The railway and clandestine migration along the Balkan migratory trail

In this paper, we ask how railways, a massive mobility (infra)structure shaped by the ideology of coordination and certainty, work in the context of prolonged and repeated situations of uncertainty related to clandestine migration. Our main question is how railways are utilized for both containing and enabling mobilities towards the EU. In doing so, we are taking up a viapolitical reading of trains and locomotion. We understand rail infrastructure not only as a tangible object but also as a relational system that organizes movement, interaction and terrain. Based on long-term ethnographic research along the Balkan migratory trail, we discuss how railways are used for facilitating clandestine movement (as leads, resting infrastructures, spaces of solidarity etc.), and how they are used by state authorities to hinder and revert this movement (as detention, backward-paths, spaces of policing and border violence etc.). We investigate how these heterotopic usages of active and abandoned railways inform and reshape everyday geographies of movement along the route, intercity mobility, life on the EU administrative border, and how they change railway routes themselves. We expose how (un)certainty operates on the move, contributing to a non-linear understanding of migration.