Hotspots of resistance in a bordered reality

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how bordered reality is being imposed and resisted in the context of where we are placed right now, ‘Greece’. Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We approach this process methodologically from the situated angle of the embodiment of resistance in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers ourselves), whose narratives reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the ‘hotspot regime’, which becomes a traveling control device. Rather than approaching the hotspots on the five Greek border islands as geographically fixed entities we introduce the concept of the mobile hotspot to show how the logic of the hotspot suffuses the uneven geographies of a bordered reality. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots.

Keywords

Hotspots economic migrants Greece bordered reality refugee crisis

Introduction

In the context of a declared ‘refugee crisis’, defined by the EU as a problem of ‘unprecedented pressure’ caused by ‘thousands of migrants’ (EC, 2015a: 4, 2) arriving at the external borders of Europe, in 2015–2016, the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros, and Kos became the sites of five ‘registration and identification centres’, termed ‘hotspots’ (EC, 2015b; see Vradis et al., 2018).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). The Agenda mandates the European 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, who are slated for deportation. Further, Europol and Eurojust are to assist the ‘host’ Member State in the dismantling of ‘smuggling and trafficking networks’ (EC, 2015b). In contrast to the previous procedure, which remains in effect on the mainland, the institution of hotspots directly involves European agencies in national process of asylum adjudication. Hotspots introduce the accelerated border procedure for asylum claimants arriving on these five islands, and make possible the geographical restrictions that will later be imposed with the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal,¹ while differentiating populations in terms of their nationalities, dates of arrival, and corresponding degrees of deservingness.

Drawing on ongoing conversations, ethnographic study, participant observation, and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016),² we are interested in how resistance to a bordered reality was taking place, as islands in the Aegean Sea were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We move beyond the idea of the hotspot as a specific institutional form to be closely investigated on its own terms. For instance, interviewing officials, Barak Kalir and Katerina Rozakou (2016) ‘focus on the meso-level of the implementation of border policies on the ground in the Moria hotspot … [and] leave aside the perspective of the border-crossers who are subjected to this emerging archipelago of containment’ (4). In our research, we aim to amplify these perspectives, particularly of those who resist the order of things imposed by the hotspot. We use the hotspot as a lens that allows us to analyse wider global processes that incarnate and reproduce the logic of the hotspot across space and time. This logic naturalises and reinforces what we term bordered reality, that is the ways in which we internalise the system of borders as an ahistorical fact of social life that seemingly naturally segregate us into ‘populations’. Bordered reality generates an affective landscape that forms the backdrop of our most mundane or intimate experiences, while, equally, shaping the political field of contestation, struggle, and resistance.

Hotspots were instituted on islands at the maritime border region of Greece; the relationship of the islands to the mainland and the geographical restriction of mobility to people arriving there became a tool of control. The ferries that asylum seekers were allowed or disallowed to board to travel onward – to the mainland, to the capital, or to the border with North Macedonia, through the Balkan Route to central Europe – became a vital vehicle. Instantiated by the centrality of the ferry, our analysis is based on encounters with subjects whose experience is shaped by frictions, by struggles to self-determine mobility, by diversion of routes, and by the denial of mobility. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots. The ferry, in this sense, is both a metaphor and a concrete vehicle of research through which to study the ways in which the trajectories of the differential operations of the hotspot go hand in hand with the fragmentation and reshaping of migratory routes, and with the transformation of the islands into spaces of containment, waiting, and administrative torture (Spathopoulou, 2016). We approach these processes methodologically from the situated angle of their embodiment in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers), whose narratives and whose resistance reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the ‘hotspot regime’, which becomes a traveling control device.

