
Europe was led astray not by confident nations, but by imperial designs. Experiments and
experimenters in empire building were the root cause of the monstrous wars of the twentieth
century, an ocean of suffering, and the repeated devastation of a flourishing Europe. National
Socialism and international socialism, fascism and communism all chased imperial dreams:
supranational concepts; new forms of humankind created in melting pots; commercial profits on
an unprecedented scale; and the global—or imperial—governance that guarantees all this. […]
Today in Brussels, the drums of imperialism beat again. It is true that this tune is different from
the old one. Today they are not setting out to conquer with force of arms. We are well aware of the
fact that Brussels is not Constantinople, nor Moscow, nor Imperial Berlin, nor even Vienna.
Nothing has ever been conquered from Brussels. It only ever administered colonies. We, however,
have never been either a colony or a colonizer. We have never taken away anyone’s homeland, and
it is precisely for this reason that we will not give our homeland to anyone else!
25

24
The EU Parliament voted to trigger Article 7 against Hungary on September 12
th
, 2018 after the
Sargentini Report detailed Hungary’s abuse of migrants, erosion of democracy, and crackdown on the
freedom of the press. The Article 7 procedure opens up a path to for placing sanctions on a member state
and removing that member state’s voting rights in EU Parliament. Hungary is the first ever member state
to have Article 7 invoked against it. See: Rebecca Staudenmaier, “EU Parliament votes to trigger Article
7 sanctions procedure against Hungary,” DW News, September 12, 2018, https://www.dw.com/en/eu-
parliament-votes-to-trigger-article-7-sanctions-procedure-against-hungary/a-45459720
25
I have made a slight change to the Hungarian government’s official English translation of this speech,
which awkwardly reads “new forms of human created in melting pots.” The dictionary definition of the
original Hungarian word used by Orbán, “emberfajták,” is “races,” but it could more literally be translated
as “types of human” or “kinds of human,” so I have chosen to transcribe it as “humankind.” While it may
be possible (and provocative) to translate his statement as “new forms of human races,” my impression
from the larger context of the quote is that it is rather meant to imply the mixing of unassimilable cultures
and ways of living. The full quote in Hungarian reads: “Európát nem az öntudatos nemzetek, hanem a
birodalomépítési vágyak vitték tévutakra. A birodalomépítési kísérletek és kísérletezők felelősek a XX.
századi szörnyű háborúkért, a tengernyi szenvedésért és a virágzó Európa többszöri feldúlásáért. A
nemzeti és a nemzetközi szocializmus, a fasizmus és a kommunizmus mind birodalmi vágyálmokat
kergettek. Nemzetek feletti ideák, olvasztótégelyben előállított, új típusú emberfajták, soha nem látott
léptékű üzleti profitok és a mindezt garantáló globális, vagyis birodalmi kormányzás. […] Ma
Brüsszelben újra birodalmi indulókat játszanak. Igaz, más dallam ez, mint a régi volt. Ma nem
fegyverekkel hódítanak. Tudjuk jól, Brüsszel nem Sztambul, nem Moszkva, nem a birodalmi Berlin, még
csak nem is Bécs. Brüsszelből sohasem hódítottak, Brüsszelből csak gyarmatokat igazgattak. Mi azonban
nem voltunk sem gyarmat, sem gyarmattartó, nem vettük el senkinek a hazáját, éppen ezért nem akarjuk
odaadni másnak sem a miénket.” For the official English translation of this speech, see: Viktor Orbán,
“Speech on the 62
nd
Anniversary of the 1956 Revolution,” (Budapest, Hungary, October 23, 2018),
https://2015-2019.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-
viktor-orban-s-speech-on-the-62nd-anniversary-of-the-1956-revolution-and-freedom-fight

154
As the words echoed down the long stretch of Andrassy Street, the crowd erupted in cheers and
applause.
Where does one begin to parse the conflations, equations, and equivocations made in the
excerpt above? And what does Orbán’s fierce exclamation that Hungary has never been a colony
or a colonizer tell us about Hungarian anxieties about European belonging, particularly after the
EU triggered its sanctions procedure against the country for failing to “be” European? This
excerpt, rich in the equivalencies it draws across formal colonialism, German Nazism, Soviet
communism, and modern neocolonialism, speaks volumes more when read in the context of
Orbán’s full speech. In his twenty-five-minute address, Orbán weaves a dizzying narrative of
national suffering and survival across key events in Hungary’s history: from its 1848 War for
Independence and its 1956 Revolution, both of which failed to achieve their liberatory aims, to
the trauma of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, under which Hungary lost approximately two-thirds of
its territory, to its contemporary battle to defend Europe from mass migration. He recalls mythic
tales of numerous empires that “sought to extinguish” the Hungarians: there were the Romans,
the Ottomans, the Mongols, “and then—mightiest of all—the Soviets’ general party
secretaries.”
26
Through all of these tribulations, Orbán insists that Hungary kept its Christian and
European character. After recounting Hungary’s most recent challenge, “almost half a century of

26
The full quote, in English, reads: “Yet here we are, eleven hundred years after we arrived in our
homeland, one thousand years after the foundation of the Christian Hungarian state, one of Europe’s
oldest nations, the survivor of occupiers and occupations. Many sought to extinguish us: the mighty Holy
Roman emperors; the mighty khans of the Mongol Empire; the even mightier Sultans of the Ottoman
Empire; and then – mightiest of all – the Soviets’ general party secretaries. We have still somehow
remained, in the middle of an endless Germanic and Slavic sea. What is this if not a genuine success
story?” His remark about the mighty general party secretaries is, I believe, meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
Nevertheless, the sweeping view of Hungarian history that Orbán gives in this speech, before turning to
the contemporary migrant/refugee crisis, allows him to expertly revitalize the antemurale myth in such a
way that it simultaneously disavows Hungary’s socialist past while also disavowing western European
imperialism, in order to recuperate “Christian Europe” from the ills of colonialism. See: Viktor Orbán,
“Speech on the 62
nd
Anniversary of the 1956 Revolution.”

155
Soviet occupation and communist oppression,” Orbán recalls the hope Hungarian’s felt after the
1989 system change:
We thought we had returned home. Hungary has been a part of Christian Europe for a thousand
years. We are Europe—because we remained Europeans even after we were sold off at Yalta, and
in ’56 when we were abandoned to our fate. After the Soviet withdrawal we felt we had found
calm, and that finally our history, culture, and situation in global politics were all in alignment. We
could again take our place in the family of free nations, which stands on the foundations of
Christian culture, national consciousness and human dignity.
27

Here, the European Union’s transition narrative, which suggests that postsocialist Eastern
European states are still in the process of modernizing and becoming European, is rebuked.
Orbán asserts that Hungary has always been European; its separation from the family of Europe
was caused by tragic historical circumstances and betrayals, when greater powers sought to
control Hungarians and undermine their sovereignty. After affirming Hungary’s rightful place in
the imagined geography of Europe, Orbán warns that Hungary’s self-determination is once again
being threatened. Gazing out at the sea of supporters stretched out before him, Orbán declares:
“Brussels today is ruled by those who want to replace an alliance of free nations with a European
empire: a European empire led not by the elected leaders of nations but by Brussels bureaucrats.”
His words describe a new world order that would destroy the Europe of sovereign nation-states
and its Christian culture through “the appearance of increasing numbers of men of fighting age
from other continents and cultures, [who] within our lifetime [will shape] European cities in their
own image, slowly but surely turning indigenous Europeans into a minority; terror [will be] a
part of life in large cities.”
28
This dystopian future, however, can still be avoided because

27
Orbán, “Speech on the 62
nd
Anniversary of the 1956 Revolution.”
28
Orbán’s use of the term “indigenous” here is of note. As Olivia C. Harrison argues, anti-racist and anti-
colonial discourses have been strategically appropriated by the far-right in order to frame the white
majority as a white minority. Focusing on political debates and literary production in contemporary
France, Harrison observes how the French far-right has taken up indigeneity as an identity to recast
France’s postcolonial citizens of Maghrebi descent as settler-colonizers who now oppress indigenous
(white) French natives. Orbán makes the same conceptual move here, but the impact of his words hit

156
“Hungarians smell out imperial designs from afar.”
29
Orbán’s claim that Hungarians are able to
detect threats in advance invests Hungary’s long history with the logic of the counter-terror
security state; by revising Hungary’s historical narratives to demonstrate the country’s service as
a guardian of Europe’s borders, Orbán seeks to make Hungary’s Europeanness/whiteness
inarguable.
I read Orbán’s speech as an example par excellence of the Hungarian government’s
recursive mediations, which seek to reformulate the European modernity timeline normalized
under the modern/colonial world system and thereby affirm Hungary’s Europeanness/whiteness.
As a concept, recursivity is most commonly found in the computational sciences and
mathematics. In these fields, recursion refers to formulas (or algorithms) that perform a looping
function to determine outcomes. More recently, the concept of recursion has been taken up in the
humanities by scholars seeking to complicate our understanding of history and temporality. In
her book Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Ann Laura Stoler specifically calls for
(post)colonial scholars to employ the concept of “recursive analytics,” or “history as recursion,”
in their work. As articulated in the previous section, historical progress is conventionally
imagined through a Eurocentric modernity narrative, which places western Europe at the
forefront of modern progress, leaving the rest of the world in the position of playing “catch up”

differently in Hungary, where contact with the non-white Other was not made through a project of
colonial conquest, but rather through the ostensibly anti-imperialist socialist internationalism of the Soviet
Union. It is additionally compounded by the fact that Hungary has been occupied by numerous other
imperial powers, though it has not experienced formal colonization of the kind implemented in the Global
South. Harrison implores us to become historians of these terms (indigenous, minority, colonization,
decolonization, racism), to ensure we stay alert to their potential misuses and misappropriations. Teasing
out the particularities of Hungary’s history as part of a region that has been both semi-colonized and
peripheralized, and also contributed to western Europe’s colonial projects by sending laborers (as
emerging scholarship from Zoltán Ginelli and James Mark shows), is of vital importance to understanding
the success of its appropriations of anti-colonial discourse and its continued investment in
Europeanness/whiteness. Olivia C. Harrison, “The White Minority: Natives and Nativism in
Contemporary France,” boundary 2, forthcoming.
29
Ibid.

157
to the “present” western Europe embodies. This teleological timeline imagines a clear separation
between past, present, and future, as well as an easily plotted continuity from a “before”
modernity to an “after.”
For Stoler, however, neither the belief that there is a clean break between the past and the
present, nor the assertion of continuity between past and present, is adequate for understanding
the “durability and distribution of colonial entailments” over time.
30
She uses recursive analytics
to focus our attention on the ways in which “the uneven, unsettled, contingent quality of histories
[…] fold back on themselves and, in that refolding, reveal new surfaces and new planes.”
31
Like
Stoler’s description of recursive history folding back onto itself to reveal new surfaces, Yuk Hui
conceptualizes recursivity as “a spiral form” which “is characterized by the looping movement of
returning to itself in order to determine itself” while remaining open to contingencies.
32

Importantly, both Stoler and Hui emphasize that recursion is not a simple repetition or mimetic
performance of prior social and political processes. Rather, recursion entails “processes of partial
reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations.”
33
Historical recursions
never mark an exact return to the past or a perfect repetition of it. They displace some elements
of the past and convert others, mapping them onto new processes of governmentality. Thus, we
can imagine history as a time-spiral rather than a timeline, which allows for movement in
multiple directions and can, at any given moment, give way to contingencies that redefine its
shape.
Recursive analytics, then, bring our attention to the strategic “reinscriptions,

30
Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016),
25.
31
Ibid., 26.
32
Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019), 4
33
Stoler, 26-27.

158
retranscriptions, and recuperations” of the past in our present and future. These “recuperations,
reactivations, and recombinations of familiar forms pre-adhere to new practices while obscuring
relational histories that have been pulled apart.”
34
Stoler reminds us that the past, present, and
future “are not sequential ways of living time” but rather exist simultaneously and are variously
suspended and seized upon by state and non-state actors. Making sense of these different
temporalities—and the ways in which they are animated, lived, and felt—requires that we hold
them in their entirety, with the understanding that the past is always being rewritten alongside the
present and the future, often in new and unexpected ways. Attention to recursion allows us to
interrogate the narratives, images, and language we use to invoke the past and imbue it with an
imagined stability that it does not maintain.
35

Building from Stoler’s work, I argue that the concept of recursive mediation is of
particular value for understanding Hungary’s methods of reformulating the temporal contours of
the modern/colonial imaginary and performing the ideal counter-terror security state. Recursive
mediations, as I understand them, do not simply point to historical precedents to explain the
contemporary; rather, they project forward and backward simultaneously, (re)writing the past and
future together. In the case of Hungary, recursive mediations project the logics of counter-
terrorism onto Hungary’s past and future in order to justify the state’s increasing measures of
securitization, surveillance, and authoritarianism in the now. They also function to disavow
Hungary’s socialist past, marking it as a temporal aberration that should be excised from
Hungary’s historical timeline. Understanding recursion as both structural and operational,
36
and

34
Ibid., 31-32.
35
Ibid., 33.
36
Yuk Hui defines recursion as both structural and operational; it is a process that creates itself anew with
each iteration. Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, (London: Rowman & Littlefield International,
2019), 4

159
as a spiral looping that reactivates—but never simply repeats—the past as it projects toward the
future, allows us to see how Hungarian state media operationalizes Hungary’s historical and
mythological narratives alongside contemporary images of crisis elsewhere in Europe.
Recursive mediations portend to act upon (or against) a potential and unwanted future at
the same time that they revise understandings of the past with this future in mind. In the case of
Hungarian state-sponsored and state-affiliated media, recursive mediations about migration
across the Balkan Route variously evoke the history of Hungary’s occupation under the Ottoman
empire, the redrawing of Hungary’s borders under the Trianon Treaty, German occupation of the
country during World War II, and Soviet imperialism during the Cold War, through
contemporary anti-terror and anti-colonial discourses. Ultimately, these mediations frame both
the European Union and migrants as ongoing threats to Hungary’s sovereignty and to the
survival of European ways of life. To achieve their effect, Hungary’s anti-migrant and anti-EU
campaigns strategically reappropriate Europe’s imaginative geographies, which construct
Europe’s east as backward, barbaric, and temporally “behind” the west.
37
Rather than conceding
to the idea that Eastern Europe must “catch up” to the rest of the modern world, Hungarian state
media instead places western Europe within a dystopian and undesirable future that Hungary,
from its temporal vantage point, is able to preemptively see. This is achieved through practices
of historical revisionism, which project counter-terror discourses onto Hungary’s history in order
to evidence the ways in which Hungary has already protected Europe’s survival, and through the
use of decontextualized, contemporary documentary images of “migrants”
38
across news

37
See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
38
Here, I place the word migrants in quotation marks because Hungarian state-affiliated media has been
caught circulating fake videos that claim to show migrants committing violent acts against white civilians
in Europe but have in fact been sourced from elsewhere. In 2018, the Hungarian news site Origo posted a

160
reporting and government media campaigns, which function as images from a future-to-come.
Through the use of such recursive mediations, these campaigns institute a new European
modernity timeline; they situate the “New” Europe at the forefront of progress and invest it with
the power to predict and avert what western Europe allegedly failed to prevent: Europe’s total
demise.
In his public statements, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán frequently deploys anti-terror and
anti-colonial discourses together in order to simultaneously disavow the European Union as an
imperial power impinging on weaker countries’ sovereignties, while framing Hungary as an
exceptional counter-terror state that has always been willing to defend Europe against “Muslim
invaders” and other outside forces.
39
His statements provide some of the clearest illustrations of
the ways in which the Hungarian state has been engaging in a historical revisionism that merges
narrative frameworks from both the Cold War and War on Terror in order to recuperate
Hungary’s Europeanness and revise Europe’s modernity timeline, with Hungary, and by
extension the rest of Eastern Europe, now at the forefront of progress. In his 2016 State of the
Nation Address, for example, Orbán proclaimed:
One year ago, on this same occasion, we were already warning that a new age of mass migration
had begun. We were mocked mercilessly, and insulted by friends, allies and rivals alike. The thing
is, however, that the new mass migration is now a historical fact. No one in their right mind
disputes this any longer. Why were we—or to be more precise, why were the Central Europeans—
the first to see this? There could be several reasons for this, and several in parallel: perhaps the

video to Facebook showing two Black men attacking a white woman in a church, with the caption
“Western Europe, 2017. Is this what you want?” The video turned out to be footage of a 2015 robbery
committed in the state of Nebraska, and its audio had been manipulated to include shouts of “Allahu
akbar.” Though the video itself showed neither western Europe nor migrants, this documentary footage of
a robbery was used to give Hungarians a view into the dystopian future western Europe now represents.
See: “Így hazudik az Origo: a 2017-es európai migránstámadás egy 2015-ös amerikai rablás [This is how
Origo lies: the 2017 European migrant attack is a 2015 American robbery],”HVG, March 14, 2018,
https://hvg.hu/itthon/20180314_Igy_hazudik_az_Origo_a_2017es_europai_migranstamadas_2015os_ame
rikai_rablas
39
Emily Schulteis, “Viktor Orbán: Hungary doesn’t want ‘Muslim invaders,’” Politico, January 8
th
, 2018.
https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-hungary-doesnt-want-muslim-invaders/

161
storms and seismic waves of history; perhaps the sweaty struggles in the years after the fall of
communism; perhaps the experience that we must be on our guard, because something may happen
at any time—as it has so many times in the past—which could unexpectedly and irretrievably ruin
our plans. When we Central Europeans move forward, we put our ear to the rails every now and
then for any suspicious noises which could signal a source of danger: for any fleeting sounds
transmitted by the unscheduled train of ill fate.

By asserting that Eastern Europeans were the first to see the danger of mass migration, Orbán
invests the region with the superior predictive and preemptive capabilities attributable to a
successful counter-terror security state. The insinuation is that these capabilities ultimately make
Eastern Europe more secure, and therefore more European/white, than the European core. In
interviews, Orbán has warned that “illegal migrants” may occupy Hungary and bring both
“communism” and “terrorism” with them, merging together the ideological threats targeted by
the Cold War and War on Terror respectively, and mapping them onto non-European migrants
currently seeking asylum across the continent.
40
Concurrently, he has referred to the European
Union as a “Sovietizing force”
41
that increasingly threatens the sovereignty of European nation-
states, inverting the Cold War division between East and West in order to suggest that the real
anti-democratic “illiberalism” is to be found in Brussels. Such statements knowingly appropriate

40
In his September 4
th
, 2015 radio interview on the Kossuth Radio program “180 minutes,” Orbán warned
listeners: “I personally believe in a Europe, would like to live in a Europe, and would like my children to
live in a Europe and in a Hungary which is a continuation of the one-thousand-year tradition maintained
by our parents, our grandparents and our great-grandparents. This could change: they could occupy
Hungary – something not unprecedented in our history – or they could introduce communism. But the
profile of our population could also change slowly, by degrees, without our even noticing.” Viktor Orbán,
interviewed by Éva Kocsis, “180 Minutes,” Kossuth Rádió, September 4
th
, 2015. English transcript
available at https://2015-2019.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-
minster-viktor-orban-on-kossuth-radio-s-180-minutes20150904
41
In his 2016 address to the nation on the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Orbán stated:
“Today the task of Europe’s freedom-loving peoples is to save Brussels from Sovietisation, and from
their aim to decide instead of us whom we should live with in our own homeland. We Hungarians want to
remain a European nation, not a minority in Europe.” Viktor Orbán, “Speech at the official ceremony
marking the 60
th
anniversary of the 1956 Revolution” (Budapest, Hungary, 2016). English transcript
available at https://2015-2019.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-
minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-official-ceremony-marking-the-60th-anniversary-of-the-1956-
revolution

162
the conceptual frameworks western European politicians, scholars, and journalists have
mobilized, often condescendingly, to evaluate Hungary’s and Eastern Europe’s progress toward
modernization and reframe them to cast western Europe as the region that has failed to learn
from its history.
In a 2015 meeting with European Council President and former Prime Minister of Poland
Donald Tusk, Orbán stated that he and Tusk “discussed history; we talked about our own
experiences [...] I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities,
we [Hungarians] are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go
through that experience for 150 years.”
42
In this comment, Orbán justifies Hungary’s anti-
migrant policies by asserting that the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, which ended over 300
years ago, nevertheless gives Hungarians a deeper knowledge of what it is like to “live together”
with Muslims than any contemporary experience other European countries may have.
43
In this
way, he maps Hungary’s historical experience under Ottoman occupation onto the global War on
Terror, and a wider collective fear of “Muslim terrorist attacks” that Hungary has not
experienced. The fact that Hungary has not experienced the type of attack associated with the
global War on Terror is used as illustrative proof of Hungary’s exceptional ability to detect and
preempt danger, rather than something that is attributable to Hungary’s lack of attractiveness as a
European target. This recursive mediation of the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, which invests
this history with the lessons of counter-terrorism, demonstrates the country’s eager over-
identification with the War on Terror as part of its attempts to prove its Europeanness.

42
Ishaan Tharoor, “Hungary’s Orban invokes Ottoman invasion to justify keeping refugees out,” The
Washington Post, September 4
th
, 2015.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/04/hungarys-orban-invokes-ottoman-
invasion-to-justify-keeping-refugees-out/
43
Ibid.

