Furor Et Vindicta: Joint Revenge Fantasizing and Impossible Harm in the Narrative Criminology of Balkan Route Migrants

Abstract

This article examines how migrants who traveled the Balkan Route use joint revenge fantasizing to make sense of border violence and reassign criminality to state actors. Based on minimally structured group conversations recorded in Trieste, Italy, it analyzes joint fantasizing as a collective narrative practice rather than an incidental expression of shared frustration. It identifies three mechanism families—symbolic reversal of hierarchies, collective moral tribunal, and contained transgressive catharsis—that show how imagined counter-violence may function as “impossible harm”: morally saturated yet structurally blocked from enactment. Revenge fantasies among structurally marginalized groups are conceptualized as harm-related storytelling that exposes and contests state and border violence. Joint revenge fantasizing emerges as a mode of impossible harm through which migrants symbolically reassign criminality to state actors while keeping counter-violence in the imaginative realm. In this way, the article extends narrative criminology beyond its offender-centered, event-focused inheritance by foregrounding imagination, interaction, and lived narrative practices in contexts of border violence.

Plain Language Summary

How Migrants on the Balkan Route Imagine Revenge to Make Sense of Border Violence

This article looks at how migrants who traveled along the Balkan Route talk together about revenge after experiencing violence at European borders. Based on group conversations recorded in Trieste, Italy, the study shows that these revenge fantasies are not simple jokes or random expressions of anger. Instead, they are a shared way of talking about humiliation, fear, and injustice. The article identifies three main patterns in these conversations. In some cases, migrants imagine turning power relations upside down, so that border guards experience the same fear and suffering they caused. In other cases, they imagine a moral or legal judgment in which state actors are exposed and punished for their actions. In still other cases, dark humor allows them to express rage and frustration without turning these fantasies into real plans. The article argues that these imagined acts of revenge are a form of “impossible harm”: they are emotionally intense and morally meaningful, but they remain blocked from real action by fear, legal insecurity, exhaustion, and dependence on institutions. More broadly, the study shows that people who suffer border violence use storytelling not only to describe harm, but also to challenge official ideas about who is dangerous and who is criminal.