Our argument in this paper proceeds as follows. First, we introduce the concept of ‘bordered reality’. We discuss what we mean by bordered reality in the context of where we, the authors, are located right now. We acknowledge that bordered reality is a global phenomenon and that much has already been written about its subjective, affective embodiment, and performance (see Andersson, 2014; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Khosravi, 2010). Our aim in this paper is neither to offer a literature review nor to speak exhaustively about this phenomenon. Rather, we set out to write this paper from an embodied awareness of the ways in which the border and its crisis management infrastructure – the hotspot – intrudes into our everydayness, shaping forms of resistance at and against the borders of Greece. We point out the ways in which bordered reality in Greece relates to the ‘crisis regime’ (Athanasiou, 2012) and how there is even a border that runs through crisis. Heath Cabot (2018) argues that ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’ in Greece of ‘overlapping crises’ are situated on a ‘shared precarity continuum’, and that the ‘“European Refugee Crisis” must be understood alongside an emerging crisis of European citizenship itself, and the radical precaritisation of rights for both citizens and non-citizens on Europe’s Mediterranean margins’ (3, 7). Still, the nationalisation and Europeanisation of ‘crisis’ has reinforced the subject-position particularly of white nationals to express their entitlement, ownership, and supremacist ideologies over and against racialised citizens, migrants, refugees, and criminalised subjects (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2018). Indeed, the criminalisation of ‘economic migrants’ arriving in Greece reveals that financial crisis is conceptually and materially segregated from the ‘refugee crisis’: despite in part being produced by EU institutions and globalised capital, the former crisis is nationalised as a ‘sovereign debt crisis’ targeting citizens, while the latter crisis is constructed as an unendurable burden imposed from the outside of the nation, that can only be managed through the intervention of EU institutions. Thus, to cut through this false distinction between ‘crises’ and their proper objects, we focus on people classified as ‘economic migrants’ and their struggle against the bordered reality being instituted through the hotspot mechanism. It is not incidental that most funded research on the European migration regime is primarily interested in diagnosing how well or how poorly the various institutions comprising the asylum–migration nexus are functioning. The establishment of expertise about the hotspots requires researchers to become embedded in the institutional structures and logics they set out to analyse. We question the premise that more research, greater access, or proliferating case-studies – particularly when the researcher takes the perspective of institutional actors – will generate better knowledge about the hotspots, which, in turn, will lead to dismantling them. Our point of departure is the resistance of people caught up in this regime, and their refusal to embody and perform the dehumanising subject-positions that legitimise the immobilisation and deportation functions of the asylum system.

Second, we introduce the concept of the ‘mobile hotspot’, as the analytical angle through which we examine the hotspot regime. This concept reveals the ways in which the hotspot is mobile. That is, how its functions move beyond classification on the islands to include the multiplication of informal hotspots on the Greek mainland. The ferry reveals in very tangible ways how the ‘refugee/economic migrant’ binary becomes central to the logic of the hotspot. The ferry is tied to particular experiences of immobility and mobility, and is graphically reproduced in scenes of arrival/departure in and from borderlands. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to concretise the concept of the mobile hotspot, since the ferry connects to the hotspot’s spatial strategies of rendering migrants (im)mobile and ‘redistributing’ them on the Greek mainland. Our ethnographic encounter on the ferry further reveals the criminalisation of the so-called economic migrant.

Finally, we discuss two examples of resistance that unfolded at the hotspots on the islands of Lesvos and Samos. We discuss how Pakistani migrants challenged certain categories that were being reified as identities, along the logic of the hotspot, particularly that of the undeserving and thus deportable ‘economic migrant’. It is important to mention that ‘Pakistani’ functions as a derogatory synonym for the ‘illegal immigrant’ and is used widely to refer to all undocumented migrants in Greece. Since the introduction of the hotspot system, Pakistanis became constructed as ‘economic migrants’, a disposable (and deportable) labour force for the agricultural sector in Greece.

