Bordering and Governmentality Around the Greek Islands

231 Pages·2022·1.926 MB·English

by  Aila Spathopoulou

MOBILITY & POLITICS
SERIES EDITORS: MARTIN GEIGER
NICOLA PIPER · PARVATI RAGHURAM
Bordering and
Governmentality
Around the Greek
Islands
Aila Spathopoulou
Mobility & Politics
Series Editors
Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Nicola Piper, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London,
London, UK
Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Editorial Board
Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Michael Collyer, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Charles Heller, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland
Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil
Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre,
Nairobi, Kenya
Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland
Antoine Pécoud, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Villetaneuse, France
Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Roskilde, Denmark
Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica
Everita Silina, The New School, New York, NY, USA
Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Mobility & Politics
Series Editors
Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Nicola Piper, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Global Advisory Board
Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, UK
Michael Collyer, Sussex University, UK
Charles Heller, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland
Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore
Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brazil
Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi,
Kenya
Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland
Antoine Pécoud, Sorbonne University Paris Nord, France
Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Denmark
Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica
Everita Silina, The New School, New York, USA
Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, New Zealand
William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries
with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the
tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits
of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communi-
ties, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and
concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of
the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension
between openness and restriction raises important questions about how
different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility.
Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed
studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues
such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and
cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational
movements and cosmopolitics.
This series is indexed in Scopus.
Aila Spathopoulou
Bordering
and Governmentality
Around the Greek
Islands
Aila Spathopoulou
Department of Geography
Durham University
Durham, UK
ISSN 2731-3867 ISSN 2731-3875 (electronic)
Mobility & Politics
ISBN 978-3-031-08588-8 ISBN 978-3-031-08589-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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Contents
1 My Own Journey (Instead of Introduction) 1
2 Mapping Out the Hotspot 29
3 Setting the Scene of the Hotspot 49
4 Entering the Hotspot 71
5 Refusing the Hotspot 87
6 Exiting the Hotspot 107
7 Embodying the Hotspot 125
8 Returning to the Hotspot 161
Bibliography 213
Index 227
v
CHAPTER 1
My Own Journey (Instead of Introduction)
The Bench
At the end of June 2020, I was searching for Ege1 in Exarchia, a neigh-
bourhood in the centre of Athens known in the past as a self-governing
and anarchist space but in the last years has turned into one of the most
highly policed neighbourhoods of Athens, where city sweeps through
racial profiling take place daily. A month earlier, on the 4th of May 2020,
the first lockdown for the prevention of the spread of Covid-19 in Greece
was lifted for the general population in the country. As a Greek citizen,
therefore, I was able to exit my house and wander the streets and search
for him. For some time, Ege did not have a phone, as he had sold his
previous ones. Ege had been homeless since October 2019, living in a
squat in Exarchia that would eventually be evicted, then in a tent on a
hill behind Exarchia where several homeless people racialized as migrants
lived and that was, also, evicted by the police in the summer of 2020.
Ege’s last home before his arrest and detention by the police on the 21st
of June 2020, was a bench on a side street just off Exarchia square. On
that bench he slept, ate his meals, smoked and sold drugs; on that bench,
1 Ege in the Turkish language means ‘Aegean’ in English or ‘Aιγαι´o’ in the Greek
language. I purposely choose this fictious name because of its symbolic connotations; this
is where the ‘liquid border’ is located, where immeasurable violence is performed but,
also, where the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ connect. It is also where my research is located…
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
A. Spathopoulou, Bordering and Governmentality Around
the Greek Islands, Mobility & Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08589-5_1
2 A. SPATHOPOULOU
he lived and earned his living. Although I visited him frequently during
this time, I don’t think we ever sat together on that bench. If for Ege it
was his home for me the bench had become a border, a border that sepa-
rated us, even before he was arrested and detained in the pre-removal
centre of Amygdaleza whose walls and barbed wire kept us physically
apart. Was it the fear of the police, the smell of drugs, the movements
of the other ‘drug dealers’, Ege’s own lost gaze, or the fact that I did not
want to buy, and smoke weed, or the fear at the possibility of contracting
the Covid-19 virus if I was to sit too close, that I refused to sit with Ege
on that bench, that I refused to make that bench my home, our home…?
This book is about routes and homes, a route that becomes a home,
a home that turns into a prison, a bench that becomes our home and
eventually a border where we remain fixed and separated from those we
love. It is about relationships with and separations from subjects whose
experience is shaped by frictions and violence, by struggles to appro-
priate mobility, by diversion of routes and by the denial of mobility,
during a time that spans from the summer of 2015 until the summer
of 2020. In these five years, our lives had been governed (and continue
to be governed during the time of this writing) through multiple crises.
As we have observed with my mentors and collaborators at the Femi-
nist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens (FAC Research)2 “in
