Читать книгу On the Doorstep of Europe - Heath Cabot - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction. The Rock of Judgment
Stavros led me on a leisurely and circuitous route up the Acropolis, the winter lights of Athens below us, and the monuments of the ancient city in sharp relief against the night sky. Eventually we arrived at an outcropping of stones on the northwest side of the Acropolis, which lay in darkness, except for the cigarettes of those who sat atop the rocks chatting quietly. We climbed up, my feet finding slippery grooves in the stone polished smooth from wear as I forsook the ladder that had been placed there for visitors, and we sat looking out at the Athenian night. The clusters of pine trees below us, with their green scent of darkness, opened outward into an unruly city that tumbled over and over upon itself: streets, apartment buildings, the whir of traffic, and lights. This rock, Stavros explained, was Areios Paghos: the high court of the ancient city. The supreme court of civil law in contemporary Greece also bears its name. Here—according to myth—Ares god of war was tried for murdering the son of Poseidon, hence its epithet (rock of Ares). And in Aeschylos’s Eumenides, this is where Athena set up the very first court, with a human jury, to weigh the guilt of Orestes, avenger of his father and murderer of his mother.
To do fieldwork in Athens is always to encounter the mythic city, as it is perpetually reanimated and remade in both topographies and conversations. Stavros himself is a lawyer, who at that time worked at an NGO for asylum seekers in Athens, where we met and shared important conversations. He explained that he often came to this ancient rock of judgment to think: to work through dilemmas of life, love, and law. Despite my occasional vantage point from atop this rock, where I too would sometimes come to think, I generally looked up at the Acropolis, which is visible even from dark and cramped corners of the city center. An oasis of air, stone, and green, the Acropolis rises above the fray like a great rocky head, sitting in watch and perhaps also in judgment over the city. For many Athenians (students of their own mythic histories, retold through popular culture, across generations, and in school), and certainly for many foreigners like myself, the great rock ruptures the topography of the contemporary polis, calling up the ghosts of what was or is imagined to have been: the mythic past then collides with the quotidian, the city of particular routines and practices (see Hamilakis 2007; Yalouri 2001).
From the narrow city center streets, or from my fifth-floor balcony where I could view just a sliver of the Parthenon if I positioned myself just right, during my fieldwork in Athens I looked to the Acropolis as a symbol of judgment but also of refuge. As an undergraduate student of classical religion, I was captivated when an older, particularly brainy friend explained to me that beneath the Acropolis, the center of the polis, reside the Erinyes or Furies. In the very last scene of Aeschylos’s Eumenides, which defuses the dilemmas that have ensnared characters throughout the tragic cycle of the Oresteia, Orestes is acquitted of the charges against him, thanks to Athena, who casts the deciding vote in an otherwise “hung” jury. Yet the Furies, who have chased him all the way from Argos to Athens, threaten to torment the city in retribution: they are ancient goddesses of night, they claim, and they demand recognition. And so Athena issues another judgment, a sovereign act before the audience of the court, but really more of an afterthought, outside the formal space of the law. She offers the Furies refuge beneath the Acropolis, so they might “look over the city as terror watches over the mind.” Thus granted recognition and refuge, the persecuting Furies are transformed, becoming the Eumenides, “the kindly ones,” to be honored for eternity by the citizens of Athens. And as they vanish in a procession of lights into the dark spaces beneath the great rock, the city also is transformed.1
This image of judgment, refuge, and their potential for transformation serves as a mythic backdrop for this book, which explores Greece’s emergence as a country of refuge for persons seeking political asylum. I consider the asylum system in Greece much in the vein of Susan Coutin’s (2000) “ethnography of a legal process,” through which she tracks the asylum claims of Salvadorans in the United States from their inception to their abandonment. Yet, even more, this book is about that which spills over from the formal space of asylum law: the encounters, social interactions, forms of knowledge, and ethical engagements that have their genesis in formal law but are not reducible to it. I argue that judgment and refuge, while eminently necessary, are also impossible within the formal confines of the asylum procedure. Rather, those elements that exceed or even undermine the asylum process have powerful and even transformative effects in claims for protection and the lived experiences of those who make, mediate, and adjudicate such claims. These asides, afterthoughts, and correctives to processes of adjudication serve, in always partial ways, to remake Athenian citizenship’s topographies.
The “Krisi” of Asylum
As I write in 2013, Greece is currently characterized as the lynchpin of a worldwide financial “crisis,” which has thrown into question the stability of European and global markets, the possibility of economic integration, and the futures of global economies. This small country on the periphery of Europe is thus at the center of deeply contested questions over sovereignty, financial viability, governance, and democracy. In 2004, however, when I first began my research in Athens, Greece was riding the dizzy wave of prosperity following its initial accession to the Euro and, perhaps even more important, the long-awaited “return” of the Olympic Games. With massive “cleanups,” infrastructural improvements, and sidewalks that had been polished slippery-smooth, Athens achieved some visibility as a renewed European capital worth visiting on the way to the islands. Yet overall, for international audiences, Greece continued to connote an entrenched quality of marginality, appearing largely as a benign, tourist friendly, and somewhat disorganized country on the Mediterranean peripheries of Europe and the West.