Bordered reality

Bordered reality is material, conceptual, affective, and cognitive; it is not reducible to the geopolitical borders around nation-states but refers to the ways in which states compete and collaborate to run those borders through our bodies in our everyday lives. The border is multiplied; it is everywhere, and structures even our most intimate experience. For whom we feel concern, and for whom we do not; who can sleep in a bed, and who must sleep in a cell, container, or a tent; who has the right to attend the neighbourhood school and who is turned away; who can make choices for the future (to emigrate to search for a job or attend university), and for whom choices are foreclosed, razor-wired shut like the many fences that have been erected along migration routes. As we previously mentioned, there is even a border that runs through crisis, so that which ‘crisis’ you are discursively constructed to be experiencing depends on which side of the border you are on. Circulating in official state discourse since the summer of 2015, the phrase ‘a crisis within a crisis’ exemplifies the ‘state thought’ which structures hegemonic understandings about migration into bordered places (Sayad, 2004). At the heart of both ‘crises’ is, above all, a crisis of sovereignty, which is negotiated through the violent imposition of a bordered reality. If the characterisations ‘migrant crisis’ and ‘refugee crisis’ tend to locate ‘crisis’ in the migrant/refugee (New Keywords Collective, 2016: 6), the expression ‘the Greek crisis’ renders Greek nationals as its proper victims. Reading crisis discourses through the analytic lens of bordered reality, then – and particularly through the impossible subject-position of the ‘economic migrant’ created by this reality – enables us to think together two crises that are normatively kept apart. In this connection, it is interesting to note how the one crisis – that experienced by refugees fleeing war – is used metaphorically to give content to the other, viz. ‘economic crisis’ as ‘war by other means’. Yet, in hegemonic discourses and in migration policy, this metaphorical use of migration crisis does not translate to the extension of rights of residence to so-called economic migrants whose trajectory is precipitated by precisely the same policies of neoliberal structural adjustment and debt colonialism, as Greece currently faces. Thus, the so-called refugee crisis is by European states’ definition a crisis of management of ‘mixed’ flows comprised of detainable refugees fleeing war and deportable migrants fleeing poverty. This construction refuses precisely to view economic crisis as ‘war by other means’. If, from the point of view of state thought, ‘our’ (the Greek) crisis is precipitated by banks and the Other (the refugee crisis) by tanks, the nationalisation of both crises – their use for the negotiation of the state’s sovereignty-building projects – fragments a globalised condition of predatory capitalism and accumulation by dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), making it difficult to discern the connections between them under the mystifying stranglehold of a bordered reality. Thus, as we will further argue in the next two sections, the racialisation of ‘economic migrants’ in general and Pakistani migrants specifically cannot be thought independently from the ways in which Greece is perceived and produced as a borderland of and within ‘Europe’.

In the following sections of the article, we ethnographically inquire into the trajectories of the formation of the hotspots and the enforcement of their logic during the weeks leading up to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal on 20 March 2016. Specifically, we attempt to capture the events unfolding at the Moria hotspot on Lesvos island at the beginning of March right up to the date of the EU–Turkey Deal and its immediate aftermath, ending the paper with a scene that unfolded on Samos island at the Vathi hotspot in September 2016. It is important to underscore, here, how in the months immediately after the EU–Turkey Deal was put into force, we experienced a frantic alteration in asylum procedures, detention policies, and categorisation schemas. This has concretely resulted in ‘the intense activation of a system devoted to the fast separation of people into categories with differentiated levels of access to rights’ (Sciurba, 2017: 105).

Intensifying the border, we argue the hotspot is not just a spatial entity on the islands where people are made to register, are sorted out, fingerprinted, and classified as deserving or undeserving of international protection, it is a space of administrative violence that produces in an accelerated manner illegalised subjects, inscribing the ideological–juridical distinction between legitimate supplicants and undeserving ‘economic migrants’ in detainable, deportable, and disposable human bodies.

The hotspot’s main target is what the EU Commission defines as ‘mixed flows’ arriving at the exterior border of the EU: its aim is separating those deemed eligible for international protection from those who are not, through a fast-tracking process ‘on the spot’, named the Fast Track Border Procedure. As many scholars argue, the ‘hotspot approach’ is characterised less by specific infrastructures than by a series of procedures and mechanisms for identifying and selecting migrants (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2016; Kasparek, 2015; Sciurba, 2017). However, as we will show in this paper, the hotspot approach is not just about the operation of certain EU institutions on the five islands at Greece’s exterior border; nor do these operations exclusively concern the management of newly arriving migrants. Rather, beyond the material reality of institutional operations conducted by Frontex, EASO, Europol, and Eurodac in coordination with Greek authorities and other member states (but also with Turkey, other regional allies, and NATO), the hotspot engages in the multiplication of informal hotspots on the Greek territory, and affects the mobility of long-established migrants within Greece. We are interested in how hotspots operate beyond their described function to deal with what has been identified as the ‘refugee crisis’.