163
It is, of course, no accident that Orbán identifies Brussels, the home of the EU Parliament
and its institutions that evaluate the “progress” of postsocialist nations toward Europeanization,
as the heart of a new European empire. It would be a mistake, however, to conflate Hungary’s
anti-EU rhetoric, which stems from a frustration of the EU’s refusal to recognize Hungary’s
Europeanness, with a turn away from Europe itself. Instead, we should read Orbán’s discursive
gymnastics—which thread together Hungary’s Ottoman occupation, territorial losses after WWI,
German-allied government, socialist period, and contemporary anti-migrant policies under an
antemurale framework that reproduces the counter-terror logics of the War on Terror while also
disavowing European imperialism—as an attempt to redefine and recuperate the (moral)
superiority of Europeanness/whiteness. By reframing Hungary’s history and the antemurale myth
through the lens of the counter-terror security state, which asserts its ability to predict and
preempt danger before that danger arrives, Orbán attributes Hungary’s lack of colonial history to
its superior foresight, which he suggests allowed Hungary to understand and avoid the existential
crises western Europe now faces. In other words, Orbán’s dual appropriation of anti-colonial and
anti-terror discourses, which frame both supranational institutions and Muslim migrants as
existential threats to Europe, functions to recursively mediate Hungary’s own history in order to
place Hungary at the forefront of European progress. Such narratives attempt to craft a new
European modernity timeline that portends to renounce the violence of colonialism while leaving
intact the modern/colonial world system that privileges Europeanness/whiteness as the marker of
the modern.
Through these mediations, Hungary, and by extension the rest of the New Europe,
become representatives of the real Europe: because these nations did not directly colonize non-
European territories, they can claim they are innocent of the ills of European imperialism and

164
renounce responsibility for its consequences. Furthermore, as nations that, owing to numerous
historical factors, have experienced significantly less non-European migration to their territories
than their western counterparts, they can also problematically claim that Eastern Europe has
successfully preserved its ethnic homogeneity, eliding the presence of minorities such as the
Roma in the process. By presenting Eastern Europe as a region that has protected and preserved
a white, Christian European identity, and done so without colonizing non-European others,
Orbán unsettles (post) Cold War Europe’s conceptual boundaries and shifts the temporal markers
of a morally superior modernity to Europe’s east.
The contradictions inherent within these recursive mediations point us toward the psychic
and bodily anxieties that inform postsocialist racisms
44
and more broadly toward the multiple
factors shaping the global resurgence of far-right populisms (as discussed in the previous
chapter). Though recursive mediations can be used for politically dangerous means, the
sensations of spatial and temporal unsettling that they instantiate also productively bring into
view the multiple temporalities embedded within the “New” Europe—those coeval sensations of
time, space, and history that shape ways of relating across the European continent.
45
I contend

44
The term “postsocialist racism” has been used by scholars of (post)socialist Europe to distinguish
between the invocations of race/racial difference in this region of Europe after its socialist period from the
understandings of race during its socialist period. Soviet ideology maintained that race was a social
problem brought about by capitalism and that race did not exist in the Soviet Union. Post-Cold War
Europe saw new discourses of cultural racism emerge, which shifted focus from racialized
biological/physiological differences to a range of practices that privileged European culture as the most
advanced and civilized culture in the world.
45
Johannes Fabian, in his seminal text Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, argues
that anthropology relies on temporal relegations to constitute and demote its objects, thus denying the
coevalness (the simultaneity and contemporaneity) of the ethnographic encounter. This results in
allochronism: discursive, political, and existential devices used to place the Other into a different
temporal location than the ethnographer-Self. Allochronism continues to shape political and social
relations between Old and New Europe; however, my argument here is that recursive mediations
acknowledge, and strategically appropriate, temporal relegations in order to make the coevalness of time
visible to various publics. See: Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its
Object, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

165
that attending to these multiple temporalities expressed through Hungary’s recursive mediations
of the Balkan Route allows us to grasp how the ideological affinities between the Cold War and
War on Terror—two projects that have sought to maintain the modern/colonial world system and
undermine the emergence of new global powers—influence Hungary’s response to the
migrant/refugee crisis. Hungary’s eager performance of the counter-terror security state relies on
continuously producing the migrant crisis in order to demonstrate the state’s ability to manage it
and keep it at bay (thereby evidencing its Europeanness), yet this desire to prove Hungary’s
competency in keeping Europe secure also illuminates how Eastern Europe’s position within the
imagined community of Europe remains tenuous.

Reactivating the Past: Budapest’s Changing Landscapes and Hungary’s New History
Across Hungarian state-sponsored and state-friendly media, from television and radio to
print and digital platforms, one consistently hears ominous warnings about how Hungarian cities
and villages will change if mass migration to Europe is not stopped. Alongside Orbán’s weekly
radio addresses and social media posts, a rotation of government spokesman and security
“experts” regularly make rounds on television news networks to affirm the necessity of keeping
Hungary Hungarian. Yet, this public commitment to preserving an (imagined to be) authentic
Hungary has in fact relied on a near-constant (re)mediation of public spaces in the country. Over
the past six years that I have been regularly returning to Hungary, I have been captivated by the
way city space—particularly in and around the capital city of Budapest—has become a site of
contested histories and futures, and a screen onto which the Hungarian government projects its
visions of an imminent “migrant invasion.” This production of an imminent invasion has been
coupled with the Hungarian government’s ongoing remodeling of Budapest, which seeks to

166
return the city to its pre-socialist, imperial aesthetic.
In the decade since his return to power, Orbán has overseen multiple renovations that aim
to return Budapest to the way it looked prior to 1945. Monuments that were removed from
Kossuth Square (where the Parliament building is located) after the fall of the Nazi-aligned
Horthy regime
46
have now been reconstructed in their original locations.
47
The famous statue
commemorating Imre Nagy, who was executed for his supportive role in the 1956 Hungarian
revolution against Hungary’s Soviet satellite government, was relocated from its 1996 site of
installation in Kossuth Square to another location in 2018. Where Nagy’s statue once faced the
Parliament building as a reminder of the people’s will, it now stands in a smaller public square
about fifteen minutes away from Kossuth on foot.
48
Construction is currently underway to
relocate government ministries and offices to the Buda Castle District according to historical
models of the city, and Orbán has already relocated his personal offices to a monastery building
within the Buda Castle grounds.
49

These changes, which seek to return Budapest to its “authentic” pre-socialist identity,
have been accompanied by new memorials and museums that controversially revise Hungary’s

46
Miklós Horthy served as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar period, from 1920-
1944. Under his governance, the Hungarian House of Representatives passed a series of laws related to
the Jewish population in Hungary between the years 1938-1941. These laws were based on Nazi
Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. Between 1942-1944, the Horthy regime refused to comply with Hitler’s
orders to deport Hungarian Jews to concentration camps. However, in 1944, German forces occupied
Hungary and, with the compliance of Horthy, Hungary’s newly appointed Prime Minister Döme Sztójay
and Interior Minister Andor Jaross worked closely with the German SS to deport approximately 450,000
Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. See: Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The
Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide, (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2013).
47
DW News, “Hungary: Orban is rebuilding Budapest with a look to the past,” Deutsche Welle, February
25, 2021, video, https://www.dw.com/en/hungary-orban-is-rebuilding-budapest/av-56659043
48
“Hungary removes statue of anti-Soviet hero Imre Nagy,” BBC News, December 28, 2018,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46704111
49
András Bozóky, “Nationalism and Hegemony: Symbolic Politics and Colonization of Culture,” in
Twenty-Five Sides of a Post-Communist Mafia State, eds. Bálint Magyar and Júlia Vásárhelyi, (Budapest:
Central European University Press, 2017), 459-491.

167
past. The House of Terror Museum, established in 2002 during Orbán’s first term as Prime
Minister, is one example. The House of Terror is named for its location within a building that
was used by both the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross Party (1935-1945) and the Hungarian State
Protection Authority (ÁVH , 1945-1956) to detain and torture Hungarian civilians.
50
The
museum’s permanent exhibition portrays a narrative of seamless continuity between the Arrow
Cross Party and the Hungarian communist government established in 1945, complete with an
installation piece that shows an Arrow Cross uniform transform, as if by magic, into the uniform
of an ÁVH officer. This revisionist narrative of seamless continuity between Hungarian fascists
and Hungarian communists is not only represented through the museum; it is also written into
the preamble of Hungary’s new constitution, approved in 2011, which states: “We proclaim that
the self-determination of our State, lost on 19 March 1944, was restored on 2 May 1990, with the
formation of our first freely-elected representative body.”
51
The Hungarian government’s
demarcation of the entirety of Hungary’s history between 1944 and 1990 as a period of foreign
occupation is a key component of its recursive mediation and revitalization of the antemurale
myth following the 2015 long summer of migration. By reimagining the forty-six years between
the end of WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union as an aberration in Hungary’s history, the
Hungarian government creates a narrative in which Hungary was unjustly removed from its
rightful place in the family of Europe and at the forefront of the European modernity timeline,
and suggests Hungarians are not responsible for the historical events that occurred in between

50
The ÁVH, or Hungarian State Protection Authority, was the secret police unit of the People’s Republic
of Hungary. The unit was dissolved in 1956 by Imre Nagy, the reformist Prime Minister of Hungary who
led the country from 1953 to 1955.
51
English translation of the consolidated version of the Fundamental Law of Hungary, passed in
Parliament on April 25, 2011. Translation provided by TASZ (Társaság a Szabadságjogokért) [Hungarian
Civil Liberties Union]. Available online:
https://tasz.hu/files/tasz/imce/alternative_translation_of_the_draft_constituion.pdf

168
1944 and 1990.
This eschewal of responsibility was insinuated again in 2014, when Orbán’s government
erected another World War II monument and dedicated it to “all the victims” of Hungary’s
occupation by Nazi Germany. The monument depicts Hungary, represented by the Archangel
Gabriel, being attacked by a German imperial eagle. Its dedication elides Hungary’s
collaboration with the Germans during World War II and has been criticized as an attempt to
absolve Hungary of its complicity in the Holocaust.
52
Hungarian historian István Rév writes that
the memorial “aims at carving in stone and steel the new official revisionist history of the Second
World War,” one that not only maintains the innocence of Hungarians in the genocide of
Europe’s Jewish and Roma population, but also creates a “(fictitious) continuity [between] the
interwar right-wing, autocratic, illiberal, anti-Semitic regime” and the communist regime that
followed it.
53
The museum and the memorial, along with the government’s multiple renovations
of Budapest that aim to return the city to its pre-socialist image, serve as supporting arms of the
Hungarian government’s broader attempt to cleave its Nazi-allied and socialist past from its
history.
I read these changes in the city’s architecture as recursive mediations that reframe both
the German-allied and Soviet-allied Hungarian regimes as foreign impositions which Hungarians
heroically resisted, and under which all Hungarians suffered equally as victims. The structural
changes in Budapest evidence the “processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements,
and amplified recuperations” that Stoler argues reveal history’s recursivity.
54
Budapest’s
renovations, and the discursive conflations between fascism and communism that underly the

52
István Rév, “Liberty Square, Budapest: How Hungary Won the Second World War,” Journal of
Genocide Research, vol. 20, no.4, 2018, 607-623.
53
Rév, 610.
54
Stoler, 26-27.

169
city’s changes, evidence Hungary’s anxious bid to prove its Europeanness by returning
Hungary’s aesthetic to its Habsburg-era imperial glory. Yet this return is not simply a nostalgic
return to the past; rather, it is a return that seeks to bring Hungary back to the future by excising
the period of its modern history that marked Hungary as poor, underdeveloped, and ideologically
contaminated by communism. While Rév notes that the official Communist narrative of WWII
framed the war as a battle between communism and anti-communism in which Hungary
ultimately emerged on the right side of history, Hungary’s postsocialist politicians, eager to
complete the return to Europe promised by the 1989 narrative of transition, required a new
understanding of history—one that demonstrated the country’s denouncement of both the Soviet
Union and Hungary’s alignment with the Nazis. Through revisionist narratives that blend these
two historical periods together into one long period of foreign occupation, the Hungarian
government now seeks to present Hungary as a country of innocents that was robbed of its
European nobility. Further, it frames Hungary’s response to the contemporary migrant/refugee
crisis as proof that the country is once again taking up the task of defending a Christian Europe
that is threatened by outside (migrant) forces—forces which, in Orbán’s narrative, only Hungary
and its regional allies are willing to keep at bay. In the next section, I examine how Budapest is
not only being used to remediate Hungary’s history through changes in architecture but is also
mobilized as a screen onto which the Hungarian government projects the imminent arrival of a
“migrant invasion.” This visualization of crisis extends from media in public spaces to the
privacy of the home through broadcast news reports that use decontextualized documentary
images to imagine Hungary’s dystopian future. Ultimately, I argue that these media campaigns
form the primary means through which Hungary performs the counter-terror security state and
demonstrates an overidentification with Europeanness/whiteness.

170

Seeing Crisis: Documentary Images of Hungary’s Dystopian “Future”
Like any other major international transit hub, Budapest’s Liszt Ferenc Airport greets
travelers with visions of food, fun, and relaxation. Posters and videos decorate the baggage claim
area, advertising the city’s world-famous thermal baths, picturesque river cruises, shopping and
dining offers, and a lively party scene. Liszt Ferenc Airport sits about thirty minutes or so outside
of Budapest proper, and the simplest way to get to the city’s center district is by hopping on the
100E bus. The route takes travelers along the M4 highway before weaving itself through Pest’s
southern districts and arriving at Deák Ferenc Square. It’s a route I’ve taken many times over the
past few years, and though the landscapes are familiar to me, I remain fascinated by how
roadways and buildings visually transform when the Hungarian government launches national
media campaigns. Dotted along Hungary’s highways are predictable billboards advertising major
telecom companies, international airlines, grocery store chains, live concerts, and global brands
like Apple and McDonald’s in a mix of Hungarian and English scripts. During campaign periods,
whether for elections or in advance of government referendums, government sponsored media
proliferates across cities and along roadways, with multiple, often identical campaign billboards
erected side-by-side. The mix of government campaigns and international corporate
advertisements creates a jarring juxtaposition. The visual cityscape of Budapest, as one example,
seems to advertise and contain two realities: one promises a global party destination, with plenty
of Starbucks and H&Ms to provide the comfort of familiarity to tourists. It reminds us that
Hungary is open for business and welcomes certain kinds of cosmopolitan mobilities. The other,
which is only fully legible to those who are literate in the Hungarian language, constructs the
city-space as alienating, hailing Hungarians to stay on guard against bodies, languages, and

171
sounds that do not “belong.”

Figure 10: A government billboard near Budapest’ s airport reads “Send a message to Brussels:
Migration must be stopped!” It is surrounded by billboards advertising internet services, sports
equipment, and a thrift store.

Figure 11: Multiple copies of the same government billboard advertising the 2019 “Family
Protection Action Plan” line Lajos street in a residential area of Budapest.

The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant and anti-EU media campaigns are wide-
ranging in form, and include billboards, television, print, and web advertisements, national
consultation surveys, and videos shared on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
They are additionally accompanied by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s weekly public radio

172
addresses, in which he comments on issues facing the nation, as well as frequent television
appearances by state representatives affirming the government’s position on migration and the
necessity of secure borders. These campaigns seem to infiltrate every area of both public and
private life, making the “migrant crisis” visually inescapable even as the number of asylum
seekers attempting to transit across Hungary dwindle. They are remarkable in their frequency
and reach; from urban city centers to rural villages, the government’s vision of a “migrant
invasion” is pervasive.
This totalizing vision is an integral component of crafting what Priya Jaikumar terms
“state space.” For Jaikumar, focusing our attention on the state as space, rather than as a set of
institutions, allows us to better grasp the various strategies states employ to authorize their
management of territory, capital, and life, and to produce the nation’s “territorial and spatial
fix.”
55
Thinking in terms of state space “denaturalizes the presumption that states pre-exist a field
of actions, agents, and policies that give them a territorial identity, without negating the existence
of legal, socioeconomic, and discursive domains that are conducive to particular state
formations.”
56
I argue that Hungary’s state media campaigns, which are endlessly affirmed and
remediated by the recentralized Hungarian news media, aim to unsettle (post) Cold War Europe’s
conceptual borders and to reshape the spatial, temporal, and psychic spaces that Hungary is
imagined to occupy. Through these tactics of manifesting and managing Hungary’s visual, fiscal
(through the recentralization of media companies discussed in Chapter 2), and psychic spaces, to
borrow Jaikumar’s words again, the Hungarian government coheres national identity around a
performance of the ideal counter-terror security state by demonstrating the country’s control not

55
Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, (Durham: Duke University Press,
2019), 82.
56
Ibid.

173
only over Hungary’s territorial space and demographic makeup, but also over the temporal space
it inhabits in the modern/colonial world system. Its past and future are recursively (re)written
through a narrative of crisis and counterterrorism that figures the contemporary “migrant crisis”
within the antemurale myth and ongoing battles against communism and terrorism. These
recursive mediations aim to recuperate Hungary’s place within the imagined geography of
Europe proper and, thereby, affirm Hungary’s Europeanness/whiteness.
The Hungarian government’s performance of Europeanization is, perhaps contradictorily,
achieved by separating the conceptual boundaries of Europe away from the institution of the
European Union, and shifting “Europe” from its western core to “Central Europe,” a region
(fictitiously) imagined to be untouched by non-European migration. The term Central Europe,
which is Orbán’s preferred designation for Hungary and its closest neighbors, is itself a
discursive move meant to distance the region from its socialist past and the enduring negative
connotations associated with term “Eastern Europe.” This linguistic play is not new. Historian
Ana Antic reminds us that the antemurale myth was previously invoked to conceptualize a
“Central Europe” distinct from “Eastern Europe” by anti-communist dissidents seeking to prove
that their region belonged to Europe proper:
It was in the anti-Communist dissidents’ proclamations, much hailed by a welcoming West, that
some of the most powerful reinforcements of the antemurale myth have been entertained: Milan
Kundera’s influential essay ‘The tragedy of Central Europe’, affirmed East Central Europe’s
‘Europeanness’ by stating that it was ‘a piece of Latin West which has fallen under Russian
domination’, and that, although it was politically in the East and dominated by ‘Asiatics’ –
Russians, it remained ‘culturally in the West.’ Thus, in the 1980s twist of the myth, it was the
countries of Central Europe – Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia – which defended the true
‘European civilization’ from the non-European barbarians. […] In fact, the post-Communist
‘Europeanization’ confirmed and reinforced the image of Eastern Europe as the bulwark, and the
symbolic walls were constantly erected and occasionally moved further to the southeast. In that
sense, the East European states’ brutal reactions to Middle Eastern refugees might be the sign and
the proof of the former Communist region’s ultimate Europeanization.
57

57
Ana Antic, “At the Gates of Europe: The Eastern European Refugee Crisis,” The Reluctant
Internationalists (blog published by the Centre for the Study of Internationalism, University of London,

174

Antic offers this history in order to trouble the criticisms western European politicians,
journalists, and observers have levied against Eastern European nations throughout the
migrant/refugee crisis. She argues that analyses of the region which attribute illiberalism and
intolerance to Eastern Europe’s communist past ignore the direct role western Europe has played
in encouraging nationalist politics throughout the Cold War and in emphasizing the necessity of
border security as part of EU accession negotiations afterward. They therefore “unwittingly
repeat the antemurale strategy by erecting a conceptual border between East and West and
emphasizing Eastern Europe’s continual ‘lagging behind’ the Western standards [thereby]
displacing blame and responsibility [for the refugee crisis] further to the east or south.” For
Antic, one of the key problems with the antemurale myth is that it can simultaneously cast the
same group in the role of defender and ‘barbarian.’ This duality mars the efficacy of the myth. As
Antic writes: “While Eastern European countries define and prove their ‘Europeanness’ or
Christianness or civilization by distancing themselves culturally from the refugees, they are often
frustrated to find themselves identified as ‘not European enough’ by their Western neighbors, and
by the EU itself.”
58
Hungary’s state media campaigns mobilize this “frustrated whiteness” by
strategically appropriating the logics of the counter-terror security state in order to flip the script:
the region is not one that has failed to uphold European values; rather, Central/Eastern Europe is
recast as the most European region of Europe by virtue of its ability to preemptively detect and
avert the “crisis” of mass migration unfolding in Europe’s west.

Birkbeck), November 2, 2015, http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists/blog/at-the-gates-of-
europe-the-eastern-european-refugee-crisis-2/
For more on the development and use of the term “Central European” to distance Eastern Bloc countries
from socialism and the Soviet Union, see James Mark et al., 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 125-172.
58
Ibid.

175
Hungarian state media regularly appropriate documentary images of the “migrant crisis”
in other European locations in order to demonstrate Hungary’s ability to successfully manage
threats posed by both supra-European and non-European forces. Long after Hungary completed
construction of its southern border wall, making unauthorized entry into the country significantly
more challenging, daily news broadcasts continued to lead with stories about “illegal migrants”
causing chaos in Europe. Some of the leading news headlines from March and April of 2019—a
year in which only 500 asylum seekers were permitted entry into Hungary
59
—stated: “A migrant
caravan carrying tens of thousands of migrants is being organized in Turkey and Greece;” “At
any moment, the migrant caravan may depart from Greece;” “Tear gas was needed to stop the
migrants;” and “The captured Jihadist was roaming free for years within the EU.”
60

59
“Asylum Seekers in Hungary and Persons Granted International Protected Status (2000—2019),”
Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), accessed October 15th, 2020,
https://www.ksh.hu/docs/eng/xstadat/xstadat_annual/i_wnvn003.html
60
“Több Tízezres Migránskaraván Szerveződik Törökországban és Görögországban [A Migrant Caravan
carrying Tens of Thousands is being organized in Turkey and Greece],” Ma éjjel, MTVA, Hungary,
Airdate: March 28
th
, 2019; “Bármelyik Pillanatban Elinndulhat a Bevándorló-Karaván Görögországbol
[At any moment, the migrant caravan may depart from Greece],” Híradó, M1, Hungary, Airdate: April
4
th
, 2019; “Ismét Könnygázzal Kellett Megállítani a Migránsokat [Tear gas was needed to stop the
migrants],” Híradó, M1, Hungary, Airdate: April 5
th
, 2019; “Éveken Át Szabadon Járkált az Unióban a
Felteltelezett Dzsihadista [The captured Jihadist was roaming free for years within the EU],” Híradó, M1,
Hungary, Airdate: March 26
th
, 2019.

176

Figures 12-15: News headlines in Hungarian state media accompanied by decontextualized
images from other European locations.

These headlines were accompanied by decontextualized images of long lines of migrants
and refugees superimposed over maps of the Balkan Route. For example, in a news report that
aired on March 28
th
of 2019, Hungarian state media warns of “migrant caravans” being
organized in Turkey and Greece. The report shows viewers a map of the Balkan Route that
depicts bold red and orange arrows which emerge from Turkey (colored in red) and point in the
direction of the European Union (colored in blue). The tip of the longest arrow appears to pierce
Hungary’s southern border, while the other arrows reach toward Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine
(Figure 6). As the graphic airs on screen, the lead news anchor reports that “the goal [of the

177
migrants] is to set out toward Western Europe” and that they are being helped by humanitarian
organizations. The anchor then claims that experts say “a similar strategy was used in 2015 to
bring mass migration” to the EU.
61
Here, the map evokes a well-organized military strategy; the
arrows give the impression of seamless movement across southeastern Europe, and the Balkan
Route appears as a weaponized infrastructure mobilized by migrants who plan to invade and
occupy Europe. The report’s additional allegation that humanitarian organizations are facilitating
the “illegal” movement of migrants serves to illustrate the danger posed by supra-European
forces that would undermine the sovereignty of nation-states. While the report aims to generate
anxiety about a coming invasion and occupation of Hungary, it also gives viewers the impression
that the Hungarian government is actively surveilling the situation and preparing a defense.
Video montages of skirmishes between migrants and border guards also play underneath
Hungarian reporting on the alleged organization of caravans to Europe. In these televised
segments, Hungarian state-sponsored and state-affiliated news organizations operationalize
decontextualized documentary images of migrants and refugees as visible evidence of Hungary’s
potential future to come. As the aforementioned headlines state, tens of thousands of migrants
will leave for Hungary “at any moment.” Viewers are told the caravan could depart “as soon as
next week,” but the exact moment of its departure remains uncertain. These invocations of an
imminent future-to-come rely on a strategic convergence of three modalities for their efficacy:
television’s ability to structure the flow of time; Hungary’s temporal location in the
modern/colonial world system, which places it “behind” western Europe; and the future-oriented
logic of the counter-terror security state, which gains its power from its ability to predict threats

61
“Több Tízezres Migránskaraván Szerveződik Törökországban és Görögországban [A Migrant Caravan
carrying Tens of Thousands is being organized in Turkey and Greece],” Ma éjjel, MTVA, Hungary,
Airdate: March 28
th
, 2019

178
before they form.
In her seminal essay, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” Mary Ann Doane argues that
television news reporting is “ineluctably linked with time rather than space.”
62
As a medium,
television insists on its “present-ness” and celebrates instantaneity. It “continually stresses “the
‘nowness’ of its own discourse,” transforming the function of film as an indexical trace of the
past into an emphasis on “actuality and immediacy” that threatens to annihilate (historical)
memory.
63
Doane describes television as a “preeminent machine of decontextualization” that
“thrives on its own forgettability.”
64
Its relationship to time is structured by three different modes
through which it might perceive an event: information, crisis, and catastrophe. Information is
comprised by television’s daily organization of temporality into a predictable flow of events. Its
regularity assures viewers that everything is under control. When television perceives an event as
a crisis, time appears condensed but maintains its impression of duration. Crisis demands that
action be taken within a delineated timeframe in order to solve the problem at hand, and
television’s mediation of crisis makes the limitations of time—its ability to “run out” before an
action is taken—palpable to viewing audiences. Catastrophe, meanwhile, is temporally distinct
from crisis. It is an event that happens “all at once,” suspending time and bringing us into contact
with the failure of technology and our inability to prevent death; as such, catastrophe is that
which cannot be contained in television’s ordering of temporality.
65

In a postscript to the original essay, Doane argues that in the post-9/11 era, crisis and
catastrophe are increasingly blurred, and political acts (responding to crisis) are transformed into,

62
Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural
Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 254.
63
Ibid., 255.
64
Ibid., 253-254.
65
Ibid., 255-256.

