Journeys of violence: Trajectories of (im-)mobility and migrants' encounters with violence in European border spaces

Lorenz, Rahel; Etzold, Benjamin Article Journeys of violence: Trajectories of (im-)mobility and migrants' encounters with violence in European border spaces Comparative Population Studies (CPoS) Provided in Cooperation with: Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB), Wiesbaden Suggested Citation: Lorenz, Rahel; Etzold, Benjamin (2022) : Journeys of violence: Trajectories of (im-)mobility and migrants' encounters with violence in European border spaces, Comparative Population Studies (CPoS), ISSN 1869-8999, Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB), Wiesbaden, Vol. 47, pp. 211-232, https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2022-09 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/309249 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Journeys of Violence: Trajectories of (Im-)Mobility and Migrants’ Encounters with Violence in European Border Spaces* Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold Abstract: On their journeys to and through Europe, refugees and other migrants are commonly subjected to violence in its multifaceted forms. We argue that these “journeys of violence” are a direct effect of a fundamentally uneven and asymmetric global mobility regime that creates frictions and fragmentations in the European border space and beyond. Our argument is based on: (1) a state-of-theart literature review on refugees’ mobilities towards Europe and new patterns of involuntary immobilisation through border regimes, (2) a secondary analysis of recent quantitative data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which includes a large data set on refugee’s journeys to Germany, and (3) original qualitative interviews that were conducted with migrants in Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina. We will fi rst show that mobility in the context of violence is highly selective and that trajectories of mobility signifi cantly depend on mobility capital. Second, we consider the fortifi cation of European borders and the externalisation of control regimes as facets of structural violence and demonstrate their effects on refugees’ mobility, namely the fragmentation of journeys and the systemic production of situations of protracted immobility at multiple border sites. Third, we provide insights into refugees’ exposure to and experiences of direct violence on their journeys, which must be understood as immediate consequences of the structurally violent conditions that govern their mobility and the cultural violence of delegitimising and illegalising refugees’ movements. Keywords: Refugee journeys · Encounters with violence · European border regime · Fragmentation · Immobilisation · Stratifi ed mobility Comparative Population Studies Vol. 47 (2022): 211-232 (Date of release: 09.06.2022) Federal Institute for Population Research 2022 URL: www.comparativepopulationstudies.de DOI: https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2022-09 URN: urn:nbn:de:bib-cpos-2022-09en4 * This article belongs to a special issue on "Refugee Migration to Europe – Challenges and Potentials for Cities and Regions". • Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold 212 1 Introduction Since 1993, more than 50,000 people have lost their lives or have gone missing while migrating en route to or in Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea.1 In Libya, tens of thousands of migrants are arbitrarily detained under dismal conditions. There is ample evidence of beatings, torture, forced labour, malnutrition, rape, and other forms of direct violence by the state and other armed and criminal groups (OHCHR 2018). From 2017 to 2021, the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) has documented almost 25,000 pushbacks of migrants across borders on Europe’s fringes. Pushbacks are a violent and unregulated form of deportation by state actors that violates national, EU, and international law.2 In Greece, around 103,000 migrants and refugees are stranded in reception and identifi cation centres on the Aegean islands or in refugee camps on the mainland, severely constrained in their rights, including their freedom of movement.3 The journeys of refugees and other migrants to and through Europe are much debated in policy circles and in the public, and are also subject of an increasing body of scholarly inquiry. In these contexts, the conditions of refugees’ journeys sometimes seem to fall out of sight. In this article, we focus on these conditions to highlight how refugees’ journeys have become fragmented and decelerated and how they have been marked by drastic experiences of violence. The “journeys of violence” to Europe are, we argue, a direct effect of a fundamentally uneven and asymmetric global mobility regime (Glick Schiller/Salazar 2013) that creates frictions and fragmentations in the European border space and beyond. We base this argument on a recent literature on refugees’ mobilities towards Europe and new patterns of involuntary immobilisation (Etzold 2019), secondary analysis of quantitative data from the socio-economic panel (SOEP), which also includes a large data set on refugees’ journeys to Germany, and qualitative interviews with refugees we spoke to in Germany and Bosnia–Herzegovina. In this contribution, we will fi rst