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Can the Forests be Xenophobic? Migrant Pathways through Croatia and the Forest as Cover

Since 2018, the forests of Gorski Kotar, Croatia, have become a part of the migrant Balkan route, resulting in some far-right activists appointing themselves as defenders and spokespersons of these forests. Whilst these spokespersons are most clearly xenophobic, where they claim migrants are not welcome in the forests, the aim of this article is to explore whether the forests themselves take a xenophobic stance towards these figures. However, before this question can be properly considered, we argue that the issue of how to analytically situate ourselves in relation to the xenophobic narratives of these far-right activists needs to be resolved. As Hage (2017) has pointed out in his discussion of the relation between racism and environmentalism, although the messages we may be promoting are very different, as scholars we share a very similar analytical position with these self-appointed defenders and spokespersons of the forests. This role of acting as spokespersons of nature has a long history far- right ideologies but is also very visible in scholarly fields such as biology. By sharing a similar position, it is easy to get entangled up in narratives where we may even be unwittingly supportive of them or animate them. Taking Kohn’s (2013) ideas about the ways in which we might read how forests think, and seeking to avoid inhabiting the role of self-appointed spokespersons of the forests, we ask what are the forests offering to migrants? Are the forests discriminatory in who they offer things to? Through an exploration of published migrants’ testimonies about the forests, we propose that they present the forests as offering a form of cover to them and that the forests are indiscriminate in terms of who they offer this cover to: migrants, police, smugglers, far-right actors, local people. As such, the forests are neither xenophobic nor welcoming, which we feel stimulates further questions about these very human interests.

Migrants, Balkan route, eco-fascism, forests.

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