In the European context, however, in the early 2000s Greece was fast acquiring notoriety as a problem zone with regard to questions of immigration and asylum. This was largely owing to its geopolitical position on EU land and sea borders, changing patterns of violence and poverty (notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), and increasingly militarized policing measures in other regions of Europe’s Mediterranean coast. These multiple factors contributed to rapidly increasing numbers entering Greece’s own territorial borders, reconfiguring also the routes of smuggling through which people make their ways to Europe. Greece is often more accessible than other EU Mediterranean countries for persons coming from the Middle East, because of its proximity and its shared land and sea borders with Turkey. Most cross the river and mountain-drawn borders in the North. Others enter in rubber dinghies, crossing the short but dangerous distances from the Turkish coast to islands in the Aegean. Larger boats from North Africa often initially head for Italy (or passengers may be told that this is where they are bound), but many boats are redirected and abandoned in Greek territorial waters. In the current climate of economic instability, many migrants are returning voluntarily to home countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia; others, many of whom have lived in Greece for a number of years, have left for other locations in Europe. Since 2011 there has been an overall decrease in undocumented migration to Europe, owing largely to more militarized and rigorous policing measures on all external borders. Still, as of 2013, the Greek borders, and in particular, the Evros River between Greece and Turkey, are among the most trafficked borders of the European Union.2
A few years before the financial collapse, the Greek asylum process thus emerged as a growing area of “crisis” for the EU. Only a fraction of those who entered Greece applied for asylum, very often owing to difficulty accessing the asylum system, and just as often because many traveled elsewhere in Europe or remained undocumented. Beginning in 2004, however, Greece had one of the fastest rising rates of asylum application in Europe, combined with staggeringly low refugee recognition rates. According to official statistics compiled by the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection (Ipouryio Dhimosias Taksis kai Prostasias tou Politi; Υπουργείο Δημόσιας Τάξης και Προστασίας του Πολίτη),3 the number of asylum applications in Greece grew by more than five times between 2004 and 2007, from 4,469 to 25,113 (see Table 1). Meanwhile, only a small fraction were recognized as refugees each year. In 2006, only 64 persons acquired refugee status; in 2007, 140.4 In 2008, there was an increase in the number of positive decisions to 415 but this number remained extremely low in comparison to other EU member states (see Table 2). Just as striking as the high number of rejections was the extraordinarily high number of cases that remained pending. In 2010, according to data released by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR 2010), Greece was globally the country with the fourth highest number of backlogged asylum cases (48,201), behind South Africa, the United States, and Ecuador. For European and international audiences, then, the “crisis” of asylum in Greece was not just a question of volume but lay also in the spheres of law and bureaucracy: in Greece’s incapacity to document, register, and process claims to protection. Moreover, given Greece’s status as a European external border, asylum in Greece also threw into crisis the EU capacity both to protect European territories and citizens from “alien” threats and to comply with international laws guaranteeing protection for persons fleeing violence and persecution.
Table 1: Number of Asylum Applications in Greece by Year, 2004–2010
| Year | Number of new applications |
| 2004 | 4,469 |
| 2005 | 19,884 |
| 2006 | 12,267 |
| 2007 | 25,113 |
| 2008 | 19,884 |
| 2009 | 15,928 |
| 2010 | 10,273 |
Source: Greek Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection.
Table 2: Comparative Table of EU Asylum Decisions, 2008 (EU countries issuing highest numbers of decisions)
| EU country | Total decisions issued | Positive decisions (refugee status) |
| France | 56,115 | 11,470 |
| Germany | 30,405 | 10,650 |
| Greece | 30,915 | 415 |
| Italy | 20,260 | 9,740 |
| Sweden | 31,220 | 8,670 |
| United Kingdom | 33,525 | 10,190 |
Source: Data provided by national authorities and by Eurostat (www.europa.eu); rounded to nearest 5.
Krisi [κρίση], in Greek, refers not just to “crisis” (its clear English equivalent) but also to the work of judgment in the context of law and, more loosely, in the sense of critique or criticism. This book examines a number of sites where judgment is carried out. Within the asylum procedure, and through detailed examinations of encounters between workers and aid candidates at an Athenian asylum aid NGO, I consider how processes of decision making give rise to prototypes (Coutin 2000: 107) of credible asylum cases, and accompanying figurations of which persons and lives are (or are not) eligible for protection. More broadly, however, “crisis” invokes a narrative of historical time punctuated by turning points and critical shifts (Redfield 2005). Such narratives also accomplish moral work, enacting forms of judgment by demarcating certain territories, persons, and moments as sites of potential danger. I thus explore how European and more global narratives of crisis reinscribe long-standing, even structurally entrenched histories of exclusion and marginality. These include both the marginalization of Greece in Europe and the ongoing exclusion of asylum seekers and refugees, who—in Greece, in the EU, and on a more global scale—are perpetually relegated to the edges of the body politic. I consider how crisis narratives both assert and legitimate structural violence, which in Greece plays out not only in the fraught arena of asylum, but in increasing poverty, civil unrest, state brutality, and the breakdown of bureaucratic and civic entitlements. Finally, I show that the krisi of asylum in Greece, like the financial crisis, simultaneously enacts a rupture in these marginalizing configurations, throwing them into contestation, and creating possibilities for change in sociopolitical and legal spheres as well as in ethical life.