show that mobility in the context of violence is highly selective and that trajectories depend to a large extent on refugees’ mobility capital. Second, we consider the fortifi cation of European borders and the externalisation of control regimes as facets of structural violence and demonstrate its effects on refugees’ mobility, namely the fragmentation and deceleration of journeys and the systemic production of protracted immobility at multiple sites. Third, we provide insights into refugees’ exposure to and experiences of direct violence on their journeys, which must be understood as an immediate consequence of the structurally violent conditions that govern their mobility. Finally, we discuss migrants’ vulnerability to 1 This calculation by Benjamin Etzold is based on the available data from the following sources: http://www.unitedagainstracism.org (1993-1999), http://www.themigrantsfi les.com/ (20002013) and https://missingmigrants.iom.int (2014-2021). 2 According to https://www.borderviolence.eu/statistics/, see also BVMN (2020) for detailed information. 3 According to https://migration.iom.int/europe/migrants-presence, for conditions see (Tazzioli/ Garelli 2020). Journeys of Violence • 213 violence, particularly regarding violent encounters with the state and armed actors in two different regions that are an integral part of the European border regime; the Western Balkan region and Libya. 2 Journeys of violence to Europe 2.1 Refugees’ journeys The actual experience of displacement and the journeys of people seeking protection are not given the necessary attention within research on (forced) migration that they deserve. According to Gadi BenEzer and Roger Zetter (2015), refugees’ journeys and thus the pathways of becoming and being a refugee need more systematic examination. First, the journey into exile is much more than a simple movement from a place of origin via intermediate stations to a place of arrival. Rather, the journey marks a signifi cant turning point in the life course of displaced people. Second, social resentments towards migrants and asylum seekers grow and more restrictive political decisions are made when migration “fl ows” or “waves” are presented as abstract dehumanised problems. Research on these journeys can contribute to making refugees’ experiences – here, their encounters of violence – and perspectives better understood in public debates. Third, a more comprehensive understanding of refugees’ routes, life trajectories, and decision-making processes could be used to improve policies and migration control in light of human rights and refugee protection (BenEzer/Zetter 2015: 302-304). A growing number of scholars has investigated refugees’ journeys, most notably with a regional focus on movements to Europe (Collyer 2010; Crawley et al. 2018; Schapendonk et al. 2020; Etzold 2019). The drastic experiences of different forms of violence during these journeys are highlighted in many academic contributions (Martin 2011; Baird 2014; Krause 2015; Freedman 2016; Vries/Guild 2019) and documented in numerous NGO reports. From the perspective of critical border studies, violence and death en route are direct consequences of a highly uneven global mobility regime (Glick Schiller/Salazar 2013) that manifest itself in states’ bordering and ordering practices in border landscapes on the one hand, and in migrants’ subversive border-crossings but also their immobility on the other hand. Violence against migrants disturbingly shows that territories, borders, and mobile subjects are constantly contested. Even more so, the – oftentimes violent – acts of bordering and the (im)mobilised subjects that are thereby produced are part and parcel of a global capitalist order (Tsianos/Karakayali 2010; Mezzadra/Neilson 2013; Andersson 2014). 2.2 Violent encounters en route A concise analysis of refugees’ journeys of violence requires an explanation of what we understand as violence. Scholars in peace and confl ict studies consider violence as an inherent part of societal power relations (Imbusch 2003). Following Galtung • Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold 214 (1969, 1990), we apply a three-dimensional approach to violence on refugees’ journeys. First, violence is understood as practices by actors aimed at harming or hur ting an individual or group by physical and/or verbal means. Assaults, killings, rape, torture, and detention are forms of such direct violence. Displaced people not only fl ee from the direct violence that they experienced in their countries of origin, but they and other migrants also face direct violence at multiple sites along their journeys; in the hands of smugglers, attempting to cross borders, encountering state agents or armed groups, or living in camps (Krause 2015). This observation led Bank et al. (2017) to the conclusion that displacement, which is commonly conceptualised as a linear migration out of violence, must also be understood as a violent process. Second, structural violence manifests itself through injustice, exploitation, deprivation, and marginalisation that refl ect unequal economic structures and power relations. Structural violence is a continuous process, rather than a singular event, in which the involved actors are often not immediately visible (Galtung 1969). Structural violence is evident in insecure livelihoods, exploitative labour relations, and