179
and related to audiences as, catastrophes. This transformation is undergirded by television’s
ideology of liveness, which performs the immediacy, urgency, and presence of events for
viewers. I argue that television’s ideology of liveness and its structuring of temporality is felt
differently for viewing audiences who understand their own temporal location to be ‘lagging
behind’ the places shown on screen. In such cases, television does not communicate “this is
happening here and now” so much as it communicates “this is happening there and will happen
here soon.” Television images can thus become interpreted as images bearing the “future,” and
not necessarily a simultaneous, “live” present. In the case of Hungarian news reporting on the
migrant/refugee crisis, television’s ability to structure sensations of time and to bring Hungarian
audiences this view into the “future” aids the Hungarian government’s performance of the
counter-terror security state. Images of Greece, Italy, France, and other European locations are
used recursively to stand in for a dystopian vision of what Hungary would become if not for the
prescience of the Hungarian government, which is able to accurately predict future risks. In other
words, if the power of the counter-terror security state comes from its ability to preempt threats
and manage risk, the Hungarian state uses decontextualized documentary images of migrants to
visually illustrate the threats it has allegedly avoided, and to insinuate that only the strong-man
politics of Viktor Orbán and the Fidesz party can continue to protect the future of Hungary and of
Europe.
While television news broadcasts beam images of an imminent “migrant invasion” into
people’s private homes, the Hungarian government’s media campaigns project this invasion onto
Hungary’s public spaces. The government’s first wide-scale media campaign targeting migrants
and refugees launched in February 2015, well before the spectacularized images of the
migrant/refugee crisis gripped global news media that summer. That month, in partial response to

180
the January Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, the Hungarian government announced it would be
conducting a “National Consultation on Migration and Terrorism” to determine Hungarian
citizens’ wishes in relationship to immigration and border policies.
66
The consultation process
included a questionnaire sent to voters and was accompanied by months of media campaigning
meant to encourage Hungarians to respond negatively to immigration.

Figure 16: A government billboard advertising the National Consultation on Migration and
terrorism reads, “If you come to Hungary, you must not take away jobs from Hungarians!”

While the national consultation survey asked voters questions such as “Do you think
Hungary could be the target of an act of terror in the next few years?” and “Did you know that
economic migrants cross the Hungarian border illegally, and that recently the number of
immigrants in Hungary has increased twentyfold?,”
67
the billboard campaigns advertising the
consultation appeared to address migrants/refugees directly, with slogans such as “If you come to
Hungary, you must not take away jobs from Hungarians!” and “If you come to Hungary, you
must respect our culture!”
68
The construction of the slogans, which warn “if you come,” invoke

66
Ákos Bocskor, “Anti-Immigration Discourses in Hungary during the ‘Crisis’ Year: The Orbán
Government’s ‘National Consultation’ Campaign of 2015,” Sociology 52, no. 3 (June 2018): 551–68.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038518762081
67
Ibid.
68
Benjamin Novak, “Hungarian government launches xenophobic billboard campaign,” The Budapest
Beacon, June 4, 2015, https://budapestbeacon.com/hungarian-government-launches-xenophobic-

181
the “migrant crisis” as an imminent threat that has not yet but may soon materialize for
Hungarians, while the deceptively avisual
69
design of many of the government’s billboards and
posters, which contain simple text messages on blue backgrounds, allows for the imagined
infiltration of Hungary to extend beyond the figural migrant to include other so-called “foreign
agents” operating in the country, from NGOs, civil society organizations, and academic
institutions, to Hungary’s internal others: namely its Jewish and Roma citizens, but also
unhoused and LGBT+ residents. By emphasizing a constant threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and
cultural way of life, the government’s media campaigns animate multiple anxieties about
Hungarian belonging; traditional, conservative, and rural voters are encouraged to feel as though
an authentic Hungary is being eroded by globalization, liberalism, and migration, while
Hungary’s liberal and progressive voters, as well as its various minoritized social groups, are
aggressively reminded of their undesirability in the eyes of the state.
Indeed, the Hungarian government has attacked all of the aforementioned minority
groups through its various media campaigns and policy changes since 2015. The 2017 “Stop
Soros” campaign, which was widely criticized in international news media for its anti-Semitic
imagery, positioned the Hungarian émigré and philanthropist George Soros as a conspiratorial
ring-leader of Brussels bureaucrats and human traffickers (masquerading as civil society
organizations) seeking to overrun Europe with Muslim migrants.
70

billboard-campaign/
69
Akira Lippit defines avisuality as “a system of visuality that shows nothing, shows in the very place of
the visible, something else: avisuality. Avisuality not as a form of invisibility, in the sense of an absent or
negated visibility: not as the antithesis of the visible but as a specific mode of impossible, unimaginable
visuality. Presented to vision, there to be seen, the avisual image remains, in a profoundly irreducible
manner, unseen. Or rather, it determines an experience of seeing, a sense of the visual, without ever
offering an image. […] All signs lead to a view, but at its destination, nothing is seen.” Akira Lippit,
Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 32.
70
Nick Thorpe, “Hungary vilifies financier Soros with crude poster campaign,” BBC News, July 10, 2017,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40554844

182

Figure 17: A 2019 government campaign message reads “You also have the right to know what
Brussels is planning!” In the foreground is Claude Juncker, who at the time of this campaign was
President of the EU commission. Over his shoulder is Hungarian-American financier, George
Soros.

The “Stop Soros” campaign, along with other anti-EU campaigns run by the Hungarian
government, suggest that high-level politicians in the European Parliament are working under the
instruction of George Soros. As much as these campaigns seek to sow distrust of supra-European
institutions, their primary purpose is to cohere support for autocratic domestic policies that
muffle dissenting voices and ensure Fidesz maintains its hold on power in the country. Hungary’s
“Stop Soros” campaign, for example, culminated in the passage of a series of laws in 2018,
known as the “Stop Soros Laws,” that criminalize the distribution of information to migrants
about the asylum procedure in Hungary and place a twenty-five percent tax on foreign donations
made to NGOs that “support illegal migration,” placing an outsized financial burden on many
NGOs and civil society organizations that are viewed as critical of the government.
71

71
Judith Mischke, “Open Society takes Hungary to court over ‘Stop Soros’ law,” Politico, September 24,
2018, https://www.politico.eu/article/open-society-takes-hungary-to-court-over-stop-george-soros-law-

183
The Hungarian state has also extensively campaigned for Hungarian procreation over
immigration, incentivizing Hungarian women to birth three or more children through significant
tax benefits and special loan programs. Its “Family Protection Action Plan,” announced in 2019,
overtly privileges white, heteronormative nuclear families by enforcing financial and personal
eligibility conditions on those seeking to access the government’s family assistance programs.
72

Such initiatives, among other recent policy changes that attack transgender and queer people
living in Hungary
73
, subsume the state’s biopolitical management of reproduction within a
broader narrative of securing Hungary’s borders and Christian Europe’s future from migrants
who, according to the government, seek to destroy traditional European ways of life.
These campaigns collectively function to imagine—and image—Hungary’s potential
dystopian future and demonstrate the Hungarian government’s decisive, preemptive action
against this future. In enacting a preemptive defense against a “migrant invasion” that unfolds
entirely through media images, the Hungarian government visually produces a crisis against
which it can perform its competency in detecting and preventing threats before they arrive. As

asylum-seekers-ecj/
72
The Family Protection Action Program comes with conditions that require potential beneficiaries to
prove that they have been gainfully employed for at least three years. This, along with other financial and
legal conditions, such as the stipulation that beneficiaries must be in their first marriage, ensure that
Hungary’s Roma citizens are likely to be ineligible for the government’s new family benefits. See: Eszter
Zimanyi, “Family B/orders: Hungary’s Campaign for the ‘Family Protection Action Plan.’” Feminist
Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (2020): 305-309, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2020.1720352
73
Since 2015, the government has banned Hungarian universities from offering degrees in gender studies,
ended legal recognition for transgender people by making it impossible to legally change one’s sex
recorded at birth, and labeled a children’s fairytale book “gay propaganda” for including a story that
featured gay characters. See: Elizabeth Redden, “Hungary Officially Ends Gender Studies Programs,”
Inside Higher Ed, October 17, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/10/17/hungary-
officially-ends-gender-studies-programs; Shaun Walker, “Hungary votes to end legal recognition of trans
people,” The Guardian, May 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/hungary-votes-
to-end-legal-recognition-of-trans-people; Krisztina Than, “Hungarian government calls new children’s
book ‘homosexual propaganda,’ causing stir,” Reuters, October 8, 2020,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-lgbt-book/hungarian-government-calls-new-childrens-book-
homosexual-propaganda-causing-stir-idUSKBN26T2WY

184
Joseph Masco argues:
the ability to shape public fears—to give image and form to threat—is one of the key powers of
the counter-terror state today, and one of its primary domains of sovereignty. […] Historically
crafted images and logics of imminent danger allow feelings to be nationalized and directed to
produce antidemocratic actions and policy.
74

By centralizing its control over Hungarian media networks (as discussed in chapter 2) and
selectively legislating what can and cannot be seen, Fidesz seeks to demonstrate its mastery over
Hungary’s territory through the overwhelming visual display of its campaign messages. As a
result, it may be fair to say that the “migrant crisis” is experienced as an “invasion” in two
distinct senses: first, state media capture invades upon press freedom, increasingly homogenizing
the news stories, images, and information circulating within Hungary, and consequently, the
“migrant crisis,” along with the supposed conspirators behind it (be they George Soros, the EU,
or a global liberal elite), appear inescapable on screens, billboards, and in print. Migrants
themselves, meanwhile, become an invisible figural threat, always on the precipice of breaking
through Hungary’s border defenses.
The Hungarian government’s media campaigns, like the ones discussed above, aim to
make Hungarians feel spatially alienated and increasingly threatened within Hungary’s borders.
Once familiar public places are transformed into uncanny spaces as buildings, bus stops, and
underground metro tunnels are plastered wall-to-wall with identical campaign posters that
ominously exclaim allegations such as, “Did you know? Since the beginning of the migrant crisis
in Europe, more than 300 people have died in terrorist attacks.”
75
Though few migrants and
refugees have entered the country since 2016, the independent Hungarian news site 24.hu found

74
Joseph Masco, Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on
Terror, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 21.
75
Eva S. Balogh, “Orbán’s Anti-refugee Propaganda is a Roaring Success,” Hungarian Spectrum, August
9, 2016, https://hungarianspectrum.org/2016/08/09/orbans-anti-refugee-propaganda-is-a-roaring-success/

185
that numerous false “migrant sightings” had been reported to the police by Hungarian civilians
between 2015 and 2017, demonstrating how effective Hungarian state media campaigns have
been at generating paranoia.
76
If, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, “there is a constitutive and mutually
defining relationship between bodies and cities,” and cities are “the site for the body’s cultural
saturation, its takeover and transformation by images,”
77
the Hungarian government’s use of
public space as a screen for projecting a “migrant invasion” that has not, in reality, taken place
can be conceptualized as a key method of regulating the bodily and psychic dispositions of
Hungarians in order to cohere support for Fidesz’s autocratic policies. These campaigns aim to
make Hungarians feel physically threatened, mobilizing their bodies toward political action.
78

The spatial alienation felt within Hungary is also extended outward to the imagined
spaces of Europe through the images Fidesz circulates of European elsewheres. In 2016, for
example, the Hungarian government mailed an information booklet to approximately four
million eligible voters ahead of its non-binding vote against the EU’s proposed refugee
resettlement quotas for member states. The booklet contained decontextualized images of
migrants, accompanied by statements such as “We cannot allow our future to be decided by
others. Only we Hungarians can decide whom we would like to live with;” “Europe does not
protect its borders;” “Forced settlement endangers our cultures and customs;” and “If we don’t

76
These feared “migrants” turned out to be tourist groups, international students, and even a film crew
shooting on location, among other examples. “Mocskos migráns, büdös bevándorló: gyűlöletbe fulladt
Magyarország [Dirty migrant, stinking immigrant: Hungary is drowning in hatred],” 24.hu, March 11,
2017, https://24.hu/belfold/2017/11/03/mocskos-migrans-budos-bevandorlo-gyuloletbe-fulladt-
magyarorszag/
77
Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” Sexuality & Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992), 242, 249.
78
It is perhaps interesting to note that much of the aggression expressed in Hungary, whether by far-right
anti-migrant groups or by progressive, anti-government activists, has been directed toward public
billboards, posters, and monuments. Far-right groups have repeatedly attacked Jewish cultural centers,
liberal NGO offices, and monuments erected in support of minority groups, while anti-government
protestors regularly deface government billboards and posters.

186
act, in a few decades we will not recognize Europe.” The booklet also directly links migration to
terrorism, warning, “No one can say how many terrorists have arrived so far among the
immigrants,” and provides an infographic containing the number of victims in the Paris,
Brussels, and Nice attacks.

Figure 18: An information booklet sent to Hungarian voters contains an infographic showing a
drastic increase in the number of “illegal immigrants” arriving to Europe.

On the page with the infographic, we see a photograph of a group of migrants gathered
outside. In the center, one person raises an object high above his head, as though he might
aggressively throw the object. This photograph is paired with the headline “The migration of
people is jeopardizing Europe’s future […] Europe does not protect its borders.” On the right
side of the page, an infographic displays the rapid growth of migration in Europe. The
infographic follows a color scale moving from yellow, to orange, to red, with red marking the
most extreme numbers of migration in 2015. This color scheme evokes the memory of the

187
United States’ color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, which is no longer in use, and
France’s color-coded terror alert system, both of which warn citizens of the government’s terror
risk assessment and the likelihood of another terrorist attack occurring. Thus, the infographic in
the Hungarian government’s referendum booklet indirectly reinforces the connection between
migration and terrorism through the use of familiar War on Terror iconography. The shifting
colors of the bar graph function to generate anxiety and excitability over the number of migrants
and refugees in Europe and suggest the viewer needs to be on high alert.

Figure 19: The information booklet shows an infographic containing the number of victims in the
Paris, Brussels, and Nice terror attacks of 2015 and 2016. The headline warns, “Illegal migration
increases the threat of terror.”

Two pages later, the booklet directly addresses the alleged connection between migration
and terrorism by pairing a composite photograph of police officers and an emergency response
vehicle with the headline “Illegal immigration increases the threat of terror.” The booklet
continues:

188
The immigrants largely come from places where European states are engaged in military
campaigns. This significantly increases safety risks. Terrorists consciously and in a well-organized
manner take advantage of the lack of control, so that they can slip in with the crowds of immigrants.
No one can say how many terrorists have arrived so far among the immigrants. […] The Paris and
Brussels attacks proved that there is a very close relationship between immigration and terrorism.

Another infographic displays the number of victims in the Paris, Brussels, and Nice terror
attacks of 2015 and 2016, with the number of dead placed in a red circle containing a white
cross. The use of white crosses reinforces the idea that migrants are murdering Christians,
invoking once more the antemurale myth and the duty of Hungarians to protect Christian Europe.
The booklet then warns readers about supposed “no-go zones” in European cities with high
migrant populations, before imploring Hungarian citizens to vote no on the referendum to
prevent the resettlement of refugees within Hungarian borders.

Figure 20: The booklet displays a map of Europe that shows clusters of red circles denoting
allegedly dangerous neighborhoods and claims there are “hundreds of no-go zones in Europe’ s
major cities.”

189
Here again, we seem to oscillate between visibility and invisibility, the known and the
unknown. The bar graph showing the rapid growth of “illegal” migration asserts the state’s
authority to monitor and surveil migration beyond its own borders and emphasizes Hungary is
taking control of the crisis at hand. However, the text reading “no one can know for sure how
many terrorists have arrived so far” emphasizes contingency. It stresses the constancy of
ambiguous and mutable threats to Hungarians’ safety and sovereignty posed by both migrants,
framed here as terrorists, and by a European Union which would forcibly resettle them within
Hungary’s borders. Similarly, the map of no-go zones shows that Hungary knows where
Europeans cannot enter, but the interior of these zones remains unseen, leaving us to imagine
what an “unrecognizable Europe” might look like. In this way, the campaigns seek to animate
psychic and bodily anxieties of being alienated, out of place, and left behind within Hungary and
Europe at large, and work to cohere an ethnonationalist populism in support of a counter-terror
security state that promises to uphold Hungary’s sovereignty.
Orbán has frequently claimed that western Europe has lost its way and it is now Central
Europe that is advancing Europe’s progress. As Orbán declared in a 2017 speech at the
Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp, “Twenty-seven years ago here in
Central Europe, we believed that Europe was our future. Today, we feel that we are the future of
Europe.”
79
By translating and transhistoricizing the War on Terror into a revisionist Hungarian
historical narrative in which Hungary has resisted and survived multiple occupations by various
foreign powers, the government strategically uses recursive mediations to cohere a far-right

79
Viktor Orbán, “Speech at the 28
th
Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp,” July
22
nd
, 2017. English transcript available at: https://2015-2019.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-
minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-28th-balvanyos-summer-
open-university-and-student-camp

190
populism that on the surface seems to challenge uneven economic, political, and social dynamics
within the EU, but ultimately works to sustain them by further entrenching the racializing logics
of the War on Terror and the securitization of Fortress Europe’s borders. The crises visually
rendered in Hungarian state media, and the spatial and temporal dislocations these crises
generate, ultimately work to construct an image of Hungary as an advanced counter-terror
security state that does not lag behind its western neighbors, but rather, has foreseen the
“destruction” that awaits Europe if it continues on the same timeline. By recursively mediating
Hungary’s history and future, the Hungarian state imagines a new timeline with Central and
Eastern Europe at the forefront of progress, embodying a fantasy of Europeanness and whiteness
that is imagined to be unsullied by the history of colonialism, liberated from the shackles of
communism, and—owing to its anti-migrant policies and stringent border securitization—
ethnically pure.

191

Chapter 4. Living Waste: Scopic Regimes of Disposability and Sites of Refusal

In the summer of 2016, I went to visit my uncle on his farm in Ásotthalom, Hungary.
Ásotthalom, a small, sleepy town of less than four-thousand people, lies on the Hungarian-
Serbian border. It is so close to the border, in fact, that when I go to visit my uncle, my cell
phone service automatically switches to a Serbian provider. For many years, there was no
obvious demarcation of where Serbia ended and where Hungary began. When asked, my uncle
would simply point to the forest of trees behind the open fields surrounding his house and say,
“that’s Serbia, over there.” By 2016, however, things had changed. That summer, my uncle
asked me if I wanted to see the border: the newly completed, one-hundred-seventy-five-
kilometer razor wire fence,
1
patrolled by Hungarian military and police forces, that now cuts
across his land. Curious, I said yes, and we piled into his truck with my cousins. We drove on
unpaved roads around the perimeter of my uncle’s farm, and for a while, I gazed out the window
at a vast, empty field, seemingly absent of any people other than us. As we turned a corner,
another reality became visible. Barbed wire surrounding the border fence dug into the ground
and sliced across a cloudless sky. A soldier bearing his rifle motioned for us to stop our vehicle.
Approaching the window, the soldier asked my uncle “what are you doing here?” My uncle

1
This length refers to Hungary’s border fence along its southern border with Serbia, which was
completed in 2015. That year, Hungary also built border fences along its shared borders with Croatia and
Slovenia. The total combined length of the border fences is 523 kilometers, or 325 miles. In 2017, the
Hungarian government built a second fence along its Serbian border to reinforce the initial razor-wire
fence it erected two years prior. The new fence is electrified and enhanced with heat sensors, cameras,
and loudspeakers that blare recordings in English, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Serbian on an endless loop.
The fence announces: “Attention, attention! I’m warning you that you are at the Hungarian border, at the
border crossing, which is the property of the Hungarian government. If you damage the fence, cross
illegally, or attempt to cross, it’s counted to be a crime in Hungary. I’m warning you to hold back from
committing this crime. You can submit your asylum application in the transit zone.” For an analysis of the
border fence’s mediating function, see: Annastiina Kallius, “The Speaking Fence,” Anthropology Now,
vol.9, no.3, 2017, 16-23.
192
explained that we were on his land, and he wanted to show me, his American niece, what the
border now looks like. “Could we get out of the car and walk along the fence for a bit?” my
cousin asked. We were not near either of the official transit zones
2
and there were no
migrants/refugees in sight. Still, the soldier shook his head. He pointed down the road to a police
van parked a few hundred feet away from us and said, “if you try to go that way, I can’t promise
you that you won’t be arrested.” My uncle thanked the soldier, turned his truck around, and
drove us back home.
Perhaps sensing that our adventure had come to a somewhat anti-climactic end, one of my
cousins invited me inside to show me a collection of items he had found in the forest over the
past year as refugees made their way to the Serbian-Hungarian border. He spoke animatedly
about all the things migrants/refugees were leaving behind as “trash”—jackets, shoes, backpacks,
prayer rugs—and wondered aloud which objects were in good enough condition to sell. “I’ve
even found money, euros!
3
And cell phones,” he told me, “some of which had videos of terrorists
beheading people on them.” My cousin did not show me these videos, nor did I ask to see them,
but he insisted that cell phones containing disturbing media files were proof that ‘terrorists’ were
disguising themselves as refugees and infiltrating Europe.
4
Even if this wasn’t the case, he

