This book focuses on processes of bordering and governmentality around the Greek border islands from the declaration of a ‘refugee crisis’ in the summer of 2015 up until the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapters trace the implementation of the EU migration hotspot approach across space and time, from the maritime Aegean border to the islands (Lesvos and Samos) and from the islands to the Greek mainland. They do so through the lenses of peoples’ refusal to succumb to categories that get reified as identities through the hotspot approach, such as that of the ‘deserving refugee’, the ‘undeserving economic migrant’, the ‘translator’, the ‘volunteer’, the ‘tourist’ and the ‘researcher’. This book explores how ‘migration management’ in Greece from 2015-2020, along with the reshaping of space and time, reconfigured peoples’ relationships with one another and ultimately with one’s self.

This book focuses on processes of bordering and governmentality around the Greek border islands from the declaration of a 'refugee crisis' in the summer of 2015 up until the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapters trace the implementation of the EU migration hotspot approach across space and time, from the maritime Aegean border to the islands (Lesvos and Samos) and from the islands to the Greek mainland. They do so through the lenses of peoples' refusal to succumb to categories that get reified as identities through the hotspot approach, such as that of the 'deserving refugee', the 'undeserving economic migrant', the 'translator', the 'volunteer', the 'tourist' and the 'researcher'. This book explores how 'migration management' in Greece from 2015-2020, along with the reshaping of space and time, reconfigured peoples' relationships with one another and ultimately with one's self. Aila Spathopoulou is Assistant Professor (Research) in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. She is also co-coordinator of the Research Area 'Mobility: Migration and Borders' at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research (Athens). She holds a PhD in Geography from King's College London and has published her research in peer reviewed journals.

Kolliniati’s groundbreaking book, Interpreting Human Rights: Narratives from Asylum Centers in Greece and Philosophical Values, challenges the notion that the interpretation and application of human rights primarily occur within the corridors of power in Strasbourg or official European institutions. It argues that such interpretation takes place in the grassroots settings of rural areas and neighborhoods, by actors who do not belong to the class of decision‐making elites. Focusing on the Aegean islands as exemplary sites of the European refugee crisis, this book draws on research conducted among local actors, including mayors, municipal councilors, representatives of NGOs and staff at refugee reception and identification centers. This book is divided into five distinctive sections: Methodology; Legal Framework and the Emergence of Hotspots; Empirical Research: Narratives of Local Actors; Local Narratives and Political Attitudes; and Glocalization of Human Rights. The study explores the role of human rights in narratives surrounding refugee flows, categorizing responses according to various political theory approaches such as global liberalism, egalitarianism, communitarianism and conservatism. By integrating applied political theory with localized human rights interpretations, this book offers actionable steps for addressing the challenges of migration in today’s interconnected world. By amplifying the voices of those directly engaged with one of contemporary Europe’s most significant challenges, Interpreting Human Rights will appeal to scholars of sociology, political theory, politics and international law, particularly those interested in migration, human rights and refugee studies.

Over the past few years, increased ‘unauthorised’ migrations into the territories of Europe have resulted in one of the most severe crises in the history of the European Union. Stierl explores migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and the ways in which they animate, problematise, and transform the region and its political formation. This volume follows public protests of migrant activists, less visible attempts of those on the move to ‘irregularly’ subvert borders, as well as new solidarities and communities that emerge in interwoven struggles for the freedom of movement. Stierl offers a conceptualisation of migrant resistances as forces of animation through which European forms of border governance can be productively explored. As catalysts that set socio-political processes into frictional motion, they are developed as modes of critical investigation, indeed, as method. By ethnographically following and being implicated in different migration struggles that contest the ways in which Europe decides over and enacts who does, and does not, belong, the author probes what they reveal about the condition of Europe in the contemporary moment. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Migration, Border, Security and Citizenship Studies, as well as the Political Sciences more generally.

How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. This is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.

The seamy underside of humanitarianism What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the politics of humanitarian responses to border violence and unequal mobility, arguing that such responses mask underlying injustices, depoliticise violent borders and bolster liberal and paternalist approaches to suffering. Focusing on the diversity of actors involved in humanitarian assistance alongside the times and spaces of action, the book draws a direct line between privileges of movement and global inequalities of race, class, gender and disability rooted in colonial histories and white supremacy and humanitarian efforts that save lives while entrenching such inequalities. Based on eight years of research with border police, European Union officials, professional humanitarians, and grassroots activists in Europe’s borderlands, including Italy and Greece, the book argues that this kind of saving lives builds, expands and deepens already restrictive borders and exclusive and exceptional identities through what the book calls humanitarian borderwork.

Borders of states, borders of citizenship, borders of exclusion. As the lines drawn on international treaty maps become ditches in the ground and roaming barriers in the air, a complex state apparatus is set up to regulate the lives of those who cannot be expelled, yet who have never been properly ‘rooted’. This study explores the mechanisms employed at the interstices of two opposing views on the presence of minority populations in western Thrace: the legalization of their status as établis (established) and the failure to incorporate the minority in the Greek national imaginary. Revealing the logic of government bureaucracy shows how they replicate difference from the inter-state level to the communal and the personal.

The Greek island of Lesvos is frequently the subject of news reports on the refugee ‘crisis’, but they only occasionally focus on the dire living conditions of asylum seekers already present on the island. Through direct experience as an activist in Lesvos refugee camps and detention centres, Iliadou gives voice to those with lived experiences of state violence. The author considers the escalation of EU border regime and deterrence policies seen in the past decade alongside their present impacts. Asking why the social harm and suffering border crossers experience is normalized and rendered invisible, the book highlights the collective, global responsibility for safeguarding refugees’ human rights.

Drawing on the concept of the ‘politics of compassion’, this Handbook interrogates the political, geopolitical, social and anthropological processes which produce and govern borders and give rise to contemporary border violence.

The Contested Politics of Mobility is the first collection to explore how the politics of mobility turns on the condition of irregularity. Timely and incisive, it brings together leading scholars from across the sub-disciplines of citizenship, migration and security studies, who show irregularity to be a produced and highly contested socio-political condition.