Kronologija balkanske poti

The article seeks to elaborate on the genealogy of the border regime of the Balkan Route, taking as its starting point the emergence of the Balkan Corridor and the permutations that followed its closure. It examines borders as shifting places of contestation between the autonomy of migration and mechanisms of border management. In global capitalist relations, borders serve as a means of redistributing global wealth and preserving class inequalities. Yet because borders are, at the same time, essentially plastic, the border regime is influenced by changing migration movements facilitated by the same global inequalities it seeks to enforce. Drawing on the conceptualisation of borders as borderscapes, the article provides an overview of the more significant developments in the border regime of the Balkan Route, responding to the strategies and tactics of people on the move. Starting from the diapositives of the border regime before the so-called long summer of migration in 2015, the article elaborates on the four phases of the Balkan Corridor. It traces the main events from the informal corridor to its formalized phase and to its closure, enacted through border militarisation and the practice of systematic chain pushbacks across the region. As discussed in the article, the closure of the corridor transformed the linear Balkan Route into a Balkan Circuit. The article also deals with the permutations of the border regime during the Covid-19 epidemic and describes the main developments in Slovenia from 2022 onwards.