2
Until May of 2020, Hungary maintained two official “transit zones,” or more accurately, detention
centers, on its southern border with Serbia: one in the border town of Röszke, and the other in the border
town of Tompa. Ásotthalom, the border town my uncle lives, is located about half-way between these two
zones. Following a European Court of Justice ruling that dictated asylum seekers may not be detained
longer than 28 days in transit zones, the Hungarian government announced it would close the zones
altogether and require that asylum seekers file their requests for asylum at Hungarian consulates in third
countries. See: Edit Inotai, “Hungary to close transit zones after European Court ruling,” Balkan Insight,
May 21, 2020, https://balkaninsight.com/2020/05/21/hungary-to-close-transit-zones-after-european-court-
ruling/
3
Although Hungary is a member state of the EU, it has not yet joined the eurozone. My cousin’s
emphasis on finding euros in the forest is significant for this reason, as euros carry more value than the
Hungarian forint.
4
This same claim has been made by the mayor of Ásotthalom, László Toroczkai, who gained notoriety in
2015 for his anti-migrant YouTube videos. In one of Toroczkai’s recent videos, he claims his police
officers apprehended a group of migrants on the Hungarian-Serbian border and, upon searching their cell
193
suggested, if the people crossing the Balkan Route were willingly discarding belongings left and
right, they certainly were not poor, suffering victims. For my cousin, left-behind belongings
verified that people on the move are ‘economic migrants’ seeking to benefit from Europe’s
higher standard of living. Who, after all, would leave behind wads of cash unless they assumed
they’d soon be earning more? He implied.
As my cousin spoke about the objects he had found, I was struck by the layered meanings
these items carried and the different ideas they could communicate. Sifting through discarded
“trash” in the forest seemed to give my cousin affirmation that the migrants/refugees making
their way to western Europe are “better off” than many Hungarians. The forgotten objects
indicated, to him, migrants/refugees’ presumed carelessness with their belongings and
surroundings; “trash”—and the evidence it allegedly carried, with respect to the discovered cell
phones—marked migrants/refugees as untrustworthy and ungrateful. Yet, while my cousin
treated the migrants/refugees who once carried these objects with a deep skepticism, the objects
themselves were neither entirely disavowed nor disdained. Rather, they represented potentiality:
they could be recuperated, reused, and resold as items independent from the context in which
they were recovered. For my cousin, gleaning the forest presented an opportunity to turn a profit,
to take what had been left as “trash” and reinstate its value. It was not only an act of cleaning up

phones, allegedly found multiple disturbing videos. Toroczkai states, “I’d like to point out that these men
you see in these recordings are not college students, they are not engineering students. These are not [the
types of people] we usually apprehend. In fact, in their mobile phones, we found recordings taken
somewhere, perhaps in the territory of the Islamic State, that show people being beheaded. […] So it is
important to know that those [migrants] who come here now are arriving from an entirely different
civilization.” I reproduce this quotation here to emphasize that the assumption that videos discovered on
abandoned or confiscated cell phones prove ‘terrorists’ are moving among migrants and refugees is not
simply an assumption made by misinformed citizens; it is misinformation propagated as fact by local and
state authorities. For Toroczkai’s video, see: László Toroczkai, “Háború A Kevert Társadalomért [War
for a Mixed Society],” YouTube, December 20, 2020, video, 22:23,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkK2JXdCJMc
194
the environment, but also an act undertaken by a local resident of modest means, in the hopes of
obtaining some extra income.
My experience with encountering the belongings my cousin collected from the forest was
markedly different. For me, these objects, abandoned for reasons we cannot definitively know,
are not so easy to disentangle from the stories they carry. They are neither reducible to waste—
objects depleted of value—nor can they be neatly returned to their status as commodity goods.
Deserted shoes, clothing, and other personal effects may be accidentally left behind, or they may
testify to a sudden, even violent, event that forces migrants/refugees to flee without their
belongings. When I heard about cell phones containing disturbing videos and images, I
wondered if this media had been carried as evidence of a “well-founded fear of persecution,”
archived with the hope of strengthening someone’s asylum application.
5
While my cousin and I
had different interpretations of what the waste in the forest did or did not evince, we seemed, in a
way, to agree on one thing: waste is imbued with documentary value. Indexical in the most literal

5
The Common European Asylum System recognizes asylum as a fundamental right and international
responsibility of countries. The CEAS Qualification Directive clarifies the grounds for granting
international protection and affirms the evaluation of asylum claims should be based on the full and
inclusive application of the 1951 Geneva Convention. International protection is provided to those who
meet the Geneva Convention’s definition of a refugee. However, the CEAS Qualification Directive also
stipulates that the status of “person eligible for subsidiary protection” may be grated to a “third- country
national or a stateless person who does not qualify as a refugee but in respect of whom substantial
grounds have been shown for believing that the person concerned, if returned to his or her country of
origin, or in the case of a stateless person, to his or her country of former habitual residence, would face a
real risk of suffering serious harm.” Serious harm is defined as “the death penalty or execution; torture or
inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of an applicant in the country of origin; or serious and
individual threat to a civilian’s life or person by reason of indiscriminate violence in situations of inter-
national or internal armed conflict.” Video evidence of beheadings and torture may, therefore, be kept as
evidence of a well-founded fear of persecution or serious harm. See Article 2 and Article 15 of “Directive
2011/95/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council.” https://eur-
lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:337:0009:0026:en:PDF

195
sense, discarded objects bear the traces of the people who left them behind, who relied on those
objects to survive harsh journeys across the Balkan Route, and whose fates, to us, remain a
mystery.
Waste—its production and proliferation, management, and elimination—has been a central
preoccupation of state authorities, journalists, artists, and migrants/refugees, throughout the so-
called “migrant” or “refugee crisis.” The crisis itself has in many respects become synonymous
with waste. A Google image search for either “migrant crisis” or “refugee crisis” returns not only
the harrowing photographs of refugees packed tightly in rubber dinghies, but also images of
discarded life jackets and deflated boats piled along Mediterranean coasts, as well as tent
encampments surrounded by overflowing refuse. The “life jacket graveyard” in Lesbos, as one
example, has acquired iconic status. Images of this landfill, where hundreds of thousands of life
vests abandoned by migrants/refugees on the shores of Greece have been accumulated,
accompany countless news reports about migrants/refugees arriving to Europe’s shores. While
the “life jacket graveyard” stands in for the unthinkable number of people who have risked their
lives in dangerous sea crossings to reach Europe—acting as “a massive reminder of the resilience
of the human spirit” that “speaks volumes about the refugee crisis,” as actress and activist Susan
Sarandon put it for The Huffington Post
6
—the buildup of waste along the Balkan Route also
animates multiple anxieties about the unruly and unsanctioned movement of both people and
material things across the continent. These anxieties range from worries about the environmental
impact of the migrant/refugee crisis and the lack of infrastructure in place to adequately care for

6
Susan Sarandon, “The ‘Lifejacket Graveyard’ That Speaks Volumes About The Refugee Crisis,” The
Huffington Post, December 24, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lesbos-life-jacket-
graveyard_n_567487eee4b0b958f656d08a
196
refugees,
7
to fears that nations along the Balkan Route are being turned into a “dumping ground”
for Europe’s unwanted migrants and refugees, to harmful and racist accusations that refugees
pollute and contaminate their surroundings, spreading disease and disarray wherever they go.
8

Waste therefore acts in multiple and unpredictable ways. Waste is at once a remainder and
reminder of those who have travelled onward along the Balkan Route. As matter that persists on
the ground and washes up along shores, its existence creates “geographically specific landscapes
of border-crossings”
9
and facilitates the movement of migrants and refugees by literally marking
the Balkan Route’s directionality, making visible a “rubbish trail toward hope”
10
that maps the
path taken by those who are farther ahead. In this sense, waste is an integral component of the
infrastructure of the Balkan Route. Following Brian Larkin’s conception of infrastructures as
“matter that enable the movement of other matter,”
11
we might think of waste and the Balkan
Route through a relational ontology: each produces, and is produced by, the other, and together

7
As Marios Andriotis, a spokesman for the Lesbos mayor’s office, told Aljazeera in 2016, “We don’t
have the facilities here to recycle the jackets, and it is very expensive to ship them to [mainland Greece]
for recycling.” For Andriotis, the accumulation of lifejackets and rubber dinghies is “an environmental
ticking time bomb, a plastic tsunami.”

As quoted in Patrick Strickland, “Life-jacket mountain a metaphor
for Greece’s refugees,” Aljazeera, December 29, 2015,
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/12/29/life-jacket-mountain-a-metaphor-for-greeces-refugees
8
For example, in 2017, Sopacles Mantel, a Lesbos local, told the Los Angeles Times, “The problem is,
they [refugees] don’t have any respect and they stink. They’re hurting the town and scaring away the
tourists. They just throw their plastic bottles and garbage on the ground and if you ask them to pick it up,
they ignore you. Some of them set fire to their tents. That’s ridiculous! I give you a place to sleep and you
burn it down?” See: Erik Kirschbaum, “Thousands of refugees have been languishing in an overcrowded
camp in Greece for nearly two years,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2017,
https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-greece-refugee-camp-20170905-story.html
9
Juanita Sundberg, “‘Trash-talk’ and the production of quotidian geopolitical boundaries in the USA-
Mexico borderlands,” Social & Cultural Geography, vol.9, no.8, 2008, 874.
10
Journalist Lidija Tomic referred to the Balkan Route as a “rubbish trail toward hope” in a 2015 report
on the migrant/refugee crisis for German news outlet DW. In her piece, a refugee named Zaid tells her, “I
feel a bit ashamed that migrants have left so much garbage along the way. But it makes it very easy to
find the right way to go.” Lidija Tomic, “Migrants Misery Continues in Hungary,” DW, September 10,
2015, https://www.dw.com/en/migrants-misery-continues-in-hungary/a-18705057
11
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol.42,
2013, 329. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.

197
enables the mobility of migrants and refugees. Yet, waste can also be a barrier to movement, a
visual inscription of stasis, and evidence of the state’s organized abandonment of
migrants/refugees, as when it accumulates in and overflows from formal and informal refugee
camps. Waste can ‘stick’ conceptually to migrant/refugee bodies: anti-migrant discourses often
fixate on waste—its visual presence in the city, its stench—to argue that migrants/refugees are
inherently ‘dirty polluters,’ while in sympathetic portrayals of migrants/refugees, waste is used to
emphasize migrants/refugees’ suffering in ways that often reduce migrants/refugees to passive
objects of pity. In both cases, migrants/refugees are visually and discursively inscribed within
and as waste. Waste is therefore a key visual, discursive, and material framework through which
the migrant/refugee crisis is conceptualized, navigated, and managed by various actors.
This chapter situates waste as its primary object of focus to examine how migrants/refugees
and the Balkan Route are relationally transformed through scopic regimes of disposability. I
argue that scopic regimes of disposability, a term I borrow from Sherene Razack, make the
Balkan Route legible as a site of waste disposal for western Europe’s unwanted migrants and
refugees.
12
These unwanted migrants and refugees are concomitantly transformed into living
waste: bodies designated for management, containment, and eventual elimination. I use the term
living waste rather than “human waste” or “wasted lives”
13
to emphasize that while
migrants/refugees are often violently discarded and abandoned by the state, they nonetheless

12
Sherene Razack, “Human Waste and the Border: A Vignette,” Law, Culture, and the Humanities,
December 2017, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872117749524
13
Razack argues that scopic regimes of disposability transform refugees into “human waste,” while
“wasted lives” is Zygmunt Bauman’s term for modernity’s outcasts: people made redundant and
disposable through processes of globalization and modernization. See: Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives:
Modernity and its Outcasts, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
198
continue to enact an “autonomy of migration” and “autonomy of asylum” by insisting on their
freedom of movement and refusing “the forced settlement routes imposed on them.”
14

The first section of this chapter examines how images, discourses, and policies related to
material waste foment racist and reactionary policies toward migrants/refugees in nations along
the Balkan Route. I analyze the phenomenon of illegal pushbacks across national borders along
the Balkan Route as a compulsive, anxious practice of waste disposal that responds to regional
fears of becoming a “dumping ground” for migrants/refugees. I contextualize illegal pushbacks
within the European Union’s accession policies, which provide the framework for satisfactory
“Europeanization” to Central and Southeastern European nations recently admitted to, or still
seeking membership in, the EU. I argue that the logics of border security and waste management
cohere within the EU’s accession policies in such a way that they encourage illegal pushbacks
along the Balkan Route, even though these pushbacks violate international law.
Through these pushbacks, Eastern European state authorities do the dirty work of securing
the European core. They hasten the transformation of the migrant/refugee’s body into living
waste by attacking both migrants/refugees’ physical bodies and destroying migrants/refugees’
property, including their cell phones. I contend that the impulse to destroy cell phones, rather
than simply confiscate them, evidences two desires: first, breaking mobile phones is part of the
state’s aim to make migrants/refugees visibly ‘defective,’ and therefore disposable. By severing
migrants/refugees’ access to media networks and disrupting their ability to harness technology to
aid their survival, the state ensures that migrants/refugees are both physically and digitally
isolated after being “thrown out” on the other side of the border. Second, shattering cell phones
guarantees that migrants/refugees cannot produce their own media narratives; with broken

14
Nicholas De Genova, Glenda Garelli, and Martina Tazzioli, “Autonomy of Asylum? The Autonomy of
Migration: Undoing the Refugee Crisis Script,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol.117, no.2, 2018, 251.
199
phones, migrants/refugees are unable to document police violence against them during these
pushbacks, and their ability to visually document and circulate information about their own
journeys and experiences to others is disrupted. In this way, destroying phones helps to maintain
the scopic regimes of disposability through which migrants/refugees are framed; as people
forcibly disconnected from media networks, migrants/refugees are further reduced to
‘ineffective’ and ‘passive’ bodies to be acted upon, and spoken for, by designated authorities.
While the transformation of refugees into living waste serves to legitimate their detention and
deportation, I argue that illegal pushbacks also betray Eastern European states’ desires to prove
their satisfactory Europeanization by evidencing their ability to effectively manage their borders
and eliminate waste. In theorizing the Balkan Route’s transformation into a site of waste disposal
for unwanted migrants/refugees, I aim to make visible the contradictory role this region plays as
a bordering force for the EU that is itself considered undesirable and full of waste within the
European imaginary. I argue that visually and discursively framing the Balkan Route as a site of
waste disposal ultimately functions to naturalize violations of international law in the region—
seen as violations made by states that are inherently un-European—and distracts public attention
away from the EU’s direct support for violent bordering mechanisms across and beyond the
continent.
In the chapter’s second section, I attend to images of material waste in international news
reporting about camps, detention centers, and refugees along the Balkan Route to trace the
formal, aesthetic, discursive and representational tropes that undergird the relational
transformation of migrants/refugees and the Balkan Route into living waste and a site of waste
disposal respectively. I examine the informal Vučjak camp in Bosnia as an exemplary site where
the logic of disposability is visually and discursively produced. I close-read the BBC’s short
200
documentary on Vučjak, Left Out in the Cold: Bosnia’s Migrant Crisis (2019), to examine how
this sympathetic portrayal of refugees nonetheless reproduces a problematic division between
‘Europe’ and Bosnia through its emphasis on material waste and disease in the camp. By framing
Vučjak as a distinctly ‘Bosnian’ crisis, the BBC documentary leaves intact the myth of another
‘Europe’ beyond the Balkan Route that is a beacon of freedom, prosperity, and equal human
rights. This conceptual division reveals ongoing anxieties about further EU expansion into the
Balkans, despite the EU’s reliance on the region to secure Europe’s borders.
In the final section of the chapter, I turn to artistic appropriations of material waste to ask
how waste opens possibilities for imagining different connectivities and shared histories of
migration and mobility. I focus on Ai Weiwei’s 2016 installation, Laundromat, which features
over 2,000 personal items abandoned by migrants/refugees at the Idomeni camp in Greece during
the camp’s violent demolition by state authorities. I examine Laundromat within the larger scope
of Ai Weiwei’s artistic engagement with the migrant/refugee crisis to consider how the artist
disrupts the discourse of “crisis” that has overdetermined our contemporary era of mass
migration. With Laundromat, Ai Weiwei mobilizes waste to move beyond calls for empathy and
compassion toward migrants/refugees and to instead advance a historically situated politics and
practice of care. The practice of care extended to abandoned objects in Laundromat invites
viewers to consider their interconnectedness with, and responsibility to, contemporary
migrants/refugees.

A Framework of Waste
Waste, materially and conceptually, is marked by a certain excess. Whether it refers to an
excess of the body (as excrement), excessive extraction (as when land is transformed into waste
201
through an over-extraction of resources, or when waste is produced as a byproduct of extracting
resources), or excessive and improper consumption (wasteful spending or the wasting of food),
waste seems to signal some kind of transgression, a crossing of boundaries that demands those
boundaries be refortified and reinforced. ‘To waste,’ as a verb, suggests an active and intentional
violation of order. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb ‘waste’ has a number of
transitive uses, including “to devastate, ravage, ruin (a land or town, its inhabitants, property)”;
“to destroy, injure, impair, damage”; “to consume or destroy (a person or living thing, his body,
strength) by decay or disease; to undermine the vitality or strength of”; and even “to beat up, kill,
murder (someone); to devastate a place, to kill its inhabitants.”
15
Waste, in this sense, functions
similarly to ruination, the term Ann Laura Stoler uses to conceptualize the ways in which
imperial power continues to occupy the present.
For Stoler, “‘ruination’ is an act perpetrated, a condition one is subjected to, and something
that causes loss.”
16
It is also “a political project that lays waste to certain people, relations, and
things that accumulate in specific places.”
17
Stoler argues that by focusing our attention on
ruination as an active and ongoing process, one that differentially distributes what she calls
imperial debris—imperial formations that persist in and through material remains—rather than
on ruins as “dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime,” we can better grasp how the act of
ruining “unites apparently disparate moments, places, people, and objects.”
18
Following Stoler, I
argue that waste, too, is an act, a condition, and a cause of loss that allows us to see both how
imperial formations persist in the present and how disparate people, places, and histories are

15
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Waste, v.,” accessed May 23, 2021, https://www-oed-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/226029?rskey=Xn04sX&result=4#eid
16
Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016):
350.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 346.
202
connected. Waste is also political project. It is a boundary-making and boundary-marking form
that, through its creation and negation, constantly reaffirms that which is valuable and that which
belongs.
Waste, like the ruins and ruination Stoler conceptualizes, is active and alive. Unlike the term
‘ruins,’ however, which tends to evoke images of destroyed landmarks, decimated towns, or the
remnants of ancient civilizations now preserved as archeological sites of interest, waste
encompasses a broader set of valences and, as such, lends itself to a more flexible conceptual
framework. Waste can refer to both destruction (as described above), or to emptiness, as in a
wasteland. Waste is defined as both “uninhabited (or sparsely inhabited) and uncultivated
country; a wild and desolate region, a desert, wilderness” and as “a profusion, lavish abundance
of something.”
19
In this sense, it is a term full of contradictions, a signifier of both lack (a lack of
value, a lack of care) and excess, passivity (wasting time, wasting opportunities) and violence (to
lay waste). For this reason, I find waste to be a productive and helpful framework through which
to think about contemporary migration and the enactment of borders along the Balkan Route.
Thinking with the multiple valences of waste, and the anxieties waste’s presence animates in
relationship to European belonging, allows me to examine the migrant/refugee crisis from
multiple perspectives, from that of the migrant/refugee, to the national and (intra)regional, to the
supra-state perspective of the European Union and to the perspectives of international journalists
and artists engaging the Balkan Route. It also allows me to argue that migrants/refugees and the
Balkan Route are relationally transformed into waste: while migrants/refugees are violently
made into living waste, marked for disposal and eventual death, the Balkan Route is figured as a

19
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Waste, n.,” accessed May 23, 2021, https://www-oed-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/Entry/226027?rskey=Xn04sX&result=1#eid
203
wasteland—as underdeveloped, unmodern, and un-European—and therefore as a naturalized site
for waste disposal.
An analysis of waste’s relationship to migration, bordering, and competing
conceptualizations of Europe must begin, necessarily, with the work of Mary Douglas and
Zygmunt Bauman, two of the most influential thinkers to tackle the cultural, political, and social
implications of (making) waste. Virtually all scholarship engaging debris and disposability from
a sociological or humanistic approach refers to Douglas’s well-known aphorism: “dirt is matter
out of place.”
20
The phrase is evocative, conjuring associations with displacement and
misplacement, as well as—and perhaps most importantly—a refusal to remain in a designated
place. For Douglas, however, what makes something threatening as an impure or contaminated
object is not simply being out of place; a pile of schoolbooks left on the living room floor, for
example, may be out of place, but this will generally not cause the books to conceptually
transform into trash that must be disposed of. Rather, it is the disruption of (social) order that
makes waste threatening, demands a response through cleansing, and requires that the offending
object be contained and removed. In other words, once trash is bagged and placed in a garbage
bin to be transported to an official landfill, it does not disturb public sensibilities. However, when
trash exists as litter in public streets, or overflows from garbage cans in parks, it offends a shared
social contract.
Douglas argues that dirt “implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a
contravention of that order.”
21
Dirt, therefore, does not exist outside of the ordering system that it
upsets, and what is dirt in one context may not necessarily be perceived as dirt in another. It is

20
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York:
Penguin Press, 1970): 50.
21
Ibid., 36.
204
“the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter” that relies on “rejecting
inappropriate elements.”
22
When something is “recognizably out of place [and] a threat to good
order,” it possesses what Douglas calls a “half-identity” that marks it as dangerous. This half-
identity reveals the material’s connection to a previous state of being—a previous function or
use, a previous attachment—but marks it as “unwanted bits of whatever it was [that it] came
from.”
23
Its visibility as something unwanted or unneeded thus threatens the maintenance of
order. Therefore, to keep order, the offending material must be further transformed into waste—
pulverized, dissolved, decomposed—and disposed of in the correct location, such that all traces
of a previous identity are eradicated. “So long as identity is absent,” Douglas writes, “rubbish is
not dangerous. It does not even create ambiguous perceptions since it clearly belongs in a
defined place, a rubbish heap of one kind or another.”
24
Douglas is careful to note that ideas
about dirt and impurity (and by extension about what is valuable versus what is disposable) are
culturally and historically contingent. Nevertheless, her work emphasizes that waste never exists
a priori. Rather, it is produced through processes of selection, sorting, segregation, and ordering.
Through these processes, waste is stripped of its previous identity and individuality.
Douglas’s attention to the relationship between the making of waste and the stripping of
identity has informed a number of scholarly engagements with disposability as it relates to
human beings. Perhaps the most prominent of these engagements is Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted
Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Bauman builds from Douglas’s work to theorize how human
beings become figured as waste in the modern era. For Bauman:

22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 161.
24
Ibid., 161.
205
the production of ‘human waste,’ or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and
‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be
recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inescapable
side-effect of order-building […] and of economic progress.
25