The asylum process in Greece, as I approach it here, is a venue for a series of “social dramas” (Gluckman 2006 [1965]; Llewellyn and Hoebel 2002; Turner 1967, 1974) currently taking place in Athens around questions of governance, citizenship, rights, and ethics. While I recognize the limits of “social drama” as an analytical device, including its potentially teleological character and tendency to convey a stage-based theory of social change, this model highlights some important elements of the relationship between formal law and the wider sociopolitical processes that it both reflects and affects. For Turner (1974: 37), “social dramas” entail the “contestation” and, in many cases, transformation of dominant frameworks of social organization; they are “aharmonic or disharmonic processes, arising in conflict situations.” This analytical framework underscores how legal processes are often venues for the exposure and contestation of prevalent forms of structural pressure and violence, which often go unacknowledged.
Turner (1974: 39) writes that particularly during periods of “crisis,” when dominant social and political formations are turned upside down, it is “least easy to don masks and pretend that nothing is rotten in the village.” The krisi of asylum makes visible a number of underlying and perhaps irresolvable tensions in Europeanization and rights politics more broadly: how to reconcile humanitarian and security concerns, how to distinguish refugees from other kinds of migrants, how to rearticulate the insides and outsides of the Greek nation-state, and the question of what kind of polities Greece and Europe are becoming. Asylum claimants, bureaucrats, and service providers engage these dilemmas through their face-to-face encounters with each other. Some of these tensions are peculiar to Greece at this particular historical moment. These include the problems of EU governance in the arenas of immigration and asylum, and the often untenable positions in which Greek institutions currently find themselves in sites of entrenched geopolitical and economic marginality.
More deeply, however, the dramas I explore highlight how ethically engaged individuals face the tensions embedded in an international regime of rights-based protection that, even in supranational contexts, depends on nation states for its realization. This tension is endemic to the “national order of things” that Liisa Malkki (1995b) so artfully elucidates, and which Hannah Arendt (1976 [1951]) outlines with striking clarity. At least in theory, asylum, based on the framework of international human rights, is for those who have been driven from home countries and must now seek protection in the territory of a foreign nation state. Yet in practice, this national order persistently goes awry. People fleeing violence often cannot make it across borders, giving rise to that anomalous category of the “internally displaced person.” Meanwhile, barring the willingness or capacity of nation states to offer protection, there has been a proliferation of no-man’s lands, camps, and other non-nationalized spaces, where refugees are confined to zones of limbo as they await resettlement, processing, and the distribution of services (Agamben 1998; Hyndman 2000). When claimants do, however, find a way to cross borders, to a nation state deemed by the international community to be “safe” and capable of providing protection, refuge is awarded by the very virtue of their being “alien”: a citizen of another nation where citizenship has failed. Thus, while the law of protection is grounded on an ahistorical vision of humanity, a “universal” citizenship invoked through the regime of international human rights, this framework simultaneously reinscribes the refugee’s “alien” origins. At stake in asylum law, then, is the question of who among these “alien” subjects are worthy of or entitled to refuge.
I explore how this problem at the heart of asylum law is expressed and engaged both through the encounters of everyday life and in the practical concerns of asylum claimants, adjudicators, and those who take on the mediating role of service provision. I argue that the asylum procedure, in its formal application, presents applicants and decision makers with “tragic” dilemmas. “Tragedy,” as I discuss it both later in this Introduction and in greater detail in Chapter 3, entails the material, legal, and political constraints that limit claims to protection (see Calabresi and Bobbitt 1978), as well as conflicting ethical commitments in the rendering of these judgments (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]). Decision makers who assess asylum applications, in both governmental and nongovernmental spheres, must balance material limits to their capacities to offer protection with the demands of law and policy, as well as more fluid ethical concerns that may reflect cultural practices, affective modes, and dominant notions of right action.
These problems of ethics are also about citizenship: who gets to make claims to belonging and entitlement and on what grounds—a question that has powerful implications for the claimant’s quality of life and even life itself. As adjudicators, claimants, and service providers negotiate the tragedies of asylum in Greece, they also redelineate the insides and outsides of the body politic. These ethical engagements, generated in the space of law, reflect changing notions of who inhabits the viable center of the polis, and who is cast to its margins or beyond. They also point to new possibilities for who might be brought into the topography of the city itself, becoming “kindly” rather than merely “alien.” As Gluckman (2006 [1965]) and more recently, Herzfeld (1982) and Ngai (2004) show, though in very different ways, it is the “alien” or “stranger” (in Greek, ksenos; ξένος) who forces the body politic to (re)constitute and rearticulate itself.5
Such reshaping of the body politic in relationship to the “other” occurs across multiple scales and entails a constantly shifting constellation of who or what is near or far, inside or outside. Writes Simmel (1950: 405): “The stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us.” This telescopic reorienting of relationships between inside and outside, self and other, unfolds across global, European, and national scales, transecting the shifting topography of Athens and sites of face-to-face encounter. Greece—its own European membership on trial—has become a kind of test case for European dreams of the free movement of people and capital. The Greek asylum system thus speaks directly to the failures and potentialities of European citizenship: Who can make legitimate claims to belonging and entitlement in Europe, and what does this entail? And with a European migration “apparatus” that attempts the incongruous melding of security with the values of freedom and justice (Feldman 2011), what are the possibilities and limits of rights and international protection? Further, with regard to global landscapes of human rights and humanitarian intervention, are there ways of responding to claims for refuge that invoke a more flexible and inclusive image of the “generally human” that pays appropriate attention to both difference and common ground (Goodale 2009)? What alternative visions of humanity, ethics, and citizenship might tragedy unveil?
The asylum process and its adjudicative logics also entail a wealth of epistemic practices, through which both claimants and decision makers seek to make sense of each other, the law, the state, and bureaucracy, including bureaucratic tools such as documentation, interviewing, form filling, and file making. Yet far from being simply technocratic, these practices rely heavily on more indeterminate forms of knowledge production: storytelling and narrative; pictures, images, and other aesthetic forms; and rumor and fantasy. These creative and fluid knowledge practices emerge, I suggest, from profound epistemic problems embedded in the Greek asylum process. Gaps in power between decision makers and asylum seekers also entail gaps in knowledge of each by the other (Laing 1983 [1967]). Furthermore, as I highlight in Chapter 2, the Greek state and its tools of regulation are deeply mystified, even for service providers and bureaucrats, who may be even more perplexed than asylum seekers themselves. The asylum procedure thus readily weds bureaucracy with practices of what I describe as mythopoesis or myth-making, through which all parties seek to make sense of radical uncertainty, unpredictability, and even absurdity.
Asylum seekers, adjudicators, and service providers are engaged in trying to acquire usable knowledge of the asylum process, each other, and their everyday lives. Since the “real,” however, frequently evades explanation, they often look to frameworks that, like myth, are said to underlie daily life and practice. Moreover, rather than emerging in contradistinction to law and bureaucracy, myth-making is crucial to the workings of asylum in Greece and unfolds through the technocratic values of transparency and bureaucratic accountability. Much as Charles Stewart (1991) argues that the demonic buoys up the Orthodox in contemporary Greek cosmology, I show that these knowledge forms at the margins of law and bureaucracy are in fact central to their everyday functioning. In the vein of Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) analysis of Azande magic, my ethnography highlights how the search for sense, origins, causes, and effects beyond the visible or self-evident is, in its own way, deeply rational. Yet these more indeterminate forms of knowledge take on lives of their own: documents acquire their own agency; persons disappear or become phantoms and ghosts; bureaucratic processes become products of hearsay; and stories, true or not, come to form the ground of judgment.
While, for Turner (1967, 1974), social dramas often end in moments of reconstitution, when balance is restored and norms are reasserted, I emphasize their creative potential and radical indeterminacy. Paul Friedrich (1986) formulated the concept of “poetic indeterminacy” to highlight the role of individual imaginations in (re)shaping the structural dimensions of language and culture. By this, he sought to bring into view the processes by which individuals “integrate knowledge, perceptions, and emotions in some creative way … in order that they may enter into new mental states or new relations with their milieus” (18). I show here that in processes of decision making and adjudication, the enactment of judgment is accompanied by unofficial, often highly creative practices that have crucial consequences in the experiences of claimants and adjudicators. The forms of governance, sociality, knowledge, and ethical engagement generated through krisi, with their many dilemmas, take on new and unpredictable formations, with equally indeterminate effects. Projects of governance may lead to their own undoing, even as they enact regulation. Knowledge is wedded to myth. Socialities predicated on power inequalities, structural violence, and exclusion also generate attachment, humor, and intimacy. Ethics, while grounded in the binary dilemmas of tragedy, become kaleidoscopic and multilayered, as persons find myriad ways to manage and destabilize these dilemmas.
Such asides, afterthoughts, and finaglings could easily fall by the wayside if one were to focus only on the formal asylum process, Greece’s apparent failures in implementing it, and the issuance—or denial—of refuge. Yet these excesses and even byproducts of law and judgment, with their elements of superfluity, are crucial to the asylum process and its lived effects on contemporary Greek citizenship. This book, in many ways, is an exploration of how certain persons and lives are constituted as superfluous,6 cast out of home countries through multiple kinds of violence, and suspended in politicolegal precariousness in Greece. These forms of excess, however, also make possible productive encounters that have an important role in reshaping modes of social, political, and legal belonging. Those left out of dominant formations of citizenship are central to how the Athenian body politic, like the city, is remade and rearticulated.
An Office in Athens
On the loud central Athenian boulevard of Peiraios, a small “Chinatown” has sprung up in the past ten years—a row of Chinese wholesalers that supply many of the less expensive clothing shops in Athens. Both Greek and Chinese shop owners, as well as many street vendors, acquire their goods from these distributors (see Rosen 2013). Just in view of the Acropolis, and just outside the zones where tourists wander, a five to fifteen-minute walk in any direction will take you in very different trajectories.
