Zones of Detachment: Controlled Transit and Humanitarian Response in Bihać and Lampedusa

Zones of Detachment: Controlled Transit and Humanitarian Response in Bihać and Lampedusa This paper examines how contemporary migration responses in Europe are increasingly shaped by practices of detachment, understood as the spatial, social, and political distancing of migrants from local publics and surrounding social environments. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, along the so-called Balkan Route, and on the Italian island of Lampedusa, it analyzes two peripheral yet strategically central transit zones where people on the move are deliberately kept out of sight. Despite differences in geography and geopolitics, both contexts share a common logic: detention and reception centres are located outside population hubs, the everyday realities of new arrivals remain largely obscured, and advocacy groups provide vital alternative accounts that counterbalance official narratives. In both Bihać and Lampedusa, spatial isolation functions as a technique of containment. Local residents often interpret the mere presence of shelters as evidence that migrants are being adequately supported, while the intensity of their journeys remains largely unknown to the broader community. Camps located on the periphery restrict mobility and produce a tightly controlled migration response, in which spatial and administrative detachment shields authorities from scrutiny and shapes local perception. Although both sites are controlled and detached, the experiences of migrants differ. In Bihać, people remain for longer periods and can leave the camp, whereas in Lampedusa, the hotspot serves as a first reception centre: migrants are swiftly processed and either transferred to secondary centres on Sicily or the mainland, or returned to their countries of origin. By situating Bihać and Lampedusa within debates on peripheralization and the politics of mobility, the paper shows that Europe’s margins function simultaneously as transit zones and zones of detachment, where movement is regulated through containment and invisibilisation. These dynamics produce tensions between local authorities and civil society while placing migrants in conditions of uncertainty and enforced liminality. Studying these two sites together reveals that migration management at Europe’s edges relies not only on borders and procedures but also on deliberate spatial and perceptual distancing. These marginal zones offer a critical vantage point for understanding how authority, agency, and humanitarian practice are negotiated in the peripheral spaces of contemporary mobility