While this production takes place at multiple sites and through multiple processes, Bauman
nevertheless figures the border of the nation-state as one of the preeminent sites of waste
production and management. The sole purpose of the border is, for Bauman, “the incessant
activity of separation.” Though globalization has weakened the power of the nation-state in many
respects, Bauman claims the nation-state still retains “the foundational, constitutive prerogative
of sovereignty: [the] right of exemption.”
26
This right of exemption is practiced most visibly at
the border, which “divines, literally conjures up, the difference between [useful products and
waste]—the difference between the admitted and the rejected, the included and the excluded.”
27

For Bauman, the border continuously reproduces itself through collecting and disposing that
which has been marked as waste; yet, because the boundaries between ‘valuable material’ and
‘waste’ are never fully guaranteed, border zones remain sites of ambivalence, uncertainty, and
danger, that require constant vigilance and maintenance. While the border is the preeminent site
of waste management, the refugee is, for Bauman, one of the key figures of human waste, and
the refugee camp one of the primary sites of waste disposal. It is in the camp that Bauman argues
refugees are fully transformed into human waste: “Inside the fences of the camp, [refugees] are
pulped into a faceless mass, having been denied access to the elementary amenities from which
identities are drawn and the usual yarns of which identities are woven.”
28
It is here, in the camps,
detention centers, and prisons, that Bauman suggests the state—no longer finding it profitable to

25
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004): 5.
26
Ibid., 33.
27
Ibid., 28.
28
Ibid., 77.
206
‘recycle’ living waste in the era of globalization, as the surplus population is so large—aims
instead to “speed up its ‘biodegradation’ and decomposition while isolating it as securely as
possible from the ordinary human habitat.”
29

While Bauman asserts that it is the camp that transforms the refugee into human waste,
Sherene Razack suggests that this transformation in fact occurs prior to the state’s final disposal
of the migrant/refugee. Razack argues that migrants/refugees are transformed into waste through
“scopic regimes of disposability” that mark their bodies as defective and legitimate their
disposal.
30
For Razack, disposability is “a visual inscription on the flesh of the body’s value in
the social order” and a “racial condition, the mark of sub-humanity.”
31
This scopic regime,
understood as a dominant mode of seeing, is a violent process that aims to destroy the body’s
unity, often by separating the body into fragments in what is ultimately “an intentional offence to
the ontological dignity of the victim.”
32
Razack attunes readers to the ways in which
migrants/refugees are transformed into waste through actions that speed up processes of
biodegradation. This can take the shape of medical neglect and non-assistance, physical and
psychological violence, and through forcing migratory pathways through terrains that are hostile

29
Ibid., 86-87.
30
The term “scopic regime” originates with Christian Metz, who used it to distinguish between cinema
and theater. Visual scholar Martin Jay subsequently popularized the term as a means of describing
dominant and contested modes of seeing. According to Jay, the term “scopic regime” has since been
expanded to “define visual experiences mediated, even constituted, by other technologies, such as
photography, television, and digital computers, as well as to postulate significant gender differences
(more often a regime fostered by the ‘male gaze’).” It is also used to describe “systems of visuality
constructed by a cultural/technological/political apparatus mediating the apparently given world of
objects in a neutral perceptual field. In this more totalizing usage, ‘scopic regime’ indicates a non-natural
visual order operating on a pre-reflective level to determine the dominant protocols of seeing and being
on view in a specific culture at a specific time.” See: Martin Jay, “Scopic Regime,” in The International
Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Wolfgang Donsbach (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
2008), 4515.
31
Sherene H. Razack, “Human Waste and the Border: A Vignette.” Law, Culture and the Humanities,
December 2017, 2-3.
32
Ibid., 3.
207
to human survival. In all cases, these processes legitimate the disposal of migrants/refugees by
making their bodies visually legible as decaying matter and consequently as waste.
Stoler, Douglas, Bauman, and Razack all, in different ways, illuminate the ways in which
making waste is a political process of decision making that is also deeply visual. Practices of
classifying, sorting, and segregating the valuable from the disposable rely on aesthetic choices:
how something looks, feels and smells impacts whether it will be kept or discarded. Identifying
and making waste also shares much in common with producing and maintaining territorial
borders. Both rely on delineating binaries of inside/outside, belonging/unbelonging,
safe/threatening, and clean/contaminated. Finally, as Stoler and Razack argue, waste is racialized
and racializing, and its containment and elimination goes hand-in-hand with fantasies of
maintaining racial purity.
In this chapter, I build from these arguments and suggest that the Balkan Route and
migrants/refugees are relationally transformed through scopic regimes of disposability that mark
the latter as living waste and the former as a naturalized site for waste disposal. In borrowing
Razack’s term, I seek to expand her concept to think through how not only bodies but also
environments are transformed into waste through different visual and discursive regimes. Here, I
consider not only specific sites like the camp or the detention center, but also larger swaths of
area, namely the territories that comprise the Balkan Route. I suggest that the Balkan Route’s
designation as a suitable site for containing and disposing of the European Union’s unwanted
migrants and refugees is not only the result of its geographic positioning on the exterior of
Europe’s borders, but is also tied to historical, racializing imaginations of the region as wasteful
and polluted. These visual and discursive frameworks, which are reproduced not only in news
media but in EU policy as well, once again erect a conceptual division between western Europe,
208
which ostensibly manages its waste in an effective manner, and Eastern Europe, which allegedly
remains underdeveloped in infrastructure, management capacity, and democratic sensibilities.

So European: Managing Waste at the Borders of the EU

Figure 1: A European Union infographic advises countries in the “Western Balkans” about the
required standards for membership.
209

On the European Commission’s official webpage, one can find a wealth of information
about the European Union’s enlargement policy, funding recipients, monitoring reports, and the
current status of countries seeking entry into the EU. Under a section labeled “Conditions for
Membership,” a small informational box titled “Key Links” appears in the right-hand column.
As of May 23, 2021, there is only one link listed in this area: “Enlargement policy—applying EU
standards.” When I clicked on this link to learn more, the website opened an illustrated map of
Europe (see Figure 1). The drawing is whimsical and childlike, featuring cartoon icons of
animals, flowers, mountains, food, skyscrapers, and smiling people, some of whom chat on cell
phones while others bathe in the sea. Solar panels and windmills dot the landscape, ships sail in
the ocean and airplanes fly overhead. Every EU member-state is shaded in light green. National
borders appear as faint outlines and disappear underneath the train tracks and roadways that
traverse the continent. On the roadways, two police vans patrol Europe’s perimeter (one van
appears within Romania’s territory, the other is positioned near Germany’s border with
Denmark). Through its charming icons, the infographic imagines a Europe that is connected,
safe, equal (as suggested by its undifferentiated color scheme) and almost whole. Only a few
more countries remain outside of the Union. Shaded in either dark green (if they are potential
candidate states) or grey (if they do not intend to join the EU or are not under consideration for
membership), these nations appear as missing puzzle pieces of the European picture, waiting to
be filled in. Luckily, the EU’s illustrated infographic provides candidate states a helpful roadmap
towards their desired destination: full reunification and integration with the EU.
210
Appearing in a text box at the top of the map is the EU’s slogan for further enlargement
in the region it refers to as the Western Balkans
33
: “So similar, so different, so European.” The
text proclaims, “In the European Union (EU) there is no economy class; all countries must meet
first class standards if they want to join.” The infographic then provides five examples of areas in
which candidate states must meet high “European standards” before advancing toward EU
membership. Candidate states must be “stable and more democratic;” “economically sound;”
have an “improved quality of life;” offer “better and safer connections;” and finally, they must
create and maintain a “cleaner environment.” These categories map onto different sections of the
EU acquis, including rule of law, free movement of goods, food safety, transport, energy, and
environment, but their expression in the illustrated infographic is notably marked by an air of
condescension. Of particular interest is the EU’s articulation of its standards for a cleaner
environment. While the “Environment” section of the acquis itself states broadly that “EU
environmental policy aims to promote sustainable development and protect the environment for
present and future generations,”
34
the EU’s infographic on applying European standards opens
instead with a warning: “Pollution crosses national borders. To become a member of the EU,
countries must meet high environmental standards, meaning fresher air and cleaner water for
everyone.”
I read the EU’s warning that “pollution crosses national borders” as indicative of deep
anxieties about the unsanctioned movement of waste, both material and human, from the Balkans

33
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia comprise the
Western Balkan nations currently seeking membership in the EU. In the infographic reproduced above,
Turkey is also included as a potential member-state on the map. However, it is not considered part of the
Western Balkans region and is generally not included in EU publications specific to Western Balkans
expansion.
34
European Commission, “Conditions for Membership: Chapters of the Acquis,” European Commission,
Accessed May 23, 2021, https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/conditions-
membership/chapters-of-the-acquis_en
211
toward Europe’s core. The infographic sutures being “European” to being acceptably “clean”
and implies that candidate states must contain and eliminate their waste not for the sake of their
own environmental health, but rather to protect the environmental cleanliness and purity of their
neighbors. In other words, pollution is figured as threatening not because it exists but because it
moves. So long as the threat is adequately contained and managed, candidate states will
presumably inch closer to European belonging. This warning about pollution’s mobility thus
illuminates a convergence in the logics of waste management and border security; for candidate
states seeking membership in the EU, proper Europeanization and modernization hinges on their
ability to securely manage the circulation of people, material goods, and (living) waste.
European anxieties over unsanctioned movement of people and waste pervades the
earliest EU policy communications on enlargement to Eastern Europe. In 1998, as Eastern
European countries including Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia,
among others, entered consideration for EU membership, the European Parliament issued a
briefing on “Environmental Policy and Enlargement.” This briefing opened with the assertion
that:
Environment is a major challenge for the enlargement. The difference between the EU’s and
CEECs’ [Central and East European countries] standards of environmental legislation would, in
the Commission’s view, lead to a serious distortion of competition in the internal market and
jeopardize any effective environmental policy pursued by an enlarged Community.
35

EU enlargement to Eastern Europe raised concerns about various kinds of unruly movement and
contamination, from radioactive food and toxic chemical substances spreading outward from the
region’s soil and water, to worries about lax environmental policies unfairly drawing businesses

35
European Parliament, “Briefing No. 17: Enviromental Policy and Enlargement,” (EU Parliament
Briefing, Brussels, March 23, 1998),
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/enlargement/briefings/17a2_en.htm#F2
212
away from western European nations,
36
to fears that lower standards of living in Eastern Europe
would lead to massive influxes in migrant labor to the west once CEECs joined the EU. Similar
fears persist today as the EU considers expanding further into the Balkans and potentially to
Turkey. They have only been exacerbated by the so-called migrant/refugee crisis, which has
further upset the set of ordered relations between the EU, its individual member states, and its
neighborhood partners, as well as generated new and pressing environmental concerns. Yet,
when considering how the EU evaluates environmental standards, we must also ask which
European states are understood to be particularly wasteful or polluted, and why?
In her book From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History, Zsuzsa Gille argues
that the European Union’s imposition of environmental reforms on Eastern Europe is shaped by
western, Cold War-era discourses that frame state socialism as a uniquely wasteful economic
order. Gille writes that state socialism is often described as a system “polluted to the extreme by
its wastes. Visual representations of state socialism invoked the image of the state socialist
landscape most familiar in the West—a gray still life composed of shoddy goods; people wearing
poor, idiosyncratic clothes surrounded by houses that looked like they could fall apart at any
time; and piled-up garbage and filth.”
37
Gille troubles this narrative by providing a thorough
account of environmental programs in socialist Hungary, including compulsory material reuse
and recycling measures. According to Gille, however, these programs largely disappeared after
the country transitioned to a capitalist economy in the 1990s, during which time the broader post-
socialist region’s relationship to waste transformed. As Elana Resnick notes, during the early
transition years, Eastern European states viewed their increase in waste production as a positive

36
Ibid.
37
Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist
and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007): 1-2.
213
sign of economic development, growing privatization, and a successful shift toward a free
market. Their relationship to waste production would soon change again, however, as the
European Union began emphasizing that “progress” required a reduction in material waste and
efficient waste management infrastructures.
38

As part of EU accession negotiations, the EU demanded candidate countries conform to
the Union’s environmental standards and policies. To help with this process, Gille writes, the EU
provided Eastern European candidate states with millions of euros to establish extensive
networks of dumps and waste incinerators, all of which were to be built by Western European
capital and technology.
39
Yet, while the EU funded new incinerators in Eastern Europe to deal
with what it perceived as the region’s inefficient waste management, western European nations
were also exporting their own material waste to Eastern European countries.
40
In short, Gille
suggests that western Europe’s image as a “clean” region with effective waste management
practices and progressive environmental standards in fact relies upon practices of exporting
waste elsewhere, to places in Eastern Europe and in the Global South. It is in these designated
wastelands that western Europe’s unwanted refuse is held and eventually incinerated. Thus, the
Balkan Route was already imagined and understood as a dumping ground for material waste long
before contemporary migrants/refugees ever found themselves suspended (and effectively
disposed of) within the region. Having been shaped by these scopic regimes of disposability that
imagine the region as dirty, poor, and underdeveloped, the Balkan Route becomes naturalized as
a logical site for the disposal of both material and living waste.

38
Sean Guillory, Viktor Pál, and Elana Resnick, “Trash in (post-)Communist Eastern Europe,” April 9,
2021, in SRB Podcast, produced by University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian, East European and
Eurasian Studies, podcast, MP3 audio, 1:02:30, https://srbpodcast.org/2021/04/09/trash-in-post-
communist-eastern-europe/
39
Gille, 5.
40
Ibid. 183-185.
214
Importantly, western Europe’s practice of waste exportation is also a marker of racialized
difference. As Resnick’s work on Roma street cleaners in Bulgaria demonstrates, it is often
people from racialized communities who do the labor of cleaning urban environments and who
live in neglected areas close to landfills, incinerators, and sites of toxic waste. Resnick suggests
racialized communities do not have the luxury of forgetting about what they throw away. Rather,
waste becomes an intimate part of racialized life and “a site where racial hierarchy
materializes.”
41
If Gille’s work demonstrates how Eastern Europe has long been imagined and
mobilized as a landfill for western Europe’s unwanted material refuse, Resnick’s research
attunes us to the ways in which material refuse marks racial difference in a region where race is
often obscured by discourses about ethnicity and culture. The Balkan Route’s figuration as a
dumping ground for unauthorized migrants/refugees cannot be understood outside of this history
and its racializing implications. As the EU policies discussed earlier demonstrate, candidate
states are compelled to improve both their border security and waste management infrastructures
in order to join the European Union. Importantly, as discussed in chapter 2, the EU frames these
practices as part of a necessary process of modernization and “Europeanization,” processes that
are themselves racially coded as ‘white.’ In short, “Europeanizing,” for states along the Balkan
Route, requires that these states agree to do the dirty work of containing and disposing of both
literal refuse and of unwanted migrants and refugees on behalf of core EU countries. At the same
time, under the European Union’s own logic, a truly European (and therefore truly white) nation
would not contain excess waste, whether in the form of material waste or human waste. Put
differently, the (perceived) presence of excess material and living waste along the Balkan Route
conceptually marks the region as materially polluted and racially contaminated. By mobilizing

41
Guillory, Pál, and Resnick. See also: Elana Resnick, “The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the
Racialized Anthropocene,” American Anthropologist, online first, 2021, 1-15.
215
the nations along the Balkan Route to perform the dirty work of waste management and border
securitization, the EU betrays its continued racialization of Eastern Europeans and unsettles the
region’s own perception of itself as European and white in the process. I argue that this tension
between managing (living) waste in order to meet European standards and recognizing the
presence of waste as a mark of racialization animates deeply felt anxieties about European (and
racial) belonging in nations along the Balkan Route. These anxieties undergird violent anti-
migrant policies and practices in individual nation-states across the region, which seek to
eliminate migrants/refugees from the nation’s territory.
Since 2015, politicians, aid workers, and journalists have repeatedly described nations
along the Balkan Route as dumping grounds for unwanted migrants/refugees. In 2015, for
example, Slovenia’s President Borut Pahor declared that Slovenia must not become “a pocket in
which refugees would be stuck” if Austria or Germany stopped admitting asylum seekers.
42

Similarly, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Boiko Borisov announced that Bulgaria, Romania, and
Serbia were “standing at the ready, if Germany and Austria close their borders, not to allow our
countries to become buffer zones.”
43
That same year, Fredrik Wesslau, European Council on
Foreign Relations Alumni and Director of the Wider Europe Programme, warned, “The Western
Balkans is turning into a dumping ground for refugees as EU member states fortify their borders
while refugees continue to head towards Europe.”
44
Human Rights Watch’s Deputy Europe and
Central Asia Division Director, Benjamin Ward, similarly cautioned that “While increasing aid
to Turkey is much needed, any EU plans to turn Turkey, Serbia, and Macedonia into dumping

42
BBC Staff, “Migrant crisis: Balkan states threaten border closures,” BBC, October 25, 2015,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34630400
43
Ibid.
44
Fredrik Wesslau, “EU Should Bring Western Balkans into the Refugee Relocation Scheme,” European
Council on Foreign Relations, September 21, 2015,
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_eu_should_bring_the_western_balkans_into_the_refugee_2025/
216
grounds for asylum seekers would be deeply misguided and could put lives at risk.”
45
Two years
later, Andrea Contenta, the humanitarian affairs officer for Médecins Sans Frontieres in Serbia,
told The Guardian, “Serbia risks becoming a dumping zone, a new Calais where people are
stranded and stuck,”
46
and in 2018, Irish Times ran a story by Daniel McLaughlin with the
headline “Serbia a ‘dumping ground’ for migrants blocked by EU states.”
47
These public
statements and headlines reflect prominent worries that the region is intentionally being
transformed into a site for the containment and disposal of the EU’s unwanted migrants/refugees.
I argue that these anxieties about becoming a “dumping ground”—anxieties which are driven by
the racialized implications of what being a “dumping ground” means in the European
imaginary—undergird the compulsive practice of violent and illegal pushbacks in different
border zones along the Balkan Route. The practice of illegal pushbacks from Hungary into
Serbia, Slovenia into Croatia, Croatia into Bosnia and Herzegovina, and so on, amounts to a
practice of living waste disposal that aims to displace the migrant/refugee crisis further and
further south in an attempt to affirm each individual country’s place within the conceptual
boundaries of Europe proper. Illegal pushbacks are therefore not anomalies out of line with EU
policies and values, despite being technically illegal, and they do not demonstrate a ‘turning
away’ from EU values. Rather, I read illegal pushbacks as evidence of a strong identification

45
Human Rights Watch, “EU: Shifting Responsibility on Refugees, Asylum Seekers,” Human Rights
Watch, October 7, 2015. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/07/eu-shifting-responsibility-refugees-
asylum-seekers
46
Andrew MacDowall and Emma Graham-Harrison, “Influx of refugees leaves Belgrade at risk of
becoming ‘new Calais,’” The Guardian, January 14, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/14/influx-of-refugees-means-belgrade-risks-becoming-
new-calais
47
Daniel McLaughlin, “Serbia a ‘dumping ground’ for migrants blocked by EU states,” Irish Times, April
2, 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/serbia-a-dumping-ground-for-migrants-blocked-
by-eu-states-1.3447338

217
with Europe forged through attempts to maintain order and keep the nation ‘clean.’ In the next
section, I reproduce and analyze migrant/refugee testimonies of illegal pushbacks to demonstrate
how the practice of pushbacks mark migrants/refugees as living waste through scopic regimes of
disposability and, therefore, legitimates their disposal in the eyes of the state.

Illegal Pushbacks: Transforming migrant/refugee bodies into living waste
As nations along the Balkan Route closed and fortified their borders between late 2015
and early 2016, the Balkan Route was rerouted through increasingly hostile terrain. Over the
summer of 2015, when the Balkan Route functioned like a corridor, migrants/refugees traveled
from Greece across North Macedonia, through Serbia, and into Hungary before arriving to
Austria. This pathway was ideal not only because of its infrastructure (many migrants/refugees
were able to board trains and buses, or at the very least follow train tracks toward their
destination), but also because the geographic terrain it traversed—particularly between Serbia,
Hungary, and Austria—is comprised of flat, open fields that, prior to the construction of border
fences, were relatively easy to walk across. However, once Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia
militarized their shared borders with each other and with Serbia, migrants/refugees were forced
to move into Bosnia and Herzegovina in the hopes of finding another pathway toward western
Europe. There, they attempt to cross the mountainous terrain that separates Bosnia from Croatia.
This rerouting of the Balkan Route is a bordering and deterrence tactic that pushes
migrants/refugees into what anthropologist Jason De Leon terms “hostile terrain:” geographic
areas that are extremely difficult to navigate and environmentally dangerous to human life.
48

Added to the physical difficulty of crossing Bosnia’s steep mountains is the threat of unexploded

48
Jason De Leon, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2015), 31.
218
landmines from the Yugoslav Secession Wars of the 1990s. This material waste, a remainder of
an earlier refugee crisis in Europe, threatens now to debilitate and kill migrants/refugees who
attempt to enter Croatia’s territory. Though landmines are a real and present danger in the former
Yugoslav region, it is the shockingly violent and illegal border pushbacks committed by police
forces from multiple nations that have most effectively prevented migrants/refugees from
continuing their journeys northward.
Illegal pushbacks occur when migrants/refugees attempting to cross unauthorized from
one country to another are apprehended near the border and collectively expelled by force back
to the country they crossed from. The practice is illegal because it violates migrants/refugees’
right to ask for asylum at the border and have their individual cases evaluated. International news
media has most frequently reported on illegal pushbacks committed by Croatian and Hungarian
police, but migrants/refugees have also testified to illegal pushbacks by North Macedonian,
Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian police, among others.
49
In countless testimonies,
migrants/refugees speak of being severely beaten, abused, and humiliated by police in the
process of being “pushed back.” Take, for example, the following testimony collected by the
Hungarian civil society organization, MigSzol (Migrant Solidarity Group of Hungary):
At a night in January I made an attempt to cross the Hungarian border. […] We were walking
through the forest about 15 kilometers north of the border when we heard cars coming and
decided to hide. Four marked police cars arrived. There were around fifteen policemen with
trained dogs, heat-sensors, and handguns. […] They rounded us up and released dogs on us.
Then, without asking any questions first, the police officers started kicking and beating us.
Afterwards they searched each of us, checking pockets and backpacks, destroying money and
smartphones. Money was shred up in front of our faces, smartphones smashed on the ground.
Policemen took out batteries and SIM cards from each phone and destroyed them separately.
Then they collected all the warm clothing we had: jackets, gloves, hats, scarves, shoes and socks,
leaving us only in light jumpers and trousers. Every person who wore more than one pair of
trousers was told to take them off. Meanwhile, one more police car came. Newly arrived officers

49
“Balkans: New Report Details Illegal Pushbacks and Border Violence,” European Council on Refugees
and Exiles, August 28, 2020, https://www.ecre.org/balkans-new-report-details-illegal-pushbacks-and-
border-violence/
219
joined the rest. They hit one of my friends with a stick, severely cutting his head. Then they
ordered all of us to sit in a line, with our legs spread, hands on our knees and bowed heads, and
started pouring the water they had found in the bags on our heads and clothes. […]