the unequal distribution of rights and privileges between different groups. Unequal access to mobility, which manifests itself in highly selective visa regimes and borders that are porous for some, yet insurmountable barriers for others, and the fragmentation of journeys as a result of coercive migration management are prime examples of structural violence (Vries/Guild 2019). Third, cultural violence refers to ideologies, discourses, and institutions that produce, maintain and renew violent actions and processes and “justify or legitimise direct or structural violence” (Galtung 1990: 291). This legitimisation of violence can result in the perception of existing patterns of both direct and structural violence as normal and inevitable. In the context of migration, cultural violence manifests itself in alarmist chaos-and-crisis-narratives of cross-border movements, which lead to the justifi cation of ever-stricter controls and enhanced security at the external borders of the European Union in the name of reducing illegal migration and fi ghting smugglers whilst no legal and safe pathways to protection are open for refugees and other migrants (Mountz/Hiemstra 2014). In this article, we not only apply the conceptual lens of refugees’ journeys, but also use empirical evidence to highlight that refugees and other migrants who embark on journeys to and through Europe encounter violence in its multifaceted forms at multiple places en route, which in turn leaves deep traces in their lives. Journeys of violence are a direct result of a fundamentally uneven and asymmetric global mobility regime that creates frictions and fragmentations in the European border space and beyond. 2.3 The EU’s migration management and border regimes Border regimes work in divergent ways, smoothing “the mobility of some, while stigmatising and hindering the mobility of others” (Schapendonk et al. 2020: 2). Besides being rooted in certain discourses and institutionalised through policies and laws, border regimes include multiple actors and apparatuses of governance Journeys of Violence • 215 and surveillance that are nominally designed to manage migration and to improve border control. Over the past 30 years, the EU and its member states have developed a complex system of migration management, which fi rst and foremost seeks to regulate immigration into its territory and maintain states' sovereignty. The primary strategies are the militarisation of borders through high-security fences, increased numbers of border personnel, more sophisticated surveillance technologies, and the registration of arrivals with biometrical identifi ers and in databases (Andersson 2014; Shields 2015). The tightening of controls and the militarisation of the EU’s external borders is one side of the coin. The other is the extension of borders beyond the EU’s territory. This externalisation has been implemented through policies such as carrier sanctions for transport companies, bilateral agreements with states of origin and with transit countries to take back asylum-seekers that come from or passed through their territory, and comprehensive multilateral dialogues. The Rabat and Khartoum Processes between European and African states have, for instance, resulted in an increase in border surveillance and mobility controls on the African continent. Moreover, Libyan militia groups have been trained and equipped by the EU and its member states to stop “irregular migrants” from leaving for the EU (Andersson 2014). The EU’s policies have been criticised for “seek(ing) to limit irregular migration regardless of the moral, legal and humanitarian consequences (… and for) reducing migration at all costs” (Villa et al. 2018). Migrants’ greater vulnerability to violence is one of the inhumane costs of the fortifi cation of the EU’s borders and the externalisation of its migration management. While violence has become a systematic element of the European border regime, migrants do not automatically fall prey to ever-new techniques of panoptical control, border fortifi cation, and externalisation. From the perspective of critical border studies, migration is a movement “that possesses knowledge, follows its own rules, and collectively organises its own praxis” (Tsianos/Karakayali 2010: 378). People on the move are thus neither easily immobilised by multiple mobility restrictions as a facet of structural violence, nor are they helpless victims of acts of violence in borderlands. They are often able to subvert mobility controls, cross borders, and resist violent encounters based on collective action, shared knowledge, and mutual support (Hess 2017). While focussing on the factual reality of direct violence on journeys to Europe, the following sections nonetheless hint at migrants’ agency and the collective power of the autonomy of migration in withstanding both immobilisation and violence. 