2015 following the financial crisis in 2011 through which Greece was
constructed as the disobedient pariah of Europe, reinforcing the polarity
between the European centre and the periphery, the European refugee
crisis represented by myriad photographs of people in boats arriving at
the island of Lesvos appears on the scene” (Carastathis et al. 2020, p. 9).
As a response to the ‘refugee crisis’, the hotspot approach was presented
by the European Commission in May 2015, as part of a larger policy push
termed the “European Agenda on Migration” (EC 2015a). Five registra-
tion and identification centres started operating in Greece, on the islands
of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos that ‘set the stage’ for the devel-
opment of the ‘refugee crisis’ and particularly for the distinction between
‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’ that shaped the ‘script’ of the crisis
since 2015.
The hotspot approach was presented by the European Commission
in May 2015, as part of a larger policy push termed the “European
2 https://feministresearch.org/.
1 MY OWN JOURNEY (INSTEAD OF INTRODUCTION) 3
Agenda on Migration” (EC 2015a). The Agenda mandates the Euro-
pean Asylum Support Office (EASO), Frontex and Europol to collaborate
“on the ground with frontline Member States to swiftly identify, register
and fingerprint incoming migrants” (EC 2015b), dividing those eligible
to apply for asylum from those ineligible, rendered deportable. Further,
Europol and Eurojust are to assist the “host” Member State in the
dismantling of “smuggling and trafficking networks” (EC 2015b). The
hotspot approach is, ultimately, tied to the implementation of the EU–
Turkey Deal3 on the 20th of March 2016, that effectively turned the
‘hotspot islands’ into prison islands and deportation sites for the people
on the move. The chapters of this book and the experiences that they
narrate are structured around what Martina Tazzioli (2018) refers to as a
“split temporality, formed by a “before” and an “after” the Deal” (p. 19).
Four years later, in October 2019, Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos
Mitsotakis of the ruling right-wing New Democracy party announces to
the population that what Greece is dealing with is no longer a refugee
crisis but a migration crisis, claiming that the majority of the population
that is entering Greece have the profile of an economic migrant and not
that of a refugee (see also Spathopoulou and Tazzioli 2021). As we have
pointed out at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens,
“during this time, the construction of new closed detention centres on
‘hotspot’ islands was announced; the imposition of a new asylum law
3 With the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal (otherwise known as the EU–
Turkey Statement and Action Plan or the EU–Turkey Agreement) on 20th of March
2016, all migrants arriving on the border islands are geographically restricted to the
five hotspot islands. The Deal comprises several action points, including: (1) the return
to Turkey of all asylum seekers arriving on the Greek islands after the Deal’s date of
implementation; (2) the resettlement of 1 Syrian in the EU for every Syrian returned to
Turkey; (3) the disbursement of e6 billion from the EU to Turkey; (4) the lifting of
visa requirements for Turkish citizens by the end of 2016; and (4) the re-energisation
and acceleration of the EU Accession Process for Turkey. The deal hence erects a
temporal border between those designated ‘refugees’ or ‘newcomers’, arrived post-2015,
and those referred to as ‘migrants’, who have been living for many years or were
even born in Greece, but have been denied asylum, permanent residency, or citizenship.
See: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-towards-a-new-policy-on-mig
ration/file-eu-turkey-statement-action-pla Researchers that happened to be on the hotspot
islands when the deal was put into force observed how the gates of the hotspot were
locked or closed (Tazzioli 2016; Antonakaki et al. 2016; Spathopoulou 2016). “Migrants
were free to leave the centers but a second order of restriction of movement barred them
from leaving the islands, while the centers themselves remained largely inaccessible for
outside observers, such as journalists, NGOs or researchers” (Antonakaki et al. 2016).
4 A. SPATHOPOULOU
that among other things violates one’s very right to apply for asylum in
Greece; evictions of squats in Athens and other urban centres, and the
transportation of people to isolated and segregated camps; evictions of
recognized refugees from housing by the state and UNHCR, the IOM
leading people to ‘self-deportation’; incessant stop and search procedures
through racial profiling on the islands and in urban centres; daily more
deaths in the Aegean sea; an increased criminalization of solidarity and
mobility; blood stains marking the ‘Balkan route’, through which in 2015
the ‘March of Hope’ took place”.4
In March 2020, “a ‘state of emergency’ declared by the Greek govern-
ment, suspended asylum processes for newly arriving people for one
month, invoking article 78.3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the
European Union”. Subsequently, since March 2020, the Greek author-
ities have engaged in an ongoing practice of systematic and violent
collective expulsions, targeting specifically unregistered migrants (Legal
Centre Lesvos 2022). Ege’s homelessness coincided with the outbreak
of yet another crisis that emerged in Greece in March 2020; the global
Covid-19 pandemic crisis that “has exacerbated the negative effects of the
previous declared crises” (Carastathis et al. 2020, p. 9). Racial profiling
and criminalization of people racialized as migrants by police in the urban
centres had intensified under the pretext of pandemic controls (see Legal
Centre Lesvos 2021).5
Alongside pushbacks which have become the modus operandi of
‘migration management’ on the Aegean and Evros Greek–Turkish
borders (Legal Centre Lesvos 2020)6 as well as ‘push-offs’ from the
shores and into the sea on what migrants have referred to as floating
tents (The New Humanitarian 2020), various changes to the prevailing
asylum legislation and prolonged delays in registering people as asylum
seekers due to health quarantines (see Legal Centre Lesvos above reports)
are pushing more and more people out of the asylum system or denying
them the right to even apply for asylum. The pandemic was tied to an
increased exclusion of people on the move from the asylum procedure and
to several changes in the laws governing the asylum procedure (governed
4 https://feministresearch.org/mobility/.
5 http://legalcentrelesvos.org/2021/04/13/legal-centre-lesvos-quarterly-newsletter-
january-march-2021/.
6 http://legalcentrelesvos.org/2020/07/13/press-release-new-legal-centre-lesvos-rep
ort-details-collective-expulsions-in-the-aegean-sea/.