When the 'game' was over they put us in police cars and drove back to the Serbian border. They
set the air-conditioning to maximum in order to lower the temperature. We were brought back to
the border where we were forced to read aloud a statement showed to us on a piece of paper,
written in Urdu (there were also versions in Pashto and Farsi), saying that we crossed the border
illegally and that we didn’t experience any verbal or physical violence from the Hungarian side.
Those who didn’t read loud enough were yelled at and threatened. While reading the statements,
we were recorded by the officers. […] Afterwards, at around 8 in the morning, we were passed
over to the Serbian side. […] Only some [got their] wet shoes or socks back, so [the rest of us]
took off some of the remaining clothes we had and wrapped them around our feet before starting
to walk backwards. The temperature was down to -7 degrees [Celsius] at the time and it was
snowing.
50

In the dead of winter, migrants/refugees are forced to strip their clothing, surrender their
belongings, endure multiple rounds of beatings, and withstand extreme exposure to the elements.
The tactics used in the illegal pushback described above aim to speed up the biodegradation of
the migrant/refugee’s body. Speeding up biodegradation is a manifestation of the scopic regimes
of disposability that mark migrants/refugees as waste to be discarded. As Razack argues, “the
deliberate action that produces the outcome of wasted bodies is in fact a chain of events.”
51
By
physically breaking the migrant/refugee’s body through punches, kicks, and hits with batons, and
by drenching the body and its clothing with water in below freezing temperatures, Hungarian
police hasten, and make visible, the body’s decline and defectivity. Once visibly deteriorated, the
disposal of living waste is legitimized. Containment and death are interpreted as natural
outcomes of the wasting away of body and mind.
Police engaging in illegal pushbacks not only aim to destroy the migrant/refugee’s body;
they also aim to destruct the technologies the body relies upon for survival. In reports and first-

50
MigSzol, “Testimony #6 – Cold,” MigSzol: Migrant Solidarity Group of Hungary, February 19, 2017,
http://www.migszol.com/border-violence/testimony-6-cold
51
Razack, 3.
220
hand accounts of illegal pushbacks, migrants/refugees frequently state that police forces break,
rather than confiscate, migrants/refugees’ cell phones. Mobile phones seem to animate excessive
anger in police officers, as related by another migrant/refugee who provided testimony to
MigSzol:
There was one man and one lady, they were looking through our phones. They found something
on one person's phone and this man got beaten more than any of us. They've beaten him so badly
that there was blood coming out of his ears. I don't know what it was, what they found, he was a
regular refugee, he wasn't anyone special. They broke everyone's phones but more than anything
they beat us.
52

What would compel border police to destroy mobile phones rather than confiscate them? Would
it not make more sense to take the phones in order to extract their data and gather intelligence on
the networks of communication migrants/refugees use in order to facilitate their travel? To be
clear, there are numerous reports of police confiscating mobile phones. Yet the frequency with
which migrants/refugees testify to having their phones destroyed in front of them and returned to
them with shattered screens and defunct SIM cards suggests the desire to visually inscribe the
migrant/refugee as waste extends beyond the physical body as form to the technologies the body
uses to survive and communicate.
Mobile phones are a necessary tool for migrants/refugees’ survival. Migrants and
refugees rely on their phones to navigate their journeys, access important information and
resources, maintain transnational connections with family, friends, and community, and to
document their own experiences, including their experiences of violence at the hands of police.
53

52
MigSzol, “Testimony #7—Teargas,” MigSzol: Migrant Solidarity Group of Hungary, March 3, 2017,
http://www.migszol.com/border-violence/testimony-7-teargas
53
Marie Gillespie, Souad Osseiran, and Margie Cheesman, “Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to
Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances,” Social Media + Society, January-March 2018, 1-
12. See also: Marie Gillespie et al., “Mapping Refugee Media Journeys: Smartphones and Social
Networks,” The Open University/France Medias Monde, May 13, 2016,
https://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/sites/www.open.ac.uk.ccig/files/Mapping%20Refugee%20Media%20Journe
ys%2016%20May%20FIN%20MG_0.pdf
221
A wealth of excellent scholarship produced since 2015 has addressed concepts such as the
“connected migrant”
54
and the “digital migrant,”
55
attending to the ways in which
migrants/refugees engage in different media practices to plan their travel and assimilate to host
societies. New and vital work on digital technologies and migration has also highlighted how
these technologies allow the state to surveil and track migrant communities.
56
The act of
destroying cell phones, then, rather than confiscating phones to extract data from them or even to
resell them on the market, suggests three things. First, transforming migrants/refugees into waste
relies not only on causing physical degradation to the body but also on disrupting or destroying
access to the media technologies and networks that migrants rely upon for their survival. By
breaking phones, police erect a digital border between migrants/refugees and their networks of
communication. This logic is affirmed in a refugee testimony given to the Croatian grassroots-
activist-group-turned-NGO, Are You Syrious, at an informal migrant camp in Velika Kladusa,
Bosnia. After being illegally pushed back by the Croatian police, a migrant/refugee named
Hisham recalls walking alone in the darkness, with no sense as to where he was:
No light, no nothing. You can’t see a single thing…I don’t have GPS or anything…When I
could hear the police beating people again, when I heard the screams, I came back. I feel this is
not Bosnia, this is Croatia, and go another way. Maybe 10 minutes, after this I see the light. I
hear some people say ‘Hey, hey, come here, this is the way, come on.’
57

54
See: Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi, “Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitanization,”
Popular Communication, vol 16, no. 1, 2018, 4-20.
55
See: Koen Leurs and Madhuri Prabhakar M, “Doing Digital Migration Studies: Methodological
Considerations for an Emerging Research Focus” in Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies,
eds. Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Evren Yalaz, (Cham, Switzerland: Springer), 2018, 247-266.
56
For example: Sanjay Sharma and Jasbinder Nijjar, “The racialized surveillant assemblage: Islam and
the fear of terrorism,” Popular Communication, vol. 16, no.1, 2018, 72-85.
57
Are you Syrious, “November Illegal Pushbacks and Border Violence Reports,” Medium, December 4,
2018, https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/november-illegal-push-backs-and-border-violence-reports-
d5494997a456
222
With broken phones, migrants cannot use GPS to ascertain where exactly they have been
dropped off by police or how to get back to a camp, and they cannot call anyone for help. The
practice is particularly dangerous in the border region between Croatia and Bosnia, where
unexploded landmines are scattered in numerous areas. By dropping migrants/refugees off in
forested areas, often in the middle of the night, and without the aid of their mobile phones to
navigate, police drastically increase the possibility of migrants/refugees walking into minefields.
Preventing migrants/refugees from connecting to media infrastructures and accessing
communication networks therefore hastens the biodegradation of the body itself and marks both
the body and its technologies as useless waste.
Second, the practice of destroying cell phones functions to reassert the state’s authority
over the visible and the knowable and to redraw the boundaries of Europe around not only
Europe’s territory but also its communication networks. By destroying phones, the police ensure
migrants/refugees cannot document evidence of police violence; they cannot film illegal
pushbacks as they happen, nor can migrants/refugees photograph the injuries they sustain during
illegal pushbacks. Without phones, migrants/refugees cannot directly share information about
their living conditions in various formal and informal camps with family and friends, and they
are limited to providing verbal testimony about illegal pushbacks to aid workers in the hopes that
they will be believed. By preventing video evidence of pushbacks from circulating, state
authorities can claim more easily that migrants/refugees make false accusations about illegal
pushbacks.
58
As the testimony given to MigSzol suggests, police also coerce migrants/refugees

58
The Croatian Ministry of the Interior, for example, alleged migrant/refugee allegations of illegal
pushbacks are fabricated in response to a Human Rights Watch report on the abuse of migrants/refugees
in Croatia. See: Republic of Croatia Ministry of the Interior, “Response of the Ministry of the Interior to
the Report of Human Rights Watch,” Republic of Croatia Ministry of the Interior, November 9, 2019,
https://mup.gov.hr/vijesti/response-of-the-ministry-of-the-interior-to-the-report-of-human-rights-
watch/285859
223
into making statements on camera affirming that they were not harmed by police during their
apprehension, making it difficult for migrants/refugees to contradict these coerced statements
later. Destroying cell phones can therefore be read as an attempt by police forces along the
Balkan Route to reassert the state’s—and by extension Europe’s—visuality, a necessary
component of the state’s authority to rule.
59
The practice draws a conceptual border between
Europeans and migrants/refugees, asserting the former are vested with the authority to harness
media technologies and decide what can or cannot be seen, while the latter are unworthy of
media access.
Yet, if we return to Mary Douglas’s assertion that what makes dirt threatening is its “half-
identity,” its relationship to a recognizable prior state of existence, we can also read the
destruction of mobile phones as evidence of a desire to strip migrants/refugees of any media that
preserves their individuality. As discussed in chapter 1, migrants/refugees use mobile phones and
social media to document and author their migration stories, and to reinscribe their relationship
to space. As Michel Agier argues, becoming a refugee involves losing “the media on which
social existence rests, that is a set of ordinary things and persons that carry meanings—land,
house, village, city, parents, possessions, jobs, and other daily landmarks.”
60
If mobile phones
preserve connections to the many other media that shape individual identity, carrying not only
photographs and messages but also, perhaps, scans of important medical and legal documents,
access to money in bank accounts, and so on, then transforming the refugee into living waste
necessitates the pulverization of the cell phone that mediates the refugee’s identity. Further
influencing the desire to destroy cell phones may be the alleged discoveries of “terrorist” media

59
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011).
60
Michel Agier quoted in Bauman, 77.
224
on these cell phones which feed into public fears about Europe’s infiltration by militant actors.
Breaking mobile phones, then, is a visual and material bordering practice that aims, however
temporarily, to sever migrants/refugees from digital spheres of communication. Thus, having
been dumped in the proverbial “middle of nowhere,” stripped of their clothing and money, and
with broken phones, migrants/refugees are made into what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life,”
61

a life stripped of all political representation and legibility, and visually inscribed as living waste.
Having been marked for elimination, they are left both literally and digitally isolated in the
hostile terrain of the border.
Although illegal pushbacks violate the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, the
European Union has not directly intervened to stop EU member-states like Hungary and Croatia
from engaging in the practice. Instead, the European Commission has continued funding border
securitization measures across the region. For example, the Commission recently awarded 6.8
million euros to Croatia to strengthen its border security as part of Croatia’s bid to join the
Schengen zone despite consistent reports of border violence at the hands of Croatian police.
62
To
this end, Amnesty International reports that the EU has sent mixed messages to Croatia about its
treatment of migrants/refugees:
As Croatian MEP Tonino Picula put it, ‘On one hand, Croatia was being called out because of
alleged mistreatment of incoming migrants, while on the other hand, it was expected to protect
EU external border.’ […] In a bilateral meeting with country’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenković
[…] German Chancellor Angela Merkel complimented Croatian police for making ‘great
progress in protecting the external EU borders.’ According to the Croatian Minister of Interior,
various EU bodies have also commended Croatia’s efforts in curbing the irregular flow of
migrants into the EU.
63

61
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998).
62
Amnesty International, Pushed to the Edge: Violence and Abuse Against Refugees and Migrants Along
The Balkans Route (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2019).
63
Ibid.
225
The European Union’s praise of Croatia’s border management and continued funding of
border securitization along the Balkan Route speaks to the hypocrisy inherent in assessments of
Eastern European nations’ abilities to uphold European values. While the nations along the
Balkan Route have been criticized extensively, and rightfully, for abusing migrants/refugees,
these criticisms have often presented the region’s bordering tactics as separate from and
unrelated to the EU’s own policies and accession requirements. As Marta Stojić Mitrović et al.
write, “On the other side of the EU border, the non-EU states of the Balkans figure as a kind of
‘dumping ground’ for unwanted people on the move: they are ‘collected’ inside EU territory and
expelled into the backyard—the Western Balkans. What happens to them afterwards is presented
as having nothing to do with the EU.”
64
To point to this hypocrisy is not to excuse the actions of
state authorities in the countries along the Balkan Route. Rather, it is to emphasize that by
deploying Europe’s external peripheries to do the dirty work of containing and disposing of
unwanted migrants/refugees, the European Union is effectively able to displace responsibility for
the violence levied against migrants/refugees to the Balkans, which has itself long been figured
as a site of violence and barbarism. The scopic regimes of disposability that frame the Balkan
Route as an underdeveloped wasteland, and therefore a natural site for waste disposal, also make
violations of international law in the region appear as predictable behavior. Meanwhile, the EU’s
own standards for membership encourage a cohesion of the logics of border securitization and
waste management under the broader rubrics of “Europeanization” and modernization. These
twin logics demand that nations along the Balkan Route eliminate all traces of living waste from
public view if they are to be fully incorporated into the family of Europeanness/whiteness. Illegal

64
Marta Stojić Mitrović, Nidžara Ahmešević, Barbara Beznec, and Andrej Kurnik, The Dark Sides of
Europeanisation: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the European Border Regime (Belgrade: Rosa
Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2020), 41.
226
pushbacks are therefore a manifestation of the obsessive need to keep migrants/refugees on the
other side of the border (whichever border that may be) in order to affirm European belonging
and to push the EU’s “dumping ground” as far south as possible.
While the previous section examined how discourses and policies related to material waste
foment racist and reactionary policies toward migrants/refugees in nations along the Balkan
Route, the next section turns to media coverage of Vučjak, an informal migrant camp in Bosnia
that gained international attention for its squalid conditions. I consider how material waste is
mobilized in sympathetic portrayals of migrants/refugees as evidence their dehumanization.
Many of these portrayals, however, ultimately end up reifying the scopic regimes of disposability
that mark migrants/refugees as living waste. In the case of Vučjak, they also reproduce a
problematic division between ‘Europe’ and Bosnia by framing Vučjak as a distinctly ‘Bosnian’
crisis. The mediation of Vučjak as a shockingly un-European camp betrays ongoing anxieties
about further EU expansion into the Balkans, despite the key role the Balkans play in securing
Europe’s borders.

Vučjak: The migrant landfill
In the spring of 2019, Bosnian authorities hastily set up an informal migrant/refugee camp on
the outskirts of Bihać, one of the country’s closest cities to the Croatian (and EU) border. The
camp was located approximately eight kilometers away from the border in Vučjak, a site which
had served as Bihać’s landfill for decades. Although authorities covered the landfill with a layer
of gravel and dirt before transporting refugees there, local activists warned the landfill continued
to emit toxic methane gas and was at risk of combusting. The threat of explosion was
exacerbated by the fact that Vučjak is surrounded by unexploded landmines left over from the
227
Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The camp had no running water, no electricity, no toilets, no
showers, and—as it was literally a garbage dump—no waste collection.
65
Here, in a landfill
surrounded by landmines, migrants/refugees slept in unheated tents, on top of filthy tarps and
blankets, or if they were lucky, upon discarded mattresses.
Vučjak operated as an informal migrant camp until December of 2019, when harsh winter
conditions finally compelled local authorities to close the site and transport migrants/refugees to
formal camps operated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Sarajevo and
Mostar.
66
Despite housing almost 1,000 people over the summer, and approximately 600 people
at the time of its closure, conditions in Vučjak were so dangerous that most aid agencies refused
to enter the camp.
67
The only organization operating on site was the Red Cross, which sent five
volunteers to the camp each day. These volunteers provided one to two meals to
migrants/refugees but were unable to offer medical care. Prior to Vučjak’s closure, police would
actively round up migrants in Bihać and drive them to the landfill site, where they were
unceremoniously “dumped.”
68
Though there have been multiple migrant “jungle” camps to
capture international media attention since 2015, including the prominent makeshift camps in
Calais, France and Idomeni, Greece, none of these camps embody the intersection between the
spectacular violence of the border and the “slow violence”
69
of toxic environments quite like

65
Stojić Mitrović et al., 81-84.
66
Al Jazeera, “Bosnia shuts down controversial camp, transfers migrants,” Al Jazeera, December 10,
2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/10/bosnia-shuts-down-controversial-camp-transfers-
migrants
67
Stojić Mitrović et al., 81-84. See also: Left Out in the Cold: Bosnia’s Migrant Crisis (BBC, 2019)
68
Elissa Helms, “Aid to Refugees and Migrants Stuck Outside the EU: A Field Report from Bihac,
Bosnnia-Herzegovina.” (lecture, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, January 17, 2020).
69
Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2011).
228
Vučjak, where the potential explosion of a landmine threatens to ignite the methane gas that
leaks from the soil, sparking a massive inferno.
70

Vučjak understandably captured the attention of global news media, and journalists often
fixated on the proliferation of trash around the campgrounds. Many of the news articles and
videos reporting on Vučjak drew attention to the squalid conditions in the camp in order
highlight the dehumanizing conditions migrants/refugees were forced to live in. Germany’s DW,
for example, published a series of photographs taken by Dirk Planert in the summer of 2019
under the headline “‘Inhumane Conditions’ at Bosnian refugee camp in Vučjak.”
71

Figure 2: Dirk Planert photographs migrants/refugees at the Vučjak camp in July 2019

70
IOM, “Forced Movements of Migrants in Bosnia Sparks Warning of Humanitarian Emergency,”
International Organization for Migration, October 17, 2019, https://www.iom.int/news/forced-
movement-migrants-bosnia-sparks-warning-humanitarian-emergency
71
Dirk Planert, “‘Inhumane Conditions’ at Bosnian refugee camp in Vučjak,” DW, July 1, 2019,
https://www.dw.com/en/inhumane-conditions-at-bosnian-refugee-camp-in-vucjak/g-49384074
229

Figure 3: Dirk Planert photographs a man eating outside at the Vučjak camp

In one image from this series, captioned “800 people living on garbage,” Planert photographs
migrants/refugees in Vučjak queuing around a modest structure. The composition of the image is
such that migrants/refugees appear indistinguishable and out of focus in the background, while in
the foreground, piles of plastic trash are shown spread across the dirt ground. While the intent is
to emphasize the “inhumane conditions” of the camp, the framing makes migrants/refugees
appear as though they are a natural part of the landscape of a landfill. A second image, captioned
“Eating in filth,” appears to counteract the first by shifting the viewer’s focus to an individual
230
migrant/refugee. The photograph shows a young man crouched on the ground in the center of the
frame, his bowl of food placed directly on a mound of gravel. Visible in the background is all
manner of trash littered across the grass. Yet the young man gazes confidently into the camera,
seemingly unphased by his surroundings, such that the photograph could almost be mistaken for
a picture of someone camping. This calm confidence is juxtaposed by the written description
accompanying the photograph which conjures a more frightening reality: “Almost everyone [in
Vučjak] has skin rashes, open or purulent wounds, and their legs and feet are bloodied.”
There is thus something other than the horrific conditions in Vučjak that makes Planert’s
photographs unsettling. Although the images are meant to garner sympathy for the
migrants/refugees stranded in Vučjak by bringing to light the unsanitary environment in which
they live, the photographs and their accompanying captions risk reinforcing scopic regimes of
disposability which mark the migrant/refugee’s body as disposable. While the image of the
young man eating on the ground might, to some, reflect a quiet dignity, it can also suggest that
living among trash is ‘natural’ for migrants/refugees. As I argued earlier in the chapter, waste
can ‘stick’ conceptually to bodies and territories. Images of Vučjak that focus on
migrants/refugees eating, sleeping, and washing among garbage may be shocking for some
viewers, but they too easily lend themselves to racialized assumptions about migrants/refugees’
uncivilized behavior and further exacerbate the transformation of migrants/refugees into living
waste, propelling discriminatory behavior in the process. For example, an Open Democracy
report on Vučjak closure remarked:
In cafés lining Bihać’s main street, there is an unwritten rule: refugees cannot sit at the outside
tables: ‘The owners of all the bars have decided not to allow migrants to sit, even if they pay.
The problem is that they don't wash, they stink,’ says Nerning, a bar owner. ‘Our customers are
afraid of the diseases migrants carry.’
72

72
Annalisa Camilli and Eleanor Paynter, “Closing the Vucjak Camp doesn’t resolve the humanitarian
crisis for migrants in Bosnia,” Open Democracy, December 13, 2019,
231
Here, the bar owner’s accusation that “the problem” with migrants/refugees is that they do not
bathe implies that migrants/refugees choose to be unclean. The stench of garbage and appearance
of filth are thus imagined as shared characteristics across all migrants/refugees, without any
acknowledgment of the lack of resources and infrastructure in place to help migrants/refugees
wash their clothes and shower themselves. In this way, images of migrants/refugees living
among garbage in Vučjak come to reinforce the scopic regimes of disposability that drive
associations between migrants/refugees and material waste.
International media attention to Vučjak has not only risked reifying the scopic regimes of
disposability it ostensibly means to undermine, it has also frequently reanimated conceptual
divisions between ‘Europe’ and the Balkans by framing Vučjak as a consequence of Bosnia’s
poor management of the migrant/refugee crisis. This is perhaps best illustrated by the BBC’s
short documentary, Left out in the cold: Bosnia’s Migrant Crisis (2019). The opening scene of
the documentary consists of a montage of images: migrants/refugees queue in a long line; some
wrap themselves tightly in blankets, others pull the hoods of their jackets around their heads in a
feeble attempt to protect from the stinging cold. A man sits on the ground inside a tent where
filthy looking mattresses and foam pads are packed tightly together in rows. Only a few of these
mattresses are placed on bedframes; the rest lie directly on the dirt ground. A group of men is
shown sleeping outside, huddled together in a dark alleyway. As we move between these images,
we hear a collection of voices: soundbites of interviews with migrants/refugees reveal one man
has been sleeping on the ground in a crowded tent for a month while another has gone three days
without food. Yet, while snippets of interviews with migrants/refugees appear in the montage, it
is a Red Cross aid worker who we hear speak first: “If you ask me to sleep here one night, I think

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/closing-the-vu%C4%8Djak-camp-doesnt-
resolve-the-humanitarian-crisis-for-migrants-in-bosnia/
232
that would be my worst nightmare.” The opening montage teases what the BBC’s European
correspondent, Jean Mackenzie, will uncover during her investigation of “Bosnia’s migrant
crisis”: overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions, limited humanitarian aid, poor
infrastructure, and the active involvement of Bosnian authorities in “dumping” migrants and
refugees in dangerous, informal campsites.
The first person introduced by name in Left Out in the Cold is Indira Kulenovic, a
representative of the Red Cross. Kulenovic guides Mackenzie around Vučjak, describing it as a
camp that was set up “like somebody took the marbles and just threw them down.” The film
emphasizes the heaps of rubbish piled around and inside of tents through multiple ground level
shots that center material trash while relegating migrants/refugees to a fuzzy background.

Figure 4: Material refuse takes center frame in many of the BBC’s establishing shots of Vučjak
233

Figures 5-6: Ground level shots of material trash emphasize the inhumane conditions in Vučjak

In another scene, Kulenovic takes Mackenzie to a tent where twenty migrants/refugees infected
with scabies are being quarantined. As Kulenovic informs Mackenzie that the Red Cross has no
234
medicine to treat the migrants/refugees with, we see a short montage of wounds: scabbed-over
skin appears on legs and stomachs in a series of fragmented body shots.