Five minutes to the southeast, you could push your way through Psiri, the old meat-packing district, silent during the day with shuttered windows, but at night coming alive with bars and restaurants that open into the street. Psiri connects labyrinth-like with some of the back streets where long-standing Greek inhabitants and recent migrants live side by side, and the grilled fish, onion, garlic, and lemon smells of old tavernes mingle with the scents of curries, sour bread, and spicy eggplant. Or you could take a tourists’ walk that Athenians also love, snaking through Psiri to Thisseio and Monastiraki, where the lines of the Acropolis vault above the narrow streets and faded shop fronts of old Athens. In a mixed sea of Greek speakers and fair-skinned tourists speaking German, English, or French, you could follow the tracks of the ιlektrico (ηλεκτρικό), Athens’s first public train system, which carves a moat on the side of the Acropolis, beneath the ancient Agora. You would also pass street vendors. Men from Bangladesh sell goods they have obtained from Chinese wholesalers—sometimes sunglasses and jewelry, but mostly knick-knacks, plastic toys such as windup dolls and windmill hats, and surprisingly useful items like whistles, key chains, and LED flashlights, which you can buy for 3 Euro. There are also West African traders selling “designer” purses—replicas of Louis Vuitton and Gucci spread out on soiled white sheets, which make for both a quick get-away and a quick way to reopen shop. When other vendors—or often customers—whisper warnings of “police” or astinomia [αστυνομία], sellers gather up their goods, only to lay them down again moments later, once danger has passed.
If you head five minutes to the southwest away from Chinatown, you will find Gazi, a relatively new center of Athenian nightlife, housing the temple of Athens’s contemporary art scene, the “Technopolis,” a converted factory that is now an exhibition space. Here, if you know where to look, you will also find the ancient gates of Athens and the ancient cemetery of Keramikos, an oasis of quiet green, replete with a small brook and the occasional snapping turtle. If you go a little to the southwest beyond Gazi, with its recently opened metro stop that has dramatically increased the crowds of club goers, you will find another crucial node in my map of Athens: the Boulevard of Petrou Ralli, and the Police Department for Aliens, where, until recently, people lined up in order to apply for asylum.7
If you take Peiraios in the other direction, to the northeast, in fifteen or twenty minutes you will reach Omonia Square, the Square of “Harmony,” with its heavy traffic of people and cars. The walk I took most weekday mornings from September 2006 through July 2008, during my primary stint of fieldwork in Athens, involved just a few city blocks: from the metro stop in Omonia to a run-down office near Exarcheia Square. Dense with people, smog, and traffic, moped engines and car horns, Omonia is known among long-time Athenian residents for its heavy concentration of tourists, drug users, and migrants, but it is also a vibrant and buzzing neighborhood full of contradictions. Exiting in the direction of Eleutherios Venezelou Street, I would walk down a pezodhromos (pedestrian walkway), past shoeshine men, kiosks, professionals in suits and sunglasses drinking coffee, bakeries, street vendors, a mid-class hotel, and a legal brothel. Rounding the corner, I would cross a broad boulevard, then head down cramped and pitted side streets into the neighborhood of Exarcheia, where dense buildings frame a sky often tinged with the tarry film of smog. Exarcheia is the site of the Polytechneio, the Polytechnic University, where the student uprising against the military dictatorship on November 17, 1973, ended in the deaths of students, sparking a much wider series of protests that eventually contributed to ousting the Junta in 1974, in the face of the Cyprus crisis. Every November 17, crowds come here in memoriam and protest, then march across town to the American embassy, in angry remembrance of the U.S. support of the Junta. A bastion for anarchist and leftist politics, this neighborhood is also hospitable for migrants, and it houses a number of NGOs and community organizations devoted to assisting migrants and refugees. For me, Exarcheia is most significant as the site of the Athens Refugee Service (ARS, a pseudonym),8 the largest and oldest asylum-related NGO in Greece.
The ARS signals its presence before one reaches the street where it is located. People speaking Arabic, Dari, Urdu, Bangla, or other languages make their way toward the office carrying files and papers; the public phone on the block often has a line. Each morning, I would find a crowd waiting at the entrance: sometimes twenty to fifty people, sometimes as many as one hundred or one hundred and fifty, some pressed against the door, others sitting on the sidewalk outside, some smoking, some just waiting. As I made my way to the entrance, the crowd would part, people tapping each other on the back to give me space, and embarrassed by their politeness, I would push through bodies and the sharp tang of old sweat. I would greet Luc, an African man who staffs the door and has worked at the ARS for a number of years. A few of those waiting most likely would be chatting with him, along with a couple of other regular visitors. A young Afghan man who loves French often practiced with Luc, and an elderly Vietnamese gentleman was usually asleep in a chair; he was homeless, and Luc let him nap there.
Climbing the tight staircase, near the second floor I would encounter the crowd of regularly scheduled clients waiting to see a social worker or a lawyer. Then I would make my way to the fourth floor, the Legal Service, which generally employed ten on-staff lawyers and a few rotating volunteers, though the staff changed multiple times even during my time there. Five staircase twists above the street, and two above the busy waiting area, this was usually one of the quietest parts of the building, but nonetheless, the shared offices were usually packed, with clients and an interpreter clustered around each lawyer’s desk. The density of languages heightened the tightness of space: interpreters translating into Greek and English for clients speaking Farsi/Dari, Kurdish, Arabic, Urdu, Bangla, Amharic, and Somali—and maybe also a crying baby.