As they are described by the EU Commission, the hotspots constitute an EU approach to ‘managing’ what the EU calls the ‘refugee/migration crisis’, that is the ‘mixed migratory flows’ placing ‘disproportionate migratory pressure at [the] external borders’ of ‘frontline Member states’ (EC, 2015b: 2). At the same time, we argue the implementation of the hotspot approach cannot be analysed separately from the ‘Greek crisis’, that is the sovereign debt crisis declared in 2009. The hotspots constitute an approach to managing migrants’ unruly mobility and to managing what the EU constructs as a rebellious Greece, after a decade of economic crisis, austerity, debt, and structural adjustment of the economy – teetering on the verge of being declared a failed state. Already relegated to an economic and symbolic periphery to legitimise the imposition of austerity measures by the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, rumours surfaced that the Greek state was threatened with removal from the Schengen Zone if it did not complete construction of the five hotspots prior to the deadline of 15 February 2016 (Athanasopoulos, 2016). This echoed threats of an externally imposed ‘Grexit’ from the European Monetary Union if the Greek government refused to implement mandated structural adjustments in the lead-up to the Referendum of 2015. As Sandro Mezzadra (2018) notes,

[t]he threat of being kicked out of the Eurozone (the single currency space) before the “deal” of July 2015 was immediately mirrored at the end of that year by the threat of exclusion from the Schengen zone of passport-free travel should the Greek government refuse the extended deployment of Frontex (the EU agency for border control) at its borders and more generally should it refuse to comply with a reorganization of the European border regime that basically assigned to the country the role of a giant holding zone for thousands of migrants and refugees. (929)

Arguably, then, an additional function of the hotspots was to negotiate Greece’s faltering Europeanness. In other words, as ordering mechanisms, hotspots border both the migrants and the islands: hotspots enforce a border classifying people on the move into legitimate refugees and illegal economic migrants. Moreover, hotspots produce Greece as a border of Europe, or, indeed, as the ‘hotspot of Europe’ (Cabot, 2016; see also Papataxiarchis, 2016). We refer to this double function of the hotspot as the ‘border within a border’, erected to manage what has been termed in state discourses ‘a crisis within the crisis’ (Prime Minister of Greece, 2015; Christodoupoulou quoted in Greenwood et al., 2015), that is the so-called nesting crises of economic collapse and forced migration (Carastathis, 2018).

The hotspot system is about containing and moving migrants around, within, and away from Greece, a redistribution based on nationality, that is on migrants’ (real or perceived) country of origin. In the months leading up to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal (December 2015–March 2016), the route a migrant would take was very much based on two factors: one’s nationality and the date of one’s arrival, not only on the hotspot island, but also at the mainland northern border. Indeed, the situation was rapidly changing with the progressive closure of the Greek–Macedonian border, which caused the blockage of thousands of migrants at the border crossing point of Idomeni. On 19 November 2015, North Macedonian instituted restrictions, allowing only Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans to cross the border. Then, in February 2016, Afghans were also denied entry to North Macedonia and consequently the number of people stranded in Idomeni increased significantly in a few days. On 8 March 2016, the Greek–Macedonian border was officially closed for all nationalities. Greece was transformed from a ‘space of transit’ (Kallius, 2019; Osseiran, 2017; Picozza, 2017; Stevens, forthcoming) to a space of containment. Following the resulting blockage and encampment of refugees in Northern Greece (waiting for the border to reopen and protesting its closure), Greek authorities decided to contain migrants on the islands based on their nationality criteria in order to alleviate the pressure at the border with Macedonia. As soon as the EU–Turkey Deal was implemented, whether one had arrived prior to or after the date of implementation would determine whether one would: (a) have to remain on the island, (b) be transferred to another hotspot island, (c) be allowed to take the ferry to Athens (to the port of Piraeus) or to Kavala (the two main mainland passenger ferry ports), (d) be relocated to ‘Europe’ through the quota system, or (e) be deported back to Turkey. The EU–Turkey Deal, in this sense, imposes a temporal border through which recent³ asylum applicants are governed through different channels and at different speeds having been separated into distinct categories depending on their date of arrival (see Sciurba, 2017; Tazzioli, 2017).

Mobile hotspots

In this section, we introduce the ‘mobile hotspot’ as an analytical tool with which to examine how aspects of the hotspot – as a border infrastructure – do not stay put within the confines of sites where it officially operates (e.g. Moria on Lesvos, or Vathi on Samos). The broader argument we wish to make, but only touch upon in this paper, is that the bordering practices of the exterior border and the securitisation of urban centres are interconnected through the naturalised logic of the hotspot. This argument builds on the concept of ‘everyday bordering’, developed in the empirical context of the UK, where scholars have shown how functions of the border are ‘out-sourced’ to various agents (school teachers and university professors tracking the status and attendance of non-citizen students in their classes; landlords renting properties to undocumented tenants, etc.) (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). As Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2018) argues, humanitarian nongovernmental organisations are gradually enfolded into the ‘spatially disaggregated network of the hotspot approach’ (12). Thus, agencies of spatial segregation – linked to ideologies of deservingness and vulnerability attached to ‘refugees’ versus underservingness and illegality attached to ‘economic migrants’ – increasingly become distributed to non-state actors, shaping the subjectivities and relationalities of so-called ordinary citizens to newcomers.

Moreover, the hotspots move beyond the islands, proliferating informal hotspots on the Greek mainland, through naturalised, ‘commonsense’ racial discourses and racist policing practices which spatialise the so-called migration crisis. The concept of the ‘mobile hotspot’ highlights how certain routes and categories that are being reified as identities are mapped out between the islands and the mainland. The hotspot, like the border itself, follows people who have passed through it, into the interior of the national state and beyond, into the projective racism of subjects enmeshed in, and reproducing a bordered reality.

Finally, the concept of the mobile hotspot may be used to refer to a representation generated by the hotspot mechanism which spatially exceeds the actual migration management infrastructure and ends up being ascribed to entire islands, cities, and countries. For example, this spatial slippage is naturalised by the mediatised spectacle of the scene of arrival in Lesvos, whereby the island is metonymically represented as the hotspot of Europe (Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi, forthcoming). Moreover, after the EU–Turkey Deal, Greece as a country is characterised as the hotspot of Europe (Cabot, 2016; Papataxiarchis, 2016): represented and materialised as, for some, a space of transit, and for others, a space of detainment.

On the ferry from Lesvos to Samos (6 March 2016)

One of us (Aila) made a journey in March 2016 from Lesvos to Samos by ferry. That overnight route had three scheduled stops at the three islands of Lesvos, Chios, and Samos with the final destination of Athens. On the ferry I spoke with an interpreter working for Doctors of the World. His parents had migrated from Sudan in the 1980s, and he was born in Greece; yet, due to jus sanguinis,⁴ he was still not recognised by the state as a Greek citizen. He told me that Doctors of the World operates a mobile unit on the ferries, taking the same route that the migrants do, from the islands to Athens, returning again and repeating the same journey. If at one time, loudspeakers on the ferry made announcements only in Greek and English, now you could also hear them in Arabic and Farsi. Above us on the upper deck, an activist group unfolded a large banner inscribed with the ‘No Borders’ slogan, while journalists held their cameras and equipment close, ready for action. On the ferry, those migrants who had enough resources to book a cabin were allowed to move freely throughout the whole space of the ship. The rest were monitored by the ferry personnel, who made sure that they stayed put within the boundaries of the lower deck, a space reserved only for them, where they could sleep only on chairs and on the floor.

Police officers come and go; they check the papers of a migrant who, in their words, ‘does not look like a refugee but more like a Pakistani’. ‘I guess it is because I have darker skin, that the policeman checked me’, a young man who was indeed from Pakistan commented. ‘But I showed him my papers and he said that it is ok, I can continue my journey, it is ok for me to be here’ (AS personal communication with ferry passenger, March 2016). This traveller was not perceived to belong to the category of the ‘deserving refugee’ even though he was holding the right document – the asylum applicant’s card – that gave him (at that time, prior to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal) the right to take the ferry, but, as the police officer confidently speculated later on, the document entitled him to ‘nothing more than this’: ‘Pakistanis will not be granted the right to stay in Greece nor be allowed to continue to Europe legally’ (AS personal communication with Hellenic Police officer, March 2016).

Indeed, with the implementation of the EU–Turkey deal, the right to the ferry was revoked with the imposition of a temporal border. Migrants, in this way, have found themselves trapped on the islands for months or years. In relation to the knowledge that is produced by and within the hotspot about the asylum procedure, they try to figure out ways to board the ferry, by adopting and challenging certain categories, according to their own knowledge of what is really going on. This knowledge production is generated through migrants’ struggles and strategies to move to, within, and beyond the mainland of Greece. Through our research, we understood that migrants do not trust UNHCR. In particular, Pakistanis, on whose bodies deportability is immediately inscribed, are dismissed by UNHCR as subjects of no concern, or, as one UNHCR official put it, ‘a bother to everyone’ (AS interview with UNHCR official, March 2016). The migrants with whom we spoke therefore base their strategies on information they receive from their own network of contacts, connecting the islands with the mainland. Finally, while it seems impossible for Pakistani migrants along with many other nationalities to leave the islands for the mainland ‘legally’, like the ‘illegal’ routes that migrants are forced to take across national borders when all ‘legal’ routes are closed to them, ‘illegal’ ways are explored and used to cross the internal border separating the islands from the mainland, creating another industry of ‘illegality’ which is profiting from the prisonification of the islands accomplished by the hotspot regime. Ironically, then, while the hotspot approach and the EU–Turkey Deal claim to seek to combat the ‘smuggling of migrants’, it arguably proliferates clandestine routes, displacing them from the exterior to the interior of the national border, or, rather, displacing or multiplying the border itself.

The ferry, functioning as a sorting and channelling mechanism, embodies the logic of the hotspot, regulating migrants’ mobility and their ability to map out their own autonomous geographies. The ferry can thus be viewed as a micropolitical metaphor, a microcosm with material force in constituting a bordered reality (Foucault, 1986; Gilroy, 2005). Ferries immobilise people in floating prisons/detention camps, literally offshore, quasi-extraterritorial spaces, which nonetheless can potentially become mobile vehicles of deportation. In ‘On the Road with Michel Foucault: Deportation, Aviation, and Viapolitics’, William Walters (2015) critically enquires into what he calls the ‘Foucault fix’: ‘the fact that Foucault’s genealogies of power and subjectivity tend to privilege fixed structures, such as the prison, the clinic and the school … Yet these lines of connection, these routes and passages are never systematically developed in Foucault’ (3). Similarly, we caution against the ‘hotspot fix’, that is approaching the hotspot exclusively as a fixed structure, a self-contained site, by examining a ‘carceral archipelago in intimate detail’ (Walters, 2015: 3), while paying less attention to the ways in which the hotspot system operates upon lines of connection, routes, and passages. Departing from Walters’s notion of ‘viapolitics’, through which he explores vehicles as mobile sites of power and contestation in their own right, we want to highlight the role of the ferry in consolidating the ‘refugee/economic migrant’ binary.

Being detained on the ferry, moreover, is a practice that has frequently been applied since the implementation of the hotspot mechanism; ultimately, it is tied to the way the hotspot system functions as an off-shore processing site. In addition to serving as vehicles of transportation of detainees, ferries are also being used as static spaces on which asylum applicants are being registered and processed, separated and categorised. For instance, in the summer of 2015, a large cruise ship in the harbour of Kos (before the island started to operate as a hotspot) was used as a first reception and identification centre for migrants. For about two weeks, migrants could apply for asylum on board. At the same time, ferries were used by the Ministry of Migration as a solution to the ‘overcrowded hotspots’. In Lesvos and Chios in January 2017, two naval vessels were moored at the islands’ ports, which functioned as accommodation centres for asylum seekers that were classified as ‘vulnerable subjects’ while awaiting the outcome of their asylum claims. Due to the lack of space at Moria hotspot on Lesvos and Vial hotspot on Chios, ‘vulnerable’ people for two months were placed on these two immobile naval ships. In October 2017, the then-Minister of Migration, Yiannis Mouzalas, was talking about introducing what he referred to as ‘floating hotspots’, as a measure to alleviate the hotspots’ ‘cramped’ conditions, that is ferries parked at the port that would function as registration and identification centres (Nikolaou, 2017). Simultaneously, the locals on Lesvos and Chios protested against their islands becoming ‘floating hotspots’. The struggle for the ‘right to the ferry’ thereby mutated into the immobilising experience of being stuck on the ferry, anchored in the port.

Hotspots of resistance

In this section, we counterpose the bordered reality – militarised detention centres, racist registration processes, segregated refugee camps, deportation schemes – to which the state subjects refugees and migrants through mobile, multiplying, formal and informal ‘hotspots’, with migrants’ own attempts to resist this reality. It is arguably through resistance that the full force of this reality becomes apparent, through all the energy and effort expended making demands that actually seem obvious and banal, that seek to reclaim the mundane and the commonplace outside or beyond the terms of bordered reality. When we use the term ‘resistance’, we have in mind the dialectic of oppression ↔ resistance as theorised by decolonial feminist scholar María Lugones (2003):

If we think of people who are oppressed as not consumed or exhausted by oppression, but also as resisting, or sabotaging a system aimed at molding, reducing, violating, erasing them, then we also see at least two realities: one of them has the logic of resistance and transformation; the other has the logic of oppression. But indeed these two logics multiply and they encounter each other over and over in many guises. (12)

Through resistance, a certain clarity of perception is gained of how an oppressive institution functions, however ‘unsuccessful’ this resistance may be in terms of achieving tangible demands. Beyond the technocratic representation of the hotspot, resistance reveals its operation as primarily a deportation mechanism; in that sense, resistance punctures the seamlessness of the bordered reality in which and against which it takes place. Two examples of migrants’ protests against the asylum regime on the islands of Lesvos (just prior to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal) and Samos (six months after the Deal went into force) show how migrants are resisting the bordered order of things reproduced in the hotspots.

Olive Grove outside Moria, Lesvos (12 March 2016)

On Lesvos, just prior to the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal on 20 March 2016, the hotspot authorities were dealing with what governmental actors and NGOs alike referred to as ‘the Pakistani issue’ (AS, personal communication with UNHCR and NGO workers, March 2016). Pakistanis were not allowed to leave the island by ferry, but they were also resisting registration in the hotspot because, in their case, making an application for asylum would result in their immediate detention. Pakistanis were regarded by officials as the ‘economic migrant’ and thus ‘deportable subject’ par excellence.

Outside the official registration centre of Moria hotspot on Lesvos island, at the end of 2015, a small, grassroots organisation rented an olive grove from a local farmer to provide shelter in tents, as well as food, clothing, medical treatment, and information to migrants transiting through the island. Upon being informed by UNHCR that ‘Europe has closed its borders to all Pakistani migrants’, Pakistani migrants held a protest at the Olive Grove demanding to be registered and given a deportation order, only so that they could buy a ferry ticket for the Greek mainland.⁵ Just the previous day, the coordinator of the hotspot had visited the Pakistani migrants at the Olive Grove and told them that the border has always been closed for them, that Europe never wanted them, and that gradually not only they, but migrants of all nationalities ‘are becoming a problem for Europe’. Seemingly wishing to exonerate the Greek government, she asserted that this was neither her decision, nor that of the Greek government but the EU’s. Yet, as one of the protestors countered,

We just want to move on. We don’t care to be refugees because we know what this means. We have the right to get registered, get the paper and take the ferry to Athens, like what is happening on other islands and up until now. If I knew the situation was like this on this island I would have tried to reach another island, like the one my friend was on. (AS personal communication with protestor, March 2016)

Aila’s interlocutor knew that playing the ‘refugee card’⁶ would do nothing but increase his deportability: to make him more vulnerable to detention on the island for an unspecified length of time, while waiting for an answer, just to be rejected and deported in the end. The protestors sought a visibility that the hotspot system was denying them: simple registration, a document that would order their removal from the country, but which would enable them to buy a ferry ticket for Athens.

