For a few years before the summer of 2015, when the unprecedented scale and strength of the movement of migrants forced Fortress Europe to temporarily open up a corridor for quicker and safer passage through the Balkans, Serbia was one of the places where many migrants were stuck for days, weeks or even months, on their way towards the EU. The aim of this paper is to present the situation of migrants in Serbia, as it was up to the summer of 2015, from a critical perspective, by showing that the category of ‘migrants’ created by the European migration policy has been externalized and transposed into Serbian legislation, and that this category is used to justify repression of people who fall into it. In the first part, I theorize on the nature of the EU migration policy – with its tendency to focus on securitization and externalization tendencies – and argue that it produces the category of ‘migrants’. In the second part, I discuss the consequences of the migration policy in Serbia, by referring to fieldwork conducted there in 2012 and between November 2014 and July 2015, based on participant observation, informal interviews and subsequent media production. I focus on a case study of two winters in the jungles of Subotica.