During much of my fieldwork I was based in this Athens office, where I conducted participant observation as a volunteer in the legal department. In addition to helping to produce and proofread documents in English, I assisted with clerical tasks like typing, photocopying, file making (and file finding), and registration, in exchange for the opportunity to speak with staff, watch them work, and observe meetings between aid candidates and workers. However, given the sheer amount of work to do, the ARS is not a place where one can simply observe, and as time went on, I was increasingly asked to become a more active and involved presence there: assisting lawyers with research on their cases, meeting with and advising clients, and conducting client interviews. Unlike many other EU countries, the Greek state allocates minimal direct funding and resources for legal aid (nomiki aroyi; νομική αρωγή) or assistance (sindhromi; συνδρομή) to asylum seekers. The ARS is one among just a handful of organizations throughout Greece that provide pro bono legal aid to applicants. Furthermore, it is the largest of just a few organizations in Athens devoted to this purpose, with full-time staff lawyers. With Greece’s lack of state-funded legal support, and a significant gap in the NGO infrastructure as well, the ARS plays a crucial role in assisting applicants in navigating the asylum procedure. Through my presence there, I was able to access a central site in the asylum process in Greece.
For years, the ARS has been on what might be described as the front lines of the Greek asylum “crisis”—a central stopping point for many who enter Greece, whether or not they stay there. Newly arrived asylum seekers come to Athens to find work, to sell goods, to find each other, and also to find smugglers to help them travel elsewhere in Europe. As I discuss in Chapter 2, Athens is also the bureaucratic center of the asylum process, so applicants also come to file paperwork and for asylum hearings. Border communities play an enormous role in the reception of migrants and asylum seekers,9 without adequate assistance from the state, and border police figure significantly in their apprehension and detention; once released, however, new arrivals are often funneled to Athens. On Lesbos, one of the island borders in the Aegean, newly released individuals (both those who do and those who do not express a desire to apply for asylum) are bused directly from the detention center to the ferry, where they are given tickets to the capital, sometimes paid for by a local group of supporters; as a woman who works at the port described the scene, “they round them up and send them away to Athens.” Near Kavala, just a couple of hours by car from the northern land border, a local police captain described to me how officers had started to take up a collection to buy bus tickets to Athens for those recently released. When I asked this police captain, “Why Athens?” he shrugged and answered as if it were obvious: “What will they do here?” While this story may have functioned as a way to demonstrate how well police treat detainees (in case I was reporting this information back to someone), this account also highlights the centrality of Athens as an assumed destination or stopping point for all new arrivals.
Athens is an epicenter in the movements of asylum seekers and refugees in Greece, and many of those who come to Athens are among the crowds that I used to find each morning at the doorstep of the ARS. Asylum seekers are directed to the ARS by acquaintances, other organizations, and even police; one can find the address scribbled by police officers on the backs of documents issued not just at the central police station in Athens, but also at the airport, at detention centers, and in border areas. The ARS has thousands of official clients, and a great many more whom they advise informally. There are even more who do not return to the office once registered in the database. For some, the ARS is a central, even daily or weekly, stopping point; for others, it is just another office they visit once or twice; for others still, it is a way-post on the road to elsewhere in Europe.
As I describe in greater detail in Chapter 1, this NGO is an important locale in multiple migratory geographies that transect but also interact intimately with geographies of law, governance, policy, and advocacy. Through its many visitors, the ARS is tied to routes of movement stretching through and across the Mediterranean world and even toward southern and eastern Asia. But it is also an important site in wide-ranging routes of intra-European travel, and the entries and expulsions of asylum seekers across internal and external borders. This became powerfully evident to me while I was in Rome in July 2007, conducting a week of comparative research with an NGO that, at times, collaborated with the ARS. There I met with a large group of Afghans who had established an informal camp behind one of the central train stations. Many of them greeted me with recognition, in Greek, having seen me at the ARS. One of them I had met on three different occasions: first, months before, at a detention center in Mytilene, then at the ARS office, and finally at this unofficial camp in Rome. Another, who had just arrived, I had seen just the week before at the ARS office, but while I had come to Italy in a plane, he had taken the ferry from Patras to Ancona by smuggling himself into the bottom of a truck. This startling moment of recognition highlighted powerfully for me the smallness of the networks in which people move, despite the great distances they cross. The ARS and the people who work there are part of these networks, an important node in the movements of asylum seekers from many different countries of origin, whether these movements are more local or regional (primarily in Athens and Greece) or more broad, traversing multiple sites in Europe.
Figure 1. Threshold of the ARS.
The ARS is a nexus for the various ethnographic threads that constitute this book: frameworks of governance, policy, law, and advocacy (at international, Greek, and EU scales); bureaucratic practices; dilemmas of knowledge, ethics, and judgment; and finally, the lives of asylum seekers in Greece, and their struggles for survival and recognition. In my field practice, I followed these threads outward from this small office, which took me from refugee apartments at the outskirts of the city center, to the borders with Turkey, the European Parliament, and briefly to other NGOs in Brussels, Spain, and Italy. Still, at the center of this book is this Athens office, an ethnographic threshold into the asylum process in Greece and the lives that it makes possible: old PCs, fluorescent lighting and dusty floors, files piled on desks, crowds of people inside and outside, densities of different languages, the smell of sweat and cigarettes, and moments of humor, kindness, anger, and frustration.
I approach the ARS not simply as a site relevant to questions of asylum in Europe, nor even as an entry into broader patterns of movement, but also as the doorstep of a kind of possible city: a new Athens emerging in and through the “crises” of immigration and asylum. Just as I was recognized in Rome by this group of Afghan asylum seekers, ARS workers often spoke of being recognized in Athens, by people and in places many of their Greek compatriots did not even notice—being addressed on the street, in buses, in parks, on the beach by peripatetic vendors or other “foreigners.” While these moments of encounter outside the office were often unnerving for workers, they were also, like my meeting in Rome, moments of surprise and often warmth. When I walked with Stavros past a Bangladeshi street vendor who spoke to him with recognition, Stavros greeted him with a wide smile and said to me, ironically but with kindness, ine dhikos mas (είναι δικός μας), “he is one of ours” or “one of us.” This phrase also has strong kinship associations—“he is one of our own.” Stavros certainly did not mean that this man is, indeed, “family”; instead, he was highlighting that this man had likely visited the ARS. Yet the statement speaks to forms of tolerance and even intimacy (Papataxiarchis 2006) fostered in the space of the office, creeping outward uncertainly onto the streets of the city. Even in their fleetingness, the social and ethical engagements that emerged at this office, around often profound dilemmas of judgment, also point to new kinds of relationships, reconfigurations of emotion and language, changing notions of inclusion and exclusion, and new conceptions of belonging that are becoming possible to imagine and even talk about.
A Moving Target
After my primary fieldwork, I returned for follow-up research in the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011, through which I was able to address, in focused ways, the rapid developments taking place around asylum, Greek politics, and the financial crisis. Just after my exit from the field in 2008, doing research about Greece suddenly became like following a moving target: a fifteen-year-old Athenian youth, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, was shot by a police officer during a night out in Exarcheia, on a street just around the corner from the ARS, and protests exploded in Athens. Migrants also took an active role in these protests, which those on the Radical Left cited as a small victory for democracy and others on the Right recounted in terms of a growing internal “alien” threat. The militarized response to this unrest also highlighted how the state, particularly as represented in the armed figures of riot police or ΜAT (Units for the Reinstatement of Order; Μονάδες Αποκατάστασης Τάξης), was increasingly violent toward both Greeks and migrants. In 2010, when the financial crisis propelled Greece into the global limelight, the sociopolitical ferments accompanying these economic instabilities made radical protest and police violence dominant aspects of life in the city center. Before, the burn of tear gas could be expected on just a few days a year—primarily, the annual protests on November 17. Now, it permeates Athenian daily life, from Exarcheia to the Parliament and beyond, while the city burns, often literally.
Somewhat ironically, however, as I recount in Chapter 1, these widespread sociopolitical and economic instabilities have been accompanied by significant (and by many accounts, positive) reforms of the asylum process. I outline these transformations alongside the forms of violence that have emerged in Athens at large. I also explore how these emergent developments around the crisis have produced a new politics of race in Athens and accompanying forms of race-related violence, which my interlocutors have recounted for me in profound and disturbing ways. While Athens, and Greece more broadly, has long been shaped through powerful metaphors (Herzfeld 1997) of blood and nation, this sharply delineated politics of race has exploded into the Athenian public sphere in just the past few years. In particular, there has been a rapid diffusion of Fascist and neo-Nazi ideologies, largely through the increasingly visible political party, Khrisi Avyi (Χρυσή Αυγή), or “Golden Dawn,” which explicitly targets migrants and other persons of color. Yet such forms of violence are also accompanied by more visible and articulated political claims among foreign residents of Athens, who increasingly demand entitlements and recognition.
It may seem incongruous to herald new forms of inclusion in the Athenian body politic alongside such dramatic forms of exclusion and violence, yet I suggest that both processes are taking place simultaneously. Whether we can induce something broader about social change in general is beyond the purview of this book or my intentions. Yet this is certainly what I have observed, and continue to observe, in Athens. The moments of urban transformation I gesture to here include extraordinary violence and rapid closure, inscriptions of old patterns, anger and disappointment, and nostalgias for and rearticulations of an imagined earlier Greek nation-state, with more solid boundaries and borders. Likewise, the ARS is not just a site of extraordinary diversity but also one of inequality based on race, class, gender, national and ethnic origin, legal status, language, and knowledge. There, NGO workers, through their assessments of legal aid applicants, make crucial judgments regarding who is and is not deserving of protection in Greece. These decisions have very real consequences in the lives of aid candidates, but despite the violence they enact, they are not one-sided. How asylum seekers engage in these encounters matters deeply in their own legal and social futures, with important impacts on the judgments lawyers make. Likewise, the new ways in which “alien” residents articulate claims to belonging shape how Greeks themselves approach citizenship.