Figures 7-9: A series of images from the BBC’s Left Out in the Cold show scabies wounds on
fragmented body parts

The scene, though sympathetic, enacts a scopic regime of disposability that rips apart the body’s
unity, making migrants/refugees appear as fungible, living waste. Migrant/refugee bodies are
shown in the process of biodegradation, while Mackenzie and Kulenovic authoritatively discuss
their medical condition. Left Out in the Cold thus reinforces disposability’s visual inscription in
the flesh.
235
While Left Out in the Cold presents a sympathetic view of migrants/refugees, the
structure of the documentary reproduces what Brian Winston calls the “tradition of the victim” in
documentary and establishes clear hierarchies between international aid workers, local
politicians, and migrants/refugees stranded in Bosnia. While the aid workers Mackenzie speaks
to are shown to have their hands tied by the Bosnian state, they are nevertheless endowed with
expert authority and come to mediate the experiences of migrants/refugees to viewers. Most of
the migrants/refugees who speak in Left Out in the Cold are only given short soundbites that
affirm their suffering. Only one migrant/refugee, an Afghan man named Hozrat, is identified by
name and given a backstory: his father worked as an interpreter for the British army and, as a
result, the family was targeted by the Taliban. Yet even Hozrat’s interview is limited to
expressions of his suffering in Vučjak. After expressing his worries about the arrival of winter in
Bosnia, Hozrat confesses that he has told the Red Cross he wants to deport himself because it
would be “better to die in Afghanistan” than to freeze to death in the landfill.
Winston argues that “Factual television cements the tradition [of the victim] into place.
[…] For it substitutes empathy for analysis, it privileges effect over cause, and it, therefore,
seldom results in any spin-offs in the real world—that is, actions taken in society as a result of
the program to ameliorate the conditions depicted.”
73
If the figure of the victim generally
functions to evoke empathy rather than analysis from viewers, Left Out in the Cold exacerbates
this issue further through the way it positions the spectator. The film’s primary focus, in fact, is
not the migrants/refugees it portends to report on but rather reporter Jean Mackenzie’s emotional
encounters with the people she meets. As viewers, we are guided to identify with Mackenzie as
she expresses shock and frustration with the living conditions of migrants/refugees in Bosnia,

73
Brian Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” in The Documentary Film
Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 786.
236
and we find ourselves aligned with her further when she confronts Bosnian police officers and
politicians to demand answers about the mistreatment of migrants/refugees. We watch as the
intrepid journalist chases down police officers at three in the morning to ask why they are
removing migrants from buses 100 kilometers outside of Bihac, and we share her feelings of
helplessness when she is refused an answer. When Mackenzie does interview migrants/refugees,
it is her stunned reactions and expressions of concern that the camera focuses on, rather than the
migrants/refugees themselves.
In one scene, for example, Mackenzie listens to a young man describe his living
conditions in Vučjak. The man is never identified by name and he is given no backstory. In
broken English, he tells Mackenzie, “one month, this camp, this room. One month.” The camera
cuts to a ground level shot of the tent’s interior, revealing five metal bedframes—sans beds—
stacked side by side on the dirt floor. Mackenzie replies in disbelief, “you’ve slept here for one
month?” When the man answers, “yes,” the camera cuts back to a medium close-up of
Mackenzie’s face, now washed over with concern. She then turns to the camera and, breaking the
fourth wall, says “gosh, this is not what a tent in a camp should be.”
237

Figure 10-11: Jean Mackenzie mediates collective disbelief and concern for viewers at home.

Though Left Out in the Cold aims to generate empathy for migrants/refugees by highlighting
the inhumane conditions in Vučjak, Mackenzie’s role, ultimately, is to mediate viewers’
collective incredulity at these conditions and to reaffirm that the camp is not representative of
European values. Thus, when Mackenzie interrogates the Prime Minister of the Una-Sana
Canton in Bosnia, she suggests that the Bosnian government is intentionally trying to keep
238
migrants/refugees from reaching Bihać and insists that the Prime Minister provide an explanation
for the region’s behavior. Her reporting makes no mention of the EU accession policies that
Bosnia is evaluated under, and it does not tell viewers that the EU has encouraged violent
processes of migrant detainment through direct material support.
74

Left Out in the Cold ultimately frames Vučjak as a distinctly Bosnian problem and a result of
poor governance that evidences the un-Europeanness of the Balkans. In doing so, it also leaves
intact the myth of a ‘real Europe’ somewhere beyond the Balkan Route that remains a beacon of
freedom, prosperity, and equal human rights. In this way, the documentary produces what Susan
Sontag calls “inappropriate” sympathy. As Sontag argues:
The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a
link between the far-away sufferers—seen close-up on the television screen—and the privileged
viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So
far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our
sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our
good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response. To set aside the sympathy
we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges
are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to
imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others,
is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.
75

While Mackenzie’s reporting brings viewers closer to the suffering inflicted on
migrants/refugees, it simultaneously absolves viewers of any complicity or responsibility for the
conditions in which migrants/refugees are made to live along the Balkan Route. By describing
Vučjak as a symptom of “Bosnia’s migrant crisis,” Left Out in the Cold displaces the

74
Local journalists in Bosnia report that the EU donated multiple police vans to Bosnian police which
were then used to round up migrants/refugees and transport them to Vucjak. The EU also provided
millions of euros to Bosnia that were meant to help with humanitarian aid for migrants/refugees; however,
much of the funding is controlled by the IOM, which runs all the official migrant centers in Bosnia, and
its distribution has not been transparent. See: Adrian Finighan, “Who should be tackling Bosnia’s migrant
crisis?,” Al Jazeera, November 17, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-
story/2019/11/17/who-should-be-tackling-bosnias-migrant-crisis
75
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador, 2003), 103.
239
responsibility for violence against migrants and refugees to Europe’s peripheries and suggests
this violence is separate and unrelated to the actions of the European Union. In this sense, Left
Out in the Cold speaks to the ways in which nonfiction media is not only a vehicle for producing
knowledge but also, as Michael Renov argues, “embroiled with conscious motives and
unconscious desires, driven by curiosity no more than by terror and fascination.”
76
The desire
that Left Out in the Cold mediates, I argue, is the desire to safely relegate violence against
migrants/refugees to Europe’s outskirts. By using Mackenzie as a conduit for mediating a
collective sense of incredulity and horror at the conditions in Vučjak, the film gives viewers at
home the space to perform empathy for migrants/refugees without generating any self-reflection.
In other words, the performance of empathy that Left Out in the Cold elicits allows liberal
viewers to constitute themselves as ‘good European citizens’ in relation to the ‘backwardness’ of
Bosnians who express anti-migrant sentiments and cruelly dump migrants/refugees in a landfill.
However, as this chapter has shown, the migration and asylum policies of nations along the
Balkan Route are not shaped in a vacuum. These nations are intentionally employed as sites for
living waste disposal and compelled to continue doing the EU’s dirty work in order to receive
financial aid from the Union and to meet the eligibility requirements for accession.
In this chapter, I have argued that scopic regimes of disposability mark the Balkan Route as a
site of disposal for living waste: migrants and refugees unwanted by the European Union. I turn
now to the work of conceptual artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei to consider how his engagement
with waste refuses the discourse of ‘crisis’ and opens up the possibility for a politics and practice
of care by attending to personal objects left behind by migrants/refugees along the Balkan Route.

76
Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 96.
240
Sites of Refusal: Reading Ai Weiwei’s art through a politics and practice of care

Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent contemporary artists to offer a sustained
engagement with the migrant/refugee crisis. His work spans several mediums, including
documentary film, public installations, gallery exhibits, and performance pieces orchestrated and
circulated on social media. Since 2015, Ai has opened multiple exhibitions exploring human
displacement, including #safepassage (2016), F. Lotus (2016), Laundromat (2016), Good Fences
Make Good Neighbors (2017), Law of the Journey (2017), and Crystal Ball (2017). He has
released two feature-length documentary films about the migrant/refugee crisis: the critically
acclaimed Human Flow (2017), which offers a sweeping exploration of displacement that spans
twenty-three countries and fifty-nine refugee camps, and The Rest (2019), a companion film to
Human Flow comprised of selections from 900 hours of Human Flow’s unused footage. While
Human Flow seeks to draw connections across multiple, global drivers of human displacement,
The Rest zeros in on the European continent and is comprised entirely of interviews with
refugees who have found themselves stranded in overcrowded, under-serviced camps after
making perilous journeys across land and sea. Ai has also staged numerous public performances
to call attention to forced migration and displacement, including a re-staging of the viral
photograph of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish shore (in which Ai’s body
replaced the toddler’s), and a set of photographs at the 2016 Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin, in
which Ai instructed celebrities to take selfies with each other while draped in the gold thermal
emergency blankets refugees often receive from aid workers upon arriving to Europe’s shores.
Ai has earned both admiration and sharp criticism for his various artistic works on the
migrant/refugee crisis, which some observers argue are tone-deaf and self-serving. Of the
celebrity gala selfies, for example, media and communications scholar Lilie Chouliaraki
241
contends that whether or not the intention was to show solidarity with refugees, the photos
operate as part of a larger process of “symbolic bordering.” For Chouliaraki, these photos
cultivate a “narcissistic form of witnessing [that] capitalizes on the glamorous voyeurism around
celebrity culture” but ultimately fail to address “the systematic marginalization and displacement
of the migrant’s face in Western spaces of public visibility.”
77
Similarly, Veronika Zablotsky
argues that in Human Flow, Ai’s attempt at humanizing refugees hinges on inserting himself in
the frame in a manner that “invites a false sense of identification” with migrants and refugees.
“By suggesting that the subject positions of the film maker and the subjects of his documentary
are ultimately interchangeable,” Zablotsky writes, “Ai asserts the shared humanity of displaced
persons. However, by obscuring the operations of power that position him as a standard bearer of
humanity, albeit racialized vis-a-vis the West, his interlocutors are reduced to generic figures that
stand in for humanity in general, rather than the particular identities of which they have been
stripped due to their forced displacement.”
78
While these criticisms are compelling, I find that
they fail to consider how Ai’s self-reflexivity and attention to celebrity functions as part of a
larger critique he proffers through his artwork about the migrant/refugee crisis. When considered
in context with Ai’s ouvre and personal history, the artist’s instrumentalization of his own fame
makes legible a broader criticism of the uneven values society assigns to human life. His
attempts at engagement and interaction with migrants/refugees—precisely because they are
stilted and awkward—can be read, I argue, as invitations to consider the limitations of
humanitarianism and calls for empathy. These interactions invite viewers to interrogate the ways

77
Lilie Chouliaraki, “Symbolic Bordering: the self-representation of migrants and refugees in
digital news,” Popular Communication, vol. 15, no. 2, 2017, 90.
78
Veronika Zablotsky, “Unsanctioned Agency: Risk Profiling, Racialized Masculinity, and the Making of
Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis,’” in Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis, eds. Krista Lynes, Tyler
Morgenstern, and Ian Alan Paul (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2020), 198-199.
242
in which humanitarianism often reinscribes the power dynamics Zablotsky and Chouliaraki
accuse Ai’s work of reproducing rather than dismantling. Though Ai’s artistic critiques of the
migrant/refugee crisis are often hit-or-miss when examined as individual projects, I maintain that
when taken as a whole, his engagement with the migrant/refugee crisis offers a sustained critique
of “border spectacles” and the production of crisis as such. In this final section of my chapter, I
consider how his mixed-media installation Laundromat opens an opportunity for viewers to
reflect on how we might move beyond calls for empathy with migrants/refugees and instead
work toward a politics and practice of care.
Although Ai Weiwei has achieved global fame and, consequently, global mobility as an
artist and provocateur, his life experiences as an exile profoundly shape his attention and relation
to the contemporary migrant/refugee crisis. Ai’s personal history is one marked by displacement.
His father, Ai Qing, was a well-known poet and intellectual who was targeted by the Anti-
Rightest Movement during China’s Cultural Revolution. In 1958, when Ai Weiwei was only a
year old, the family was exiled to a labor camp in northeastern China, and in 1959, they were
forcibly moved again to another labor camp in Xinjiang province. It was only in 1976, after the
death of Mao Zedong and the end of China’s Cultural Revolution, that the family was able to
return to Beijing.
79
These early years, marked by poverty, discrimination, surveillance, and his
parents’ forced labor, influenced Ai’s interest in using art to criticize authoritarianism,
exploitation, and injustice. Between 2005 and 2010, Ai gained global notoriety for his prolific
use of social media—first, on the Chinese blogging website Weibo, then, after his blog was shut
down in 2009 for attracting too much attention, on Twitter—and his outspokenness against the

79
Sandra Ponzanesi, “The art of dissent: Ai Weiwei, rebel with a cause,” in Cultures, Citizenship, and
Human Rights, eds. Rosemarie Buikema, Antoine Buyse, and Antonius C.G.M. Robben (London:
Routledge, 2020), 219.
243
Chinese state.
80
In 2011, the Chinese government arrested Ai for alleged tax evasion and held
him in jail for 81 days, during which time Ai’s passport was confiscated. For the following four
years, Ai was subjected to heavy surveillance and restrictions on his movement. In July of 2015,
just two months before media coverage of the migrant/refugee crisis would reach its peak frenzy,
the Chinese government returned Ai’s passport and permitted Ai to leave the country.
81
Ai’s
suddenly regained freedom of mobility—which spurred him to relocate to Berlin as a political
exile—thus coincided with the spectacularized confrontation between migrants/refugees enacting
their autonomy of migration and European forces frantically seeking to regain control of the
continent’s borders.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Ai’s work draws attention to the humiliating
bureaucratic procedures migrants and refugees must endure when seeking asylum, while also
calling into question the social capital and authority we grant to ‘experts’ and other public
figures when seeking to understand forced migration. In interviews, Ai speaks about how he self-
identifies as a “high-end refugee,”
82
someone who intimately understands the experience of
displacement, but also recognizes his fame as an artist grants him mobility and access to a highly
visible public and political platform, and to certain protections and resources that most displaced
people do not have. In a much-discussed scene from Human Flow, for example, Ai
acknowledges the unevenness of his position as someone both displaced and well-connected (and
therefore able to legally move to Germany with ease) by showing his awkward and
uncomfortable exchange with a Syrian refugee named Mahmoud. Ai jokingly trades passports

80
Ibid.
81
Hilary Whiteman, “China returns passport to artist Ai Weiwei,” CNN, July 22, 2015,
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-ai-weiwei-passport-returned/index.html
82
Ai Weiwei, interviewed by Aimee Dawson, “Ai Weiwei: ‘I’m like a high-end refugee,’” The Art
Newspaper, March 27th, 2018. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/interview/ai-weiwei-i-m-like-a-high-
end-refugee
244
with Mahmoud and offers to give Mahmoud his studio in Berlin in exchange for Mahmoud’s
tent. Although this scene is meant to provide a moment of levity in an otherwise heart-wrenching
film, as well as demonstrate that Ai recognizes Mahmoud’s humanity and right to live with
dignity, it also reveals how easily attempts at empathy can ring hollow and appear tone-deaf. As
Zablotsky notes, these two men are not interchangeable, and displacement is not a universal
condition. Yet, I remain unconvinced that Ai’s intention is to suggest an abstract universalism
here. By maintaining a self-reflexivity throughout the film and offering this scene up for scrutiny
when it could have just as easily been cut, Ai provides audiences an opportunity to consider how
all political and social identity categories are constructed, performed, policed, and differentially
situated. The passports exchanged both have the basic function of providing an identity to their
holders, but they in fact are not equally valued, useful, or powerful. By making this disparity
tangible through a performance of impossible exchange, Ai indicts not only viewers but also
himself, a high-profile artist and celebrity benefitting from continued media exposure, as
complicit in maintaining unequal hierarchies that have significant material consequences.
Ai’s attention to the power (or lack thereof) of material objects, like the passports
described above, inform virtually all of his gallery installations and exhibits. Four of the six
installations named in the opening paragraph of this section, for example, appropriate objects
abandoned or discarded by refugees during their journeys along the Balkan Route. F. Lotus,
#safepassage, and Crystal Ball all feature life jackets collected from the shores of Lesbos. For F.
Lotus, 1,005 jackets were molded into rings resembling lotus flowers for a floating installation in
the pond of Vienna’s Belvedere Museum.
83
For #safepassage, Ai wrapped 14,000 life jackets

83
Eleanor Gibson, “Ai Weiwei creates lotus-like installation from refugee life jackets,” Dezeen, July 20,
2016, https://www.dezeen.com/2016/07/20/f-lotus-ai-weiwei-installation-belvedere-museum-vienna-
syrian-refugees-life-jackets/
245
around the columns of the famous Konzerthaus in Berlin and suspended a lifeboat spray painted
with the words “safe passage” above the building’s main doors.
84

Figure 12: Ai Weiwei’s F. Lotus installation in Vienna, Austria
85

Figure 13: Ai Weiwei’s F. Lotus installation in Vienna, Austria.
86

84
Kristine Mitchell, “Ai Weiwei wraps 14,000 life jackets around Berlin landmark,” My Modern Met,
February 16, 2016, https://mymodernmet.com/ai-weiwei-berlin-lifejackets-refugees/
85
Image published by Eleanor Gibson for Dezeen.
86
Image published by Eleanor Gibson for Dezeen.
246

Figure 14: #safepassage at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, Germany.
87

Here, the life jackets—transported to two of the ideal destination countries for
migrants/refugees—serve as haunting reminders, and remainders, of the thousands of lives lost
or effectively discarded due to Europe’s violent bordering tactics which condemn
migrants/refugees to rely upon traffickers to facilitate their travel. In the latter exhibit, the black
rubber lifeboat bearing the words “safe passage,” though the boat is obviously not a form of safe
passage itself, insists through this irony that European nations hold the power to organize and
provide safe passage to refugees seeking asylum. That #safepassage was first installed in
Germany is particularly noteworthy, as Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s 2015 announcement that
Germany would grant asylum to all Syrian refugees arriving in the country ultimately rang

87
Promotional image by Oliver Lang.
247
hollow, as the “invitation” did not coincide with any direct relocation assistance to refugees
traveling along the Balkan Route. In Crystal Ball, an installation piece that first premiered in
Prague and was later featured in the Biennale of Sydney, life jackets were stacked in a pile to
support a large crystal ball that reflected and distorted the gallery’s surroundings.
88

Figure 15: Ai Weiwei’s Crystal Ball at the Biennale of Sydney.
89

This sculpture emphasizes both migrants/refugees’ dreams of a livable future, which have been
invested in the life vests, and the uncertainty of this future (represented by the crystal ball) which
hangs in the balance, contingent on the unknown. If the life vests are counterfeits, they will not
be able to keep their wearers afloat in the sea, and the crystal ball—the vision and dream of a
future—will sink. The materiality of the life jacket, then, imbues Ai’s installations with multiple

88
Kaya Barry, “Art and materiality in the global refugee crisis: Ai Weiwei’s artworks and the emerging
aesthetics of mobilities,” Mobilities, vol. 14, no. 2, 2019, 210.
89
Promotional image by Document Photography.
248
valences. The jackets are, on one hand, waste: they have either been discarded by
migrants/refugees who survived harrowing journeys across the sea, or they have washed ashore
as defective objects that failed to protect the lives entrusted to them. On the other hand, these
glaringly bright orange jackets collectively embody a ghostly presence that refuses to disappear.
While migrants/refugees may be discarded in camps and detention centers located largely out of
sight, life jackets continue to pile up along Europe’s coastlines. Ai’s transportation of the jackets
to some of the final locations they were meant to help carry their wearers to demands that core
European leaders and residents see something of the lives their policies have transformed into
disposable living waste.
Laundromat, the primary focus of this section, turns away from life jackets to instead
display 2,046 personal items abandoned by migrants/refugees during the demolition of Greece’s
informal Idomeni camp in 2016. In early 2016, Ai Weiwei travelled to Idomeni, a small village
on the border of Greece and North Macedonia, to shoot footage for his feature-length
documentary, Human Flow. At the time, Idomeni was a regular fixture in international news
coverage of the migrant/refugee crisis. Tens of thousands of refugees had found themselves stuck
in a makeshift camp after North Macedonia sealed its borders with Greece, and images of North
Macedonian police violently attacking refugees with tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and rubber
bullets circulated widely across global media. In the summer of 2015, Idomeni had essentially
functioned as a transit zone. North Macedonian authorities would issue 72-hour travel permits to
refugees which granted them permission to enter the country and apply for asylum at any police
station within three days. In effect, however, these permits facilitated transit across the country
249
and into Serbia.
90
Then, in November of 2015, Austria announced it would be tightening its
border controls in an attempt to delimit the numbers of refugees entering its territory. A domino
effect swept southward along the Balkans: Slovenia announced that it would partially close its
border as well, permitting entry to Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis only. On November 28
th
, 2015,
North Macedonia began construction on a barbed-wire border fence along its southern border
with Greece, and in February of 2016, the country formally announced that its borders were
sealed.
91
The closure transformed Idomeni into a bottleneck of the migrant/refugee crisis. At one
point, approximately fourteen-to-fifteen-thousand refugees found themselves suspended in
Idomeni, forced to live in an informal camp in conditions that international observers described
as “squalid,”
92
“appalling”
93
and a “purgatory.”
94
Tents, provided by NGOs and individual
donations, spread across a grassy field adjacent to North Macedonia’s border fence, and lined the
train tracks that cut through the town in a striking visual illustration of the uneven mobilities that
govern our world. It rained relentlessly over the winter months, transforming the field into thick
mud that seeped into every tent and swallowed people’s belongings. As more and more people
found themselves indefinitely contained in Idomeni, frustrations grew. Refugees began
protesting conditions in the camp and demanding that Europe open its borders. Instead, in May

90
Marta Stojić Mitrović, Nidžara Ahmešević, Barbara Beznec, and Andrej Kurnik, The Dark Sides of
Europeanisation: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the European Border Regime, (Belgrade: Rosa
Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2020), 13.
91
Barbara Beznec and Andrej Kurnik, “Old Routes, New Perspectives: A Postcolonial Reading of the
Balkan Route,” movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, vol.5, no.1, 2020,
36.
92
“UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants concludes his follow up country visit to
Greece,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, May 16, 2016,
https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=19972&LangID=E
93
“Greece: Europe must shoulder the burden for 46,000 refugees and migrants trapped in squalor,”
Amnesty International, April 18, 2016, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/04/refugees-
trapped-in-greece/
94
Oliver Laurent, “James Natchwey: A New Purgatory for Thousands of Refugees,” Time, March 24,
2016, https://time.com/4269922/james-nachtwey-purgatory-refugees-idomeni/
250
of 2016, the Greek government decided to demolish the campsite at Idomeni. Refugees were
hastily relocated to formal camps over the course of a few days, forced to leave many of their
personal belongings behind.
95

Figure 16: Tents line the train tracks in Idomeni, as seen in Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary film,
Human Flow.

