(Im)possible migration and the double game of asylum in Bulgaria
In Bulgaria, those seeking international protection move within a field shaped by border enforcement, legal frameworks and institutional control. Drawing on twenty-nine focus groups with 279 participants and non-participant observation conducted between 2014 and 2016 in reception centres run by the State Agency for Refugees and in detention facilities under the Ministry of the Interior, this article proposes the concept of “(im)possible migration”: a condition in which movement continues but cannot reach a place where the migration project can be realised. The analysis follows this condition along two dimensions – at the external border, where space closes, and within the status-determination procedure, where time stretches until it is lived as lost. Reading the encounter between institutional rules and people’s strategies through Bourdieu’s notion of the double game, the article argues that the category of “asylum seeker” is not merely a legal label but a symbolic boundary sustained by the state’s power to classify, one that people do not simply endure but use in pursuing their own projects. Read from Bulgaria, these practices appear as an early instance of logics that later became general across the Union.
Svoboda Stoeva
Svoboda Stoeva is an independent researcher based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Plovdiv University “Paisii Hilendarski”, where in 2018 she defended her doctoral thesis “‘Asylum Seeker’ Status: Boundaries, Categories, Discourses”. Her research explores forms of human suffering as socially and institutionally produced experiences, focusing on how physical and symbolic boundaries, administrative categories, and public discourses shape the lives of people in vulnerable positions.