3 Data and methods We use both quantitative and qualitative empirical material to better understand the effects of the increase in border controls and migration management on refugees’ journeys. The quantitative data stems from an annual household survey, the SocioEconomic Panel (SOEP), conducted by the German Institute for Economy – DIW Berlin (Kroh et al. 2016a; Liebig et al. 2021). To account for demographic changes in • Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold 216 Germany, in 2016, the SOEP added a sub-sample of 4,527 adult refugees who arrived in Germany between January 2013 and January 2016. Based on the German Central Register of Foreigners, a stratifi ed sampling design was used to include displaced persons who had different asylum statuses: 55 percent were asylum seekers, 35 percent had received a protection status, while 10 percent had been rejected but received a toleration or temporary ban from deportation (Kroh et al. 2016b: 6). While the SOEP interview focussed mainly on issues of arrival and integration, the survey also included questions regarding the journey to Germany and experiences of violence, upon which we draw for this article.4 The qualitative data is based on individual and group interviews with refugees in Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In spring 2019, Rahel Lorenz conducted two focus group discussions with thirteen refugees from Turkey each and two in-depth interviews with Syrian refugees living in a city in Western Germany as part of her master’s thesis at the University of Copenhagen (Lorenz 2019). All respondents were male, between 18 and 65 years old, and had gone to university in their home country. Benjamin Etzold has been involved in the EU-funded project TRAFIG, in which 50 semi-structured interviews and eight biographical interviews were conducted with adult refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Eritrea, who are now living in Western parts of Germany (see Christ et al. 2021 for details on the methodology and results).5 Moreover, our analysis draws on four semi-structured interviews and participant observations in the canton Una-Sana in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where migrants are frequently subject to state violence and have experienced pushbacks from Croatian authorities (Themann 2021).6 Due to the very sensitive nature of the topic, in all three projects only few respondents wanted to speak openly about the journeys and their encounters of violence, although some interviewees shared their experiences quite openly. Our empirical ma terial provides insights on refugees’ journeys of violence in times of increasing migration management. But refugees are not a homogenous group, and pre-migratory positionality impacts experiences en route. Our quantitative analysis therefore differentiates its fi ndings by gender, as well as respondents’ origins and fi nancial background. The qualitative interviews add depth to the general trends by highlighting individuals’ narratives. Together, the quantitative and 4 We thank DIW Berlin – Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung e.V. – for permitting the use of the “refugee sample” (M3) and the “refugee family sample” (M4) data sets (Liebig et al. 2021) under data use agreement No. 4674. We used the data from 10/2018-02/2019 in our study “Pathways of Forced Migration to Germany: Social Networks, Mobility, and Experiences of Violence” at BICC, Germany. At the beginning of our analysis in 2018, only subsample M3/M4 was available. 5 Benjamin Etzold acknowledges funding for the project Transnational Figurations of Displacement (TRAFIG) by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant No. 822453. Besides interviews conducted by Benjamin Etzold himself, we used protocols of interviews conducted by Gizem G. Güzelant and Mara Puers in this analysis and gratefully acknowledge their contribution to our paper. 6 We thank Philipp Themann for his permission to use transcripts of his interviews and observations so that we could relate them to our own fi ndings from Germany. Journeys of Violence • 217 qualitative fi ndings show how border regimes and individual strategies interact and shape refugees’ (im-)mobilities and their journeys of violence. 4 Results 4.1 The stratifi cation of mobility For forcibly displaced people, external migration is often the last resort, as well as a response to the fear for one’s life (Etzold 2019). But the potential for mobility is not equally distributed. Different degrees of mobilities and various governance regimes that structure mobility refl ect highly unequal power relations across the globe (Glick Schiller/Salazar 2013; Weiss 2005). Therefore, “differential mobility empowerments refl ect structures and hierarchies of power and position by race, gender, age and class, ranging from the local to the global” (Tesfahuney 1998: 501). These hierarchies of power and mobility are also refl ected in our empirical material: the destination, conditions, and duration of refugees’ journeys are shaped by their origin, access to travel documents, and in particular by their socio-economic position and available fi nancial resources, i.e. their mobility capital (van Hear 2004; Urry 2012). The SOEP survey covers information regarding transportation, accommodation, and smuggling expenses. Transportation was reportedly the most common expense, with a mean sum of 4,700€, followed by costs for smuggling with a mean sum of 5,800€. Accommodation was the least reported matter of expenditure, with a mean sum of 2,300€. In total, the mean cost of all three matters of expenses was 8,100€ for an individual. This highlights the necessity of having suffi cient funds for travelling to Europe in the fi rst place. Suffi cient money is essential for being able to fl ee at all. This was explained to us by two refugees who spoke about their journeys and their families’ situations in Turkey and Syria, respectively. Kamal,7 a Syrian who came to Germany in 2015 as an unaccompanied minor with his two brothers, explained that his family organised their departure from Turkey through the “mafi a”, paying $2,000 for each of them. After the three brothers arrived in Germany, they wanted to bring their parents and other family members who remained in Turkey to Germany via family reunifi cation. As the procedure took too long, the relatives also embarked on an irregular journey through Greece and the Western Balkan states. Kamal reiterated that money was the deciding factor for their ability to quickly move on. Only the comparatively “rich” were able to leave Syria in the fi rst place, then leave Turkey, and eventually come to Europe: “It cost a lot for us. (...) For all of us to come to Germany, almost $30,000 were spent. Because if we had not had the money, we would not be here.” Khalid, another Syrian who moved to Germany via clandestine pathways, also tried to 7 We are grateful to our respondents for sharing their time and experiences with us. All names used in this article are pseudonyms. Other details that would allow for an identifi cation of the respondents, such as place of origin or residence, age, refugee status, or family relations are not shared to protect the participants. • Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold 218 organise his family members’ moves to Germany. In contrast to Kamal, they did not have the fi nancial means to pay smugglers for their journey and a legal pathway was not available. “We don’t have money. Until now (April 2019), there are ways. But it is expensive. If someone decides now and would be willing to spend 10,000€, then they would make it to Germany.” In consequence, Khalid remained separated from his family, who now remain in northern Syria under diffi cult conditions. These two anecdotes point to the different socio-economic positions of Kamal and Khalid, as well as their families, prior to initial displacement. Data from the SOEP survey clearly shows socio-economic differences among the displaced. The journeys of refugees with an above-average fi nancial background were almost twice as expensive as of those with below-average funds. Those from a higher fi nancial background primarily relied on their personal savings and other assets to fi nance the journey, while respondents with lower socioeconomic status reported comparatively higher rates of funding by family and friends (Fig. 1). The different means of available funding point to stratifi ed mobilities that depend on fi nancial background and social networks. Ahmad, an Afghan man who arrived in Germany in 2015 after he travelled to Europe via Turkey, Greece, and the Balkan route, spent about 6,000€ for his journey. The actual costs of the journey are not fi xed, but rather depend on where you go, who supports you, and “who you escape with”. He could only afford his journey with the fi nancial support of his relatives from both Germany and Afghanistan (see also Christ et al. 2021 on the role of refugees’ networks for their journeys to Germany). Fig. 1: Sources of funding by respondents’ fi nancial background 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Savings Assets Family Friends Jobs Loans Other Above average Average Below average in percent Source: SOEP panel data, n=4,527 Journeys of Violence • 225 conditions for migrants and human rights violations in Libya (OHCHR 2018) and thus did not initially plan to go there, but later came to see it as the only path to Europe. However, not all migrants necessarily remained in Libya for longer periods of time. One reason for protracted immobility is the practice of imprisoning migrants in Libya and demanding ransom from their relatives in other countries – a violent form of how criminals aim to exploit the transnational social networks in which migrants are embedded (RMMS East Africa And Yemen 2017). Dawit and his partner were detained in an apartment with 30 people, where nobody was allowed to leave, only minimal food rations were provided, and the sanitary conditions were dismal. Unprotected and unaccompanied women were sexually abused. The smugglers tried to extract as much money from each migrant under their control as possible. It took Dawit one and half months until he was able to collect enough money from of his parents in Eritrea and a cousin in the United States. Only after 6,000€ were transferred, they were freed and “passed on” to other smugglers for the boat journey to Europe. Despite the traumatic memory, Dawit still considers himself lucky because he had relatives in other countries who could support them fi nancially by paying the ransom in a comparatively short time. Others remained in Libya for much longer. “Three months, six months, some even a year and more, they stay there and cannot leave until they have money and fi nd others to leave with”, Dawit explained (see also Christ et al. 2021). Indeed, others waited much longer: Dan, a young Eritrean migrant who arrived in Germany in 2018 as an unaccompanied minor, also experienced such a dramatic phase of forced detainment locked in with other migrants in Libya. While he was on the move to his aunt in the UK, it was his uncle in Israel who bailed him out with $4,000. After an unbearable ten months of waiting, the smugglers received the money, and he was able to leave Libya in an overcrowded ship to Italy. 4.4.3 Dangers En Route Irrespective of the route taken and the experiences made, many interviewees feared robberies, theft, betrayal, and exploitation. Kamal described the situation as follows: “Things like that happen, (people steal) organs or something and sell (them), (we heard) way too much.” According to Kamal, money was the most important factor during the journey, which is why people often committed thefts: “Many people took advantage of us. It was too much. Some people, on the way, had no more money left, so they stole. (...) It was bad. Really.” Khalid also explained that “there are many thieves en route. (...) We were all scared that we would be robbed. That they would steal our money. (...) You can’t do anything about that.” And Arif told a similar story: “They take your money. They won’t kill you, but they take everything you have and leave you behind”. Such experiences and fears of violence en route – direct violence, pushbacks, encampment, robbery and fraud, shipwrecks – led Malek, a young man in his twenties from Afghanistan to conclude that he did not want his family members to travel irregularly as well. While he wanted them to come and reunite with him in Germany, he says: “I don’t want (...) my family to come here now illegally. I wouldn’t • Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold 226 do that. (…) Look, I have experience coming from Afghanistan to Germany (...) I told them no matter how much money you must spend; it is best to not come illegally (...) but to come normally.” The presented narratives of individuals are largely in line with fi ndings by other scholars (Martin 2011; Baird 2014; Shields 2015; Vries/Guild 2019), human rights organisations (OHCHR 2016, 2018) and witness accounts (BVMN 2020). Both the quantitative and the qualitative data clearly show that violent experiences en route to Europe are the rule rather than the exception. Direct violence is pervasive, with state actors and smugglers being the main perpetrators. But structural forms of violence also shape these journeys, as only certain clandestine and dangerous modes of mobility are available to refugees. 5 Discussion of Central Findings This paper has aimed to trace the impacts of the EU border regime on refugees’ lives and their journeys. We took individual refugees’ journeys as the focus of analysis, rather than abstract fl ows along routes or the potential impacts that displaced people’s presence has at certain places. This change of perspective allows for deeper insights into refugees’ own experiences of mobility, of the places through which they pass, of the local interactions and transnational networks that shape their trajectory, and of the violent encounters that have – often literally – left a mark in their lives. From this angle, the lived experience of “being on the move” and of “becoming a refugee” can be dissected as well as the dialectic relationship of (im-)mobility and fragmentation and the extent to which refugees’ journey can be considered as violent processes in themselves (BenEzer/Zetter 2015; Bank et al. 2017). Based on the presented empirical fi ndings, we argue that refugees’ journeys to and through Europe must be understood as journeys of violence. A fundamentally uneven and asymmetric global mobility regime has created frictions and fragmentations in the European border space and beyond. We interpret this as a manifestation of structural violence. In this context, people who are on the move to and within Europe are frequently and systematically exposed to direct violence and must cope with its devastating consequences. The wider European border space is thereby not only a site of human rights violations and encounters with direct violence, but also a particularly contested space that systemically reproduces structural violence (Tsianos/Karakayali 2010; Shields 2015). Four central features of violent journeys emerge from our analysis. First, we found that access to mobility is unevenly distributed and inherently stratifi ed according to socio-economic positions (see van Hear 2004; Weiss 2005; Urry 2012). Access to mobility is strongly infl uenced by political discourses of who can travel smoothly and whose movements are and should be restricted, which refl ects the “cultural violence” inherent to global mobility regimes. Accessing mobility requires resources such as travel documents and fi nancial means, whoever does not possess these is unlikely to be able to leave in the fi rst place or can only cross the border to a neighbouring state and cannot embark on a long-distance Journeys of Violence • 227 journey. The SOEP data that we analysed showed that “class positions” shape trajectories and thereby refl ect the stratifying effects of one's fi nancial background. Our qualitative interviews also point to the fact that available capital is decisive for family members’ capacity to follow others, which relates to the risk of displacement situations becoming protracted for those who cannot afford to move on. The experience of “involuntary stillness” (Martin 2011) in the sense of becoming stuck en route, whether this is in a Turkish city, a Libyan detention centre, or at the Bosnian border to Croatia, is thus also largely an effect of the stratifi cation of mobility, which is built into the structures of global migration systems (Glick