Laundromat relays refugees’ experiences at Idomeni through a mixed-media installation
that situates refugees’ personal items next to Ai Weiwei’s photographs from the camp, his short
documentary Idomeni (2016), which depicts North Macedonian police violence against the
camp’s inhabitants, and ceramic pottery and wallpaper art that visually illustrate the
migrant/refugee crisis. The artist negotiated permission from Greek authorities to recover shoes
and clothing from Idomeni that otherwise would have been sent to a landfill and shipped the
objects to his studio in Berlin. There, the clothing and shoes—which were caked with Idomeni’s
mud—were carefully washed, steamed, dried, and ironed, until they were returned to a
recognizable condition. The items were then organized by size and style. In the exhibit, these

95
Marianthi Anastasiadou, Athanasios Marvakis, Panagiota Mezidou and Marc Speer, “From Transit Hub
to Dead End: A Chronicle of Idomeni,” Border Monitoring EU (Munich: bordermonitoring.eu, 2017).
251
items of clothing hang on rolling racks: adult jeans on one rack, children’s sweaters and vests on
another, women’s jackets and coats on a third rack, and so on. Each item is catalogued and given
an individual tag. The shoes, many of which are single shoes missing their pairs, are lined in neat
rows on the floor to form one large, multicolored block in the gallery. Though the clothing and
shoes have been carefully cleaned of Idomeni’s soil, the journeys they bear witness to can never
be entirely erased. Close inspection of a pair of pants, a jacket, a single shoe, reveals signs of
wear and tear; scuff marks, fraying fabric, and faded colors all testify to arduous migrations,
“provoke imaginations of future transits [and] uses” and evoke the personal histories and
experiences of the people who relied on these objects for their survival.
96

Figure 17: Clothing separated by size and style hangs in Ai Weiwei’ s Laundromat
97

96
Barry, 210.
97
Promotional image for Deitch Gallery by Genevieve Hanson.
252

Figure 18: Shoes are assembled neatly in rows for Laundromat.
98

At first glance, the racks of clothing and the visually striking display of shoes seem to suggest
the look of a department store. However, the individual tags on each item remind viewers that
these items already belong to specific individuals. The title of the exhibit, Laundromat, invites
viewers to imagine that these items are simply waiting to be collected, their care temporarily
entrusted to Ai and his team. The time given to washing, drying, ironing, and naming each
individual object which had, prior to the exhibit, been marked collectively as waste by the state,
models a practice of attention, or a practice of attending to that which has otherwise been
dismissed and discarded. In taking the time to restore over two-thousand personal items, Ai and
his team simultaneously draw attention to the scale of the migrant/refugee crisis and provide a

98
Promotional image for Deitch Gallery by Genevieve Hanson.
253
space for viewers to imagine the specific history, and person, behind each object. It is in this
sense that I argue the exhibit moves past generic calls for empathy with migrants and refugees to
instead advance a politics and practice of radical care.
According to Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, care is
related to empathy in that it is “theorized as an affective connective tissue between an inner self
and an outer world, [constituting] a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others.”
99
However, as
Inna Michaeli argues, radical care also allows us to understand ourselves as “grounded in
particular histories and present situations of violence and vulnerability,” thereby maintaining a
recognition of the impossibility of fully knowing or inhabiting the experience of another.
100

Conceptualizations of care have been central to feminist and Black and brown organizing,
activism, and care work, all of which have sought to address the state’s structural breakdowns
and neglect of vulnerable people. Care is, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “an ethically and
politically charged practice” that moves beyond charity to offer solidarity in the form of working
collaboratively with communities to determine what forms of help are most needed.
101
Though
enactments of radical care “cannot completely disengage from structural inequalities and
normative assumptions regarding social reproduction, gender, race, class, sexuality, and
citizenship,” they do—for Hobart and Kneese—allow us to envision what Elizabeth Povinelli
terms an otherwise: ways of being outside dominant modes of governance.
102

99
Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies
for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 1 March 2020; 38 (1 (142)): 2.
100
Inna Michaeli, “Self-Care: An Act of Political Warfare or a Neoliberal Trap?,” Development, vol. 60,
nos.1-2, 2017, 53.
101
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things,” Social
Studies of Science, vol. 41, no.1, 2011, 90.
102
Hobart and Kneese, 2.
254
In an interview with Deitch Gallery in New York City, ahead of Laundromat’s opening,
Ai Weiwei reflected on his first impression of Idomeni:
When we started filming in Idomeni, the first thing we noticed was people trying to change their
clothes. These are the clothes they wore from Syria, wet and soiled from the difficult journey
across the ocean, over mountains and through woods. They had no chance to wash their clothes
until they were forced to stop in Idomeni. They would hand wash the clothes and throw it on the
border fence to dry. There was nowhere else to hang dry their laundry. We photographed the
clothes, but we did not, and could not, imagine they could later be included in an exhibition. The
clothes were some of the few possessions they could take when they decided to leave their
homes. […] These objects were the most precious things a person could have, the last things they
brought with them as they sought a new life. Once the refugees were forced to evacuate to
different camps from Idomeni, many of those possessions were left behind. Trucks came in and
loaded these items up to take towards the landfill. I decided to see if we could buy or collect them
so they would not be destroyed.
103

A skeptical view of Ai Weiwei would encourage us to dismiss this account as a pithy attempt to
excuse a willful appropriation of refugees’ belongings for personal artistic gain. And perhaps, to
some extent, this reading is warranted. It is ultimately unlikely that the items will ever actually
be returned to their rightful guardians, and those guardians did not in fact provide consent for
their belongings to be placed on display. Yet they also did not provide consent for the objects to
be disposed of in a landfill, and for this reason, I am willing to give Ai Weiwei the benefit of the
doubt when he recounts that these were the most precious things a person could have, and he did
not want them to be destroyed. Ai’s standout memory of Idomeni—witnessing migrants/refugees
try to wash their clothes—and the impact this encounter seems to have had on him suggests Ai
relates to the clothing not only as objects that may have sentimental value, but as extensions of
the people he met and interviewed in the camp. Though Ai’s practice of care is directed, or
perhaps we might say displaced, away from migrants and refugees and onto their abandoned

103
Ai Weiwei, “Ai Weiwei: Laundromat,” interview by Jeffrey Deitch, Deitch Gallery, November 5,
2016, https://deitch.com/new-york/exhibitions/ai-weiwei-laundromat
255
objects, the work of thoughtfully preserving personal belongings nevertheless opens up a space
of being in common and caring for one another.
This practice of care is not only emphasized through the treatment of the personal objects
featured in the exhibit, but also through the images Ai surrounds the objects with. In the Deitch
Gallery installation of Laundromat, a wall of Ai’s personal photographs from Idomeni, including
selfies with the migrants/refugees he met there, covered one entire wall behind the display of
shoes. The photographs, though not captioned with identifying information, offer a sense of
intimacy, and suggest a genuine, shared experience of personal connection between Ai and his
subjects. Many of the people who appear in Ai’s photographs, either in portraits or in selfies with
the artist, are shown in moments of levity and joy. They look to be having fun as they laugh and
pose together. The gesture is an important one, as it works against the discourse of crisis that
presents migrants and refugees only as suffering, helpless victims, or as imminent threats to
Europe’s security.

Figure 19: Ai Weiwei’s personal photographs displayed in Laundromat
104

104
Still image taken from NYBen, “Ai Weiwei’s ‘Laundromat’ at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, NYC,”
YouTube, December 21, 2016, video, 11:39, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EQE9fx-jpY
256
While the wall of photographs helps to nuance viewers’ expectations of how migrants
and refugees feel or behave at any given moment, Ai’s short film Idomeni documents horrific
acts of violence levied against migrants/refugees by North Macedonian border guards. In
Idomeni, children wail after border guards attack refugees with tear gas. An adult male refugee
holds up empty canisters to the camera and says with exasperation, “welcome to Europe!” The
film offers a timeline of events in Idomeni, from North Macedonia’s border closure to Greece’s
demolition of the camp. It demonstrates the lack of care offered to stranded migrants/refugees by
evidencing the organized abandonment of vulnerable others along the Balkan Route.

Figure 20: News headlines and social media posts cover the floor for Ai Weiwei’s
Laundromat.
105

105
Still image taken from NYBen, “Ai Weiwei’s ‘Laundromat’ at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, NYC,”
YouTube, December 21, 2016, video, 11:39, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EQE9fx-jpY

257

Figures 21: A close-up of some of the headlines and social media posts in Ai Weiwei’s
Laundromat.
106

On the gallery’s main floor, underneath the racks of clothing, hundreds of news headlines
and social media posts about Europe’s “migrant” or “refugee crisis” are reproduced in columns
that mimic the flow of a Twitter feed. The headlines evidence the anxious handwringing of
European states over how to deal with migrants and refugees, demonstrating how
migrants/refugees are often reduced to objects of concern that must be acted upon or against. The
placement of this newsfeed on the floor ensures that viewers cannot avoid seeing the headlines as
they look through the racks of clothing; thus, the material objects are simultaneously tied to a
specific historical moment and context (headlines from 2015 and 2016), as well as juxtaposed to
the headlines that mass individual migrants/refugees together into a collective, undifferentiated
body. In other words, while the headlines situate the clothing within a particular historical
context, the clothing returns a sense of individual specificity to the headlines. Other objects in

106
Still image taken from TheTravelLad, “Laundromat by Ai Weiwei | Doha Fire Station Museum,”
YouTube, video, 1:05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGgixKLqdno
258
the exhibit include a large ceramic vase and corresponding wallpaper art, both of which adopt the
style of classical Greek art to depict the events leading to the migrant/refugee crisis. In one
section of the wallpaper, a top panel shows scenes of war: helicopters fly over bombed out
buildings and piles of rubble. The next panel depicts refugees fleeing their homes with sacks of
their belongings and babies in their arms, while a third panel illustrates refugees packed tightly in
a rubber dinghy, crossing a violent sea of towering waves. Rescue workers arrive in the far-right
section of this final panel and appear to frantically throw life-rings to refugees, some of whom
have fallen overboard.

Figure 22: Close up of the wallpaper design featured in Ai Weiwei’ s Laundromat.
107

107
Still image taken from Miguel Benavides, “Ai Weiwei: ‘It’s about humanity,’” Studio International,
November 6, 2016, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ai-weiwei-video-its-all-about-
humanity

259

Figure 23: Ceramic vase and wallpaper featured in Ai Weiwei’ s Laundromat.
108

The style of artwork used on the wallpaper and ceramic vase evokes archeological
artifacts from ancient civilizations and thus gestures toward a long durée of mass displacement
and migration. Though some may argue this move is unproductively universalizing, suggesting
that mass migration has always been a facet of human history and is therefore “all the same,” I
read it as an attempt to disrupt the discourse of “crisis” which suggests Europe’s encounter with
over a million migrants/refugees in 2015 was an unpredictable and unprecedented event,
unrelated to broader historical processes. As Farah Atoui argues, “the discursive regime of crisis
[…] restructures the past by disappearing the historicity of migration” and “obscures the

108
Promotional image from Ai Weiwei Studios.
260
structural forces and historic conditions that have shaped migratory movements, and that drive
thousands of people to risk their lives as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to reach
Europe. Through its evocation of a mythical past that erases the history of migration, crisis
conceals colonial histories, their legacies and enduring effects.”
109
By representing the particular
history of the contemporary migrant/refugee ‘crisis’ through an artistic style associated with
ancient civilizations, and by framing these ancient-looking artifacts alongside contemporary
video, photographs, news headlines, and refugees’ personal belongings, Laundromat effectively
refuses the framework of crisis while simultaneously insisting on the (material) specificity of
today’s migrants/refugees. The exhibit, much like Human Flow, masterfully mixes abstraction
with particularity, combining intimate objects from, and photographs of, individual refugees with
hauntingly beautiful illustrations of war, refugee camps, and migrants on the move.
In November of 2016, Ai Weiwei made an appearance at the Royal Academy America
Lisson Gallery in New York City alongside another exhibition of his, Roots & Branches, which
ran concurrently with Deitch Gallery’s installation of Laundromat. At the Lisson Gallery, a
visitor asked the artist whether the migrant/refugee crisis is the political issue everyone is
responsible for. Ai’s answer, in part, was as follows:
For me, again, it’s a humanity issue. You know, myself, when I was born—my family is like the
refugees. We’ve been pushed away because political reason. We have been exiled. […] So, I
don’t think this is a current issue. This is a historical issue […] We always talk about how Europe
would accept them [refugees] or how to help them, but we never really talk about what’s the
reason to make those wars, or those refugees, and can we really stop that? So I think this will
take a lot of political action in this topic.
110

109
Farah Atoui, “The Calais Crisis: Real Refugees Welcome, Migrants ‘Do Not Come,’” in Moving
Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis, eds. Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern, and Ian Alan Paul
(Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2020), 216-217.
110
Miguel Benavides, “Ai Weiwei: ‘It’s about humanity,’” Studio International, November 6, 2016,
https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ai-weiwei-video-its-all-about-humanity
261
Ai’s insistence that a collective response to migrant/refugee crisis must entail political actions
that address the root causes of mass displacement suggests that critics who dismiss his work for
universalizing and/or capitalizing on migrant/refugee suffering, or for reproducing the gaze of
the state through drone footage of camps and caravans, or for inserting himself into the frame,
may have missed (or misinterpreted) his point. When taken as a whole, Ai’s engagements with
the migrant/refugee crisis offer more than sympathetic portrayals of migrants and refugees. They
subtly draw attention to various political and economic drivers of mass displacement and invite
viewers to interrogate the uneven and unequal value we assign to a nameless “migrant” or
“refugee,” versus a “citizen,” or even a celebrity figure like Ai himself. Ai’s attention to
migrants/refugees’ material belongings in his installation work, particularly in Laundromat,
recovers that which has been deemed “trash” and insists on a politics and practice of care toward
both people and things. Waste, here, is exhibited as a means of refusal: the refusal of
invisibilizing migrants/refugees by tearing down the encampments in which they live and
displacing them further away from public sight; the refusal of discarding their belongings as a
means of forgetting their existence and experiences. If the state’s transformation of the
migrant/refugee into living waste relies on both physical and digital isolation, and physical and
digital deprivation, Laundromat returns refugees’ faces and refugees’ belongings to center stage
and reminds us that waste continues to live and testify to histories of war, displacement,
exploitation, and subjugation. Ai’s work, then, insists not that we should look, but rather that we
should actively give attention to what we see and move beyond expressions of “feeling with” to
active practices care.
262
Conclusion

In Unsettled Media: Documenting Refugees and Europe’s Shifting Borders, I have argued
that the Balkan Route mediates the instability of Europe’s material and conceptual borders as it
manages the movements and ambitions of migrants/refugees from the Global South and the
former “Second World.” Through examining nonfiction media objects produced by a wide range
of actors, I have demonstrated that the ideological projects of the Cold War and War on Terror,
along with their material consequences, collectively structure racist and reactionary responses to
the contemporary migrant/refugee crisis and inform shifting European policies, both at the
national level and within the European Union. I have also illustrated how both wars shape
continued and competing anxieties about European belonging from multiple perspectives,
including supra-state bodies like the European Union and International Organization for
Migration, the national governments of the countries that comprise the Balkan Route,
international journalists and independent artists from around the world, and finally individual
migrants/refugees journeying across Southeastern and Central Europe.
This dissertation intervenes in prevailing scholarship in migration and media studies by
utilizing migration as a methodology and foregrounding the role of Eastern Europe in managing
and mediating the so-called migrant/refugee crisis. Methodologically, I engage migration as an
epistemological viewpoint and move between multiple locations, perspectives, actors, and
objects that come into contact along, and give shape to, the Balkan Route. In doing so, I trouble
the methodological nationalism that frequently underpins scholarship in both migration and
media studies. This methodological nationalism too easily reproduces the binaries of host
country/home country, citizen/immigrant, and settled/transient, glossing over transnational
patterns of movement and exchange, as well as the multiple external and international pressures,
263
alliances, and networks that shape migratory practices and migration policies across the
European continent. Against the limited view offered by a national approach, I offer a
transregional and multi-perspectival study of the Balkan Route to show how supra-state, state,
and non-state actors relationally produce, communicate, and contest political configurations of
Europe’s citizens, migrants, refugees, and borders, giving rise to divergent understandings of
‘Europe’ and its boundaries in the process.
By making the Balkan Route the anchor of my study, I center a region that has been
largely overlooked in scholarship on migration from the Global South to western Europe, despite
its significant position as both a bridge and barricade between western Europe and Asia. Eastern
Europe plays a vital role in variously affirming, contesting and remapping Europe’s material and
conceptual boundaries. As my dissertation shows, the migrant/refugee crisis made Eastern
Europe’s geopolitical importance to the EU irrefutable; it also set the stage for ambitious leaders,
like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to mobilize far-right populist sentiments against western liberal
conceptualizations of ‘Europe’ that largely frame the continent’s east as a region still
transitioning out of its socialist past, and still learning how to be properly European. While the
EU publicly expresses concerns about the harsh treatment of migrants/refugees along the Balkan
Route and democratic backsliding in the region, it also continues to pressure East European
countries to secure their borders and prevent unauthorized migration westward. The EU has
provided millions of Euros in financial aid to countries along the Balkan Route toward this end.
As such, glossing over Eastern Europe as a mere transit zone for migrants/refugees, or as a
region where democratic backsliding is the result of authoritarian communist histories, rather
than an outcome connected to EU policies, is no longer tenable for scholars invested in
understanding the relationship between the Cold War and War on terror, as well as the shifting
264
power dynamics between the European Union, individual nation-states, and migrants/refugees
moving across the continent.
Throughout this dissertation, I have shown how unauthorized migration across the Balkan
Route animates anxieties about ‘Muslim terrorists’ infiltrating Europe, the European Union’s
expansion into the Balkans (a region western Europe imagines as unruly and ungovernable), the
contingent Europeanness/whiteness of Eastern Europeans, and the forcible resettlement of non-
European migrants/refugees in Eastern Europe (a region most migrants/refugees do not wish to
be resettled in). In 2020, anxieties about unsanctioned movement into and across Europe were
compounded further by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus raged across Europe,
initially impacting Italy, France, and Spain, European nation-states halted all non-essential travel
and sealed their borders shut. In Hungary, the spread of the virus was initially blamed on
migrants/refugees. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán maintained that migration remained the primary
threat to Europe and, early in the pandemic, the Hungarian government’s official COVID
information website logged the nationality of patients known to be infected with the disease.
Orbán repeatedly emphasized that the first people discovered to have COVID in Hungary were
international students from Iran; these students were subsequently expelled from the country.
1

Far-right politicians in Greece and Italy also capitalized on the pandemic to generate further
animosity toward migrants/refugees.
2
As European nations went into lockdown,
migrants/refugees were left stranded in overcrowded, unsafe camps that made them particularly

1
“Hungary’s Orban blames foreigners, migration for coronavirus spread,” France24, March 13, 2020,
https://www.france24.com/en/20200313-hungary-s-pm-orban-blames-foreign-students-migration-for-
coronavirus-spread
2
Aggelos Andreou, “Europe’s Far-Right Exploits COVID-19 For Anti-Refugee Propaganda,” Balkan
Insight, June 4, 2020, https://balkaninsight.com/2020/06/04/europes-far-right-exploits-covid-19-for-anti-
refugee-propaganda/
265
vulnerable to infection with COVID-19.
3
While my dissertation does not address the pandemic,
future work will need to consider how COVID-19 has impacted the policing of borders within
Europe and exacerbated tensions between migrants/refugees, the European Union, and individual
nation-states along the Balkan Route.
While the Balkan Route makes these competing ideas of who, what, and where ‘Europe’
is starkly apparent, encounters between newly arriving migrants/refugees and locals along the
Balkan Route have also inspired expressions of solidarity and being-in-common through shared
experiences of migration and displacement. Future studies may examine how the remnants and
memories of Yugoslavia, and the attendant refugee crisis caused by the Yugoslav secession wars
of the 1990s, resurface alongside the current migrant/refugee crisis. Between 2015 and 2020,
multiple art exhibits, films, and activist organizations in the Balkans foregrounded the history of
Yugoslavia and/or the Non-Aligned Movement alongside the contemporary migrant/refugee
crisis. Examples include the 2019 art exhibit The Nineties: A Glossary of Migrations, held at the
Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, and the 2019 art exhibit Southern Constellations: The
Poetics of the Non-Aligned, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana.
Both exhibits were commissioned as part of New Mappings of Europe, a two-year collaborative
project between cultural institutions in Slovenia, Serbia, Austria and the United Kingdom, which
sought to “generate knowledge about the migrants’ cultural heritage in Europe and make cultural
and art institutions more accessible to local communities of migrants of the first and second
generations as well as to the new communities of asylum seekers and refugees.”
4
Another
example is Želimir Žilnik’s 2015 documentary, Logbook Serbistan, which follows multiple

3
Melissa Godin, “Coronavirus is Closing Borders in Europe and Beyond. What Does that Mean for
Refugees?,” Time, March 25, 2020, https://time.com/5806577/coronavirus-refugees/
4
“About,” New Mappings of Europe, n.d., accessed May 31, 2021,
http://www.newmappingsofeurope.si/en
266
migrants/refugees as they decide whether to transit across or resettle in Serbia. Throughout the
film, Žilnik’s subjects remark on the similarities between Serbia and Africa as they interact with
local residents.
These expressions of commonality gesture toward the historical relationship between
Yugoslavia and Africa, and offer an alternate mapping of Europe that rejects the colonial
hierarchy between Europe and the Global South. By examining artistic projects such as the ones
mentioned above, researchers may consider how contemporary migration across the Balkan
Route has revived public interest in rethinking Second-to-Third World relations during the Cold
War, as well as led to new collaborative projects between Balkan residents and migrants/refugees
that draw upon shared experiences of war, displacement, and Otherness. Recognizing how the
Balkan Route is not simply a mediational tool for powerful state and institutional actors that
helps to keep undesirable bodies out of ‘Europe,’ but also a site where new identities and
affiliations are being imagined and constituted outside of the framework of both liberal European
values and illiberal nativist populisms, is necessary for building a truly robust and nuanced
understanding of the ways in which the Balkan Route unsettles Europe’s conceptual and material
borders.

267
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Creator Zimanyi, Eszter (author)

Core Title Unsettled media: documenting refugees and Europe's shifting borders along the Balkan Route

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/14/2023

Defense Date 06/08/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag asylum,Balkan Route,Balkans,Borders,Cold War,digital media,disposability,documentary,eastern Europe,European Union,film,Hungary,Maps,media,media infrastructures,media policy,migrants,migration,nonfiction,OAI-PMH Harvest,populism,Refugees,television,war on terror,waste

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Imre, Aniko (committee chair), Govil, Nitin (committee member), Harrison, Olivia C. (committee member), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email eszterzimanyi@gmail.com,zimanyi@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15595906

Unique identifier UC15595906

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Document Type Dissertation

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Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu