Erased in Life and Death: Intersecting Injustices faced by People on the Move in Serbia: Summary 5/7
A knowledge-mapping report.
The Border Regime
Tuesday 1 July 2025
Introduction:
Our full report ‘Erased in life and death: intersecting injustices faced by people on the move in Serbia’ explores the systemic neglect, institutional silence, and structural violence surrounding the deaths of people on the move in Serbia. It is not a new intervention, nor a pioneering effort. Rather, it builds on the longstanding work of civil society organisations, cemetery workers, communities of faith, journalists, researchers, and families who have long documented, buried, and remembered the dead. Our aim is to contribute capacity, coordination, visibility, and documentation to efforts already underway.
Following Friday’s release, the fourth of six sections we’re sharing ahead of publication of the full report in July, this fifth summary section focuses on the role of the border regime itself; not merely a backdrop but an active and structuring force. The border regime is simultaneously a causal factor, a web within which all of our context and discussion is enmeshed and from which it cannot be separated, and a central facilitator of EU policy and practice.
The role of the border regime
We consider all deaths of people on the move in Serbia to be deaths that have been caused by the border regime; whether documented in 4D, or elsewhere, whether unreported, not yet, or never discovered. They are all predictable, preventable consequence of a policy architecture deliberately built to deter and obstruct movement and deny protection rights. This regime sacrifices human lives in the name of border control, in blatant contempt of international law, fundamental rights, and the basic principle that every person has the right to seek safety.EU institutions and partner countries often operate in legal grey zones, where jurisdiction is fragmented and responsibility diluted. The lack of enforcement mechanisms allows the regime’s most violent practices to persist without meaningful redress.
What is the border regime?
The European border regime is a complex, multinational web of actors. Nation states, the EU, law enforcement agencies, private companies, intergovernmental organisations, and others, working toward two primary goals:
Preventing movement from the global south into Europe,
Extracting profit from migration control via private contracts, surveillance tech, detention infrastructure).
The border regime in Serbia is inextricably linked to its contentious post-war and post-Communist development trajectory. Since the turn of the Millenium, it has opened its markets in full force, exploiting its good relations with the EU, Russia, China, and now the Arab Gulf states - the so-called ‘good’ Muslims of global capital.
Serbia plays a pivotal role in this system through it's position as an EU candidate country. The European Union uses candidacy frameworks and pre-accession funding as a strategy for externalising its border regime into neighbouring countries, namely Serbia and the Western Balkans, effectively outsourcing migration control by channeling pre-accession funds through mechanisms like the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA), the EU channels financial and technical support into strengthening Serbia’s border infrastructure, surveillance, and asylum capacity, aligning Serbia’s migration policy with EU priorities even before formal accession.
In return for this support and the political promise of future EU membership, Serbia has been playing ‘good soldier’, largely complying with the EU’s demands by adopting restrictive migration management strategies and formally cooperating with EU agencies such as Frontex, conducting joint operations and deploying corps on Serbia’s territory. Serbia’s role is particularly opportunistic: the country needs only to demonstrate reliability on migration management which allows it to secure significant funding and movement towards accession. This is regardless of whether Serbia’s measures match internal or international human rights standards. This dynamic demonstrates how EU externalisation practices have transformed candidate countries into de facto buffer zones for Fortress Europe.
In exchange, Serbia gains capital, political legitimacy, and progress toward EU membership, without necessarily receiving full scrutiny for compliance with European human rights standards, with Serbia’s non-EU status conveniently providing the EU with plausible deniability or distance from breaches. The country is incentivised to act as a buffer zone for Fortress Europe, enacting EU border goals with its own internal policies and policing, rewarded with membership of the European Union - the ultimate symbol of development.
The capitalist Western European mindset
At its core, the border regime is driven by a capitalist, Western European logic, with racialised assumptions about who belongs and who deserves mobility or safety. In Serbia, this logic intersects with the country’s post-Communist “development” trajectory that equates modernity with cleanliness, order, and alignment with Western economic values. In this framework, marginalised groups, such as people on the move, Roma communities, and others classed as ‘outsiders’ are framed as spatial blemishes, or interruptions to a societal transformation rooted in proximity to capital.
People on the move are treated as undesirable, incompatible with the image Serbia projects to foreign investors and elite partners as it moves to drastically transform the perception of Serbia to foreign coorporations
Projects like Belgrade Waterfront residential complex to be jointly built with UAE Eagle Hills exemplify this drive to “cleanse” spaces of social realities, such as displacement and migration, that might unsettle such lofty economic ambitions: A migrant population, who would not likely invest in EUR 2 million properties within the country, are out of the question.
The driving force behind the border regime is a capitalist Western European mindset - supported by xenophobic policy and narratives. These narratives enact tangible and intangible modes violence on people seeking sanctuary. Both modes of violence are deadly. The regime kills directly and indirectly:
Pushbacks and border militarisation push people into more dangerous terrain.
Neglect such as lack of access to shelter, healthcare, and safe routes.
Internal policing and harassment.
Deaths caused by fear of detection; accidents, self-medication, or suicide.
The lack of accountability for these deaths is itself part of the system.These deaths are the structural outcomes of a system sustained by ideologies of racialised control. This is what theorist Achille Mbembe has described as necropolitics: a form of governance that decides who may live and who must die. The border regime actively creates conditions where certain groups of people’s lives are weighed as irrelevant and their deaths legitimised.
Questions for accountability and structural redress
As it's role expands, should Frontex be tasked with tracking and publishing data on border deaths?
Why are activists and volunteers bearing the burden of care, while EU institutions hold the power and resources?
Can all migrant deaths in Serbia be traced back to EU border externalisation?
How does EU-funded tech (e.g. recent tenders) reshape movement routes and risks?
Still, as we saw in a previous chapter, resistance persists. In the absence of state accountability a constellation of different actors; grassroots groups, researchers, NGOs, civil society organisations, and online communities, has stepped in to perform essential roles of care and resistance, to transform mourning into collective, transnational action. These decentralised and human-centred efforts defy the border regime’s logic of erasure. They expose the cracks in its control. They insist on a different way of being.
The sixth and final summary section of this report, which considers the Border Regime, will be published this Friday 4 July.