Schiller/Salazar 2013). Second, and closely related to the sketched economic dimensions, refugees’ journeys to Europe – be they irregular or regular – are increasingly fragmented. Migration trajectories evolve gradually, they are dynamic and non-linear processes. Forced migrants must constantly adapt to the circumstances into which they are thrown. Their multi-directional step-by-step-movements are frequently – sometimes violently – halted and re-routed. And oftentimes, people end up in a very different place than originally planned (Collyer 2010; Schapendonk et al. 2020). In the SOEP database, Germany is framed as the fi nal place of arrival. However, many interviewees were in a weak legal position where arrival and longer-term settlement are legally obstructed and “voluntary return”, forced deportation, and onward movements are quite likely. Others such as Kamal ended up in Germany by chance, while their desired destination was somewhere else. Hence, even when a journey seemingly comes to an end, this may well be continuously infl uenced by the border regime and its structural violence. Border regimes do not only operate at the physical border itself. They also affect life in the destination country and people’s living conditions even after they have decided to stay in one place. Third, 2015 was exceptional in the sense that not only a record number of people on the move reached European territory via irregular pathways, but also that the journeys were comparatively fast – half of the respondents in the SOEP study arrived within one month. This refl ects the unique conditions of organised journeys across the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Balkan route in that year. With the EU-Turkey deal and the subsequent (publicly declared) closure of the Balkan route in March 2016, refugees’ mobilities to Europe were again decisively decelerated. Since then, long-term encampment in the EU borderscape has become the norm, leading to refugees’ enhanced precarity and protracted situations in which the entrapped people can neither move back nor forth. The infamous camp Moria on the Greek island of Lesvos stands as a prime example of this disturbing trend of immobilising refugees in border spaces with the aim of discouraging further mobilities (Tazzioli/Garelli 2020; Vries/Guild 2019). The increased risks of immobilisation and fragmentation of journeys with longer and more dangerous routes is a clear consequence of structural violence against refugees and, in turn, immediately linked to frequent encounters with direct violence. Fourth, in the wake of increasingly controlled, partially externalised and militarised border regimes, the access to safe pathways to asylum in Europe has not only become more restricted, but direct violence against people on the move is increasing and normalised. Refugees need to travel clandestinely, they rely on • Rahel Lorenz, Benjamin Etzold 228 others’ knowledge about illicit border crossings, and they are forced to draw on and pay for the support of the migration industry. This “illegalisation” of migration leads to unsafe routes and is the prime reason why more than 50,000 individuals have lost their lives or gone missing en route to Europe in the past 30 years. It has also contributed to increasing the costs of journeys, which enhances the prevalence of fraud and stealing en route and indirectly leads to stranded migrants’ greater exposure to labour exploitation. Moreover, social, political, and legal marginalisation make refugees more vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment at the hands of offi cial as well as private actors who embody the border regime. Direct violence may be infl icted by border guards, the police, or detention offi cers in Europe, as well as in the context of illegal pushbacks from Croatia or arbitrary imprisonment in Hungary. Other perpetrators of violence are not part of European states’ authorities, but are also connected to the EU border regime. The case of Libya shows the normalisation of violence against migrants quite drastically. The EU and Libyan warlords have co-created a regime of migration control, with cooperation between the Libyan coast guard and human traffi ckers. Practices of border control go hand in hand with violence and crimes against migrants such as forced return, arbitrary detention, slavery, and sexual violence. Overall, refugees’ journeys to Europe are fundamentally shaped by violent encounters. While we need to differentiate the types of violence that are infl icted, we also need to acknowledge that different individuals and groups are exposed to violence to different degrees and have developed diverse coping strategies to circumvent and deal with violent encounters. We see a clear trend emerging: the degree of fragmentation of refugees’ journeys correlates with the degree of violence encountered. We argue that the experiences of fragmented journeys with non-linear back-and-forth movements, forced immobilisation, and experiences of direct violence along the journey are deeply rooted in the border regimes that European governments have made great efforts to establish and consolidate inand outside of the EU’s territory. References Andersson, Ruben 2014: Illegality, inc. Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. California series in public anthropology 28. 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