Notes on Form: Law and Tragedy
The ethnographic material I present in this book highlights law’s dramatic and tragic qualities through the heuristic of the case. The “case” is a knowledge form common to multiple diagnostic sciences: law, medicine, psychoanalysis, and even social scientific research. Rather than drawing on the diagnostic use of the case, however, which seeks to examine and thus unveil the root[s] of a set of symptoms, I emphasize its dramatic potential. Llewellyn and Hoebel (1941) denote “trouble cases” as moments of “hitch, dispute, grievance, or trouble … that dramatize a ‘norm’ or ‘conflict of norms’ which may have been latent” (21). The usefulness of the “trouble case,” for both participants and ethnographers, lies in how it “forces conscious attention, forces the defining of issues” (21), making normative structures and practices “present at hand” (Heidegger 1962). All the cases I explore in this manuscript are, in their own ways, troublesome to NGO workers, aid applicants, agents of the state, and policy makers (indeed, Greece itself could be framed as a “trouble case”). They demand active engagements from multiple participants who must produce judgments in the face of uncertainty, doubt, and “the ghost of the undecidable” (Derrida 1992: 24), entailing anxiety, difficult ethical work on all sides, and decisions that are in many ways impossible. Yet such cases also disrupt law’s normative and regulatory properties: through “crises” in the fabric of law, legal and sociopolitical orders become open to redefinition and transformation. These are what Agamben (1998: 19) describes as “thresholds”: liminal spaces, openings, between the “normal” situation and that of crisis, between the world that is and one that may (or may never) emerge.
At stake in this discussion of tragedy is the precious yet often troublesome gap between self and other, inside and outside, and the ways in which a political body may or may not find ways of recognizing otherness without domesticating it. Law has a tendency either to cast the other out or “reduce outsider to insider” (Douzinas and Warrington 1994: 223), often simultaneously. Indeed, the paradox of refuge is that laws of protection simultaneously incorporate and reinscribe alienage. Both rights frameworks and the practice of humanitarianism demand that claimants, adjudicators, and service providers do the impossible: render suffering visible, pasts accessible, and stories legible, even as suffering, like the past, always exceeds speech, narration, and visibility (Papailias 2004; Scarry 1985). Those who fail may be cast to the margins of the city or beyond. Yet beneath the formal veneers of rights discourse and humanitarian practice, there are elements that persistently exceed such domestication, which are not redemptive but are crucial to making lives livable and may even have revolutionary potential.
Tragedy, as a dramatic genre, entails an encounter with that which is at once self and other, inside and outside the body politic. The tragic hero is often taken to represent a vision of universal humanity, but as Butler (2000) highlights in her analysis of Antigone, there is much that marks the hero as a perversion of the social order (such as Antigone’s entwinement in incestuous kinship ties, or in Orestes’s case, a family prone to cannibalism and the murder of kin). The tragic hero is thus, in part, a “stranger,” cast out of the polis or even condemned to death, a “dangerous person” (Panourgia 2009), through whom the body politic, as a normative order, is destabilized or even turned inside out. Pollution may follow him, the Furies at his heels, threatening to bring destruction and suffering to the city; or like Antigone, she may threaten to expose the social order itself as perverse by revealing the pollution that lies at the seat of sovereignty. It is no accident that these dangerous heroes are so often seekers of refuge: Oedipus invokes the laws of hospitality at Colonus; Orestes seeks protection at the living image of Athena; Antigone, perhaps, finds refuge in the tomb. Yet as Neni Panourgia (2009: 7) writes, this figure, in her very dangerousness, “transcends the polis; she becomes a part of it; she knows its inner workings, makes hiding places in its buildings, learns and produces a topography that is also a topology completely unimagined and unsuspected by the sovereign who suspects her.”
The moment of judgment marks the intervention of human and divine power in attempting to reorganize and set to right the city and the cosmos (Douglas 1966; Malkki 1995a). Orestes is cast out by the laws of both humans and gods until he is finally brought to judgment. Meanwhile, Antigone, the willing victim (Butler 2000) of an unjust verdict, is removed to the space of the tomb even in life. There is an inherent violence to this form of intervention, and its penal character is unmistakable, yet it also has creative elements. Judgment entails no simple resolution, but rather, incites an opening into a possible (though often thwarted) transformation: of self and other, of both the hero and the city itself. The dramatic action of the trial, the judgment, and its aftermath brings the audience “in,” an engaged participant (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]) in the suffering and struggle unfolding on the stage. Reason, here, is insufficient. Rather, tragedy engenders in the audience what Aristotle, following Plato, describes as catharsis: an encounter with suffering that catalyzes a cleansing of the self through the release of a spirit of excess (Lacan 1992). This point of crisis, then—the hero taken to judgment—presents an opening, a threshold, which does not erase the gap between self and other but deeply confounds it. The stranger is revealed as the hero who, in a way, she has always been: the beating heart of the polis. The Furies, with their fearful countenances, both persecuted and persecuting, make their way into the darkness beneath the city. Neither stranger nor citizen, neither actor nor audience, remains the same. This transformative potential of tragedy—an ineffable line of excess and flight—is at once the pnevma (spirit) of this book and the ghost that haunts it.
