19 research outputs found
Neighbourliness, conviviality, and the sacred in Athensâ refugee squats
To better understand the range of possibilities and opportunities for (co)existence available to displacementâaffected people, attention must be given to the thick webs of sociality shaping interactions in situations of mass displacement. This paper makes the case that refugee squats in Athens are distinct spaces wherein different understandings of (co)existence converge â spaces whose production is contingent on support from neighbourly relations and networks that are mediated in moments through conceptions of conviviality informed by religion. Based on ethnographic work carried out in 2016 and a spatial analysis of refugee squats in Athens, this paper emphasises neighbourliness and conviviality as they relate to sacred understandings of coexistence. This helps highlight the limits built in to thinking about the movement of refugees from the global South through Euroâcentric ontologies of the social. More than this, following postcolonial debates on the decentring of knowledge production, the research makes manifest how Islamic socioâcultural memories of jiwÄr or a right of neighbourliness complicate geographies of humanitarianism that make stark binary assumptions between religious and secular space. In turn, the evidence from Athens indicates that refugee perspectives on neighbourliness are imperfectly translated by migrant rights activists as solidarity, obscuring the different ways Muslim structures of feeling contribute to the production of refugee squats
Socialities of solidarity: revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises
This article addresses solidarity and the opening of social spaces in the relations between refugees and residents of Greece who try to help them. âSocialities of solidarityâ materialise alternative worldviews; they are loci for the production of lateral relationships; places inhabited by the prospects that derive from the political production of sociality. The article discusses the âgift tabooâ, dominant in the pre-crisis era, that reflects the risks of giving to the formation of horizontal relationships. In the contemporary âEuropean refugee crisis, and other crises, the gift taboo has collapsed, posing challenges to the egalitarian visions of sociality
Nonrecording the âEuropean refugee crisisâ in Greece: Navigating through irregular bureaucracy
This article explores nonrecording on the borders of Europe during the âEuropean refugee crisisâ in 2015. It examines the ambiguous practices of border control and the diverse actors involved. Taking the island of Lesvos as its starting point, the article interrogates how state functionaries manage an âirregularâ bureaucracy. Irregular bureaucracy is approached as an essential element of statecraft , rather than an indication of state failure. Nonrecording is thus a crucial site of contestation between the state, nonstate agents, and the government, as well as between Greece and âEurope.â Nevertheless, despite the prevalence of irregularity, the imagery associated with ideal bureaucracyâa system of absolute knowledge, control, and governance of populationsâis powerful; and yet, the actors are fully aware that it is a fantasy