The protestors were shouting ‘We love you Greece, Europe please’, and ‘We are all humans’. At this point, the options that the hotspot administrator was giving them were either to ‘voluntarily return’⁷ to Pakistan, or to enter the hotspot, apply for asylum, and be detained until their claim had been assessed. The Pakistani migrants knowingly resisted applying for asylum; they knew back then what this meant for them: that they would not be granted refugee status since their asylum claims would invariably be rejected. Thus, the asylum application process, for them, was experienced as ‘giving themselves up’ for immediate detention. Refusing to construct their identity as ‘refugees’, they claimed a right to the ferry. That is, the right to move on with their journey to the mainland, paradoxically constructing the deportation order that would be hanging over them as a means of enhancing their mobility.

As soon as the EU–Turkey Deal was implemented, everyone who was already in the hotspot, who had arrived prior to the deal, was forcibly removed from the island, in order to make space for the newcomers, who would be warehoused there regardless of national origin or citizenship. Those who applied for asylum were ferried to various military-controlled camps on the mainland while awaiting their asylum cases to be processed. On Lesvos, many of those who were deemed ineligible for asylum, including Pakistani nationals, were either locked in Section B of the Moria hotspot to await their deportation, or were transported to the mainland and interred in what are known as ‘pre-removal’ or, literally, ‘pre-departure’ centres, such as those prisons in Korinthos and Amygdaleza, also to be eventually deported. The reason for this was to create space on the islands for all those people who were anticipated to arrive after 20 March, since the new arrivals would not be allowed to exit the hotspots until the finalisation of their asylum process.

While the mobility of ‘economic migrants’ is criminalised by design, any resistance within or around hotspots is surveilled and punitively repressed. In the spring of 2016, there were threats made by the Ministry of Migration that new detention centres would be created to segregate migrants that have shown signs of misbehaviour. In these detention centres would be detained ‘disobedient’ migrants, who have caused troubles of any kind, such as trying to approach or enter the ferry without having been granted the right to board it – all those who were constructed as ‘potential’ criminals (Georgiopoulou, 2016). Here, we see clearly how the problem of detention capacity on the hotspot islands – a problem produced by the infrastructure of migration management itself – is solved by simply equating the ‘economic migrant’ with a criminalised status.

Demonstrating the circularity of this process of criminalisation, an interpreter working for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) observed that potential troublemakers – those who are detained on the pretext of having shown ‘criminal behaviour’ – are then rejected as asylum applicants, and classified as deportable ‘economic migrants’ (AS, personal communication, MSF interpreter, April 2016). The Ministry’s plan to create separate pre-removal centres for Pakistani and for Maghrebian migrants, segregated by nationality, reveals, according to this interlocutor, that although both groups are classified de facto as ‘economic migrants’ and not ‘refugees’, Pakistanis are constructed as more docile, obedient, and passive detainees than are Maghrebians, who were stigmatised as being defiant, disobedient, uncooperative, and always causing trouble to the authorities (AS, personal communication, MSF interpreter, April 2016).

Pakistanis accept their fate, the fact that they are here for work and not because their lives are under threat, they accept to be detained and deported. The notorious detention centre of Amygdaleza will shortly accept only Pakistani migrants, while the detention centre in Korinthos will receive only Moroccans and Algerians. (AS, personal communication, MSF interpreter, April 2016)

In July 2016, every evening on Chios island, migrants who had freedom to move on the island, but who were barred from leaving the island by taking the ferry because they lacked an international protection card, would gather at the port just before a ferry was ready to embark for Athens and hold a protest there, while many of them also tried to board the ferry, clashing with the police. The right to the ferry, in other words, had become a daily demand within the hotspot reality. Following these demonstrations, merely gathering at the port in ‘crowds’, or even being present while a ferry was departing became defined as a crime, with ensuing arrests and imprisonments of migrant protesters and their allies.

Vathi, Samos (September 2016)

The majority of Pakistani migrants arriving on Samos island in the month of September 2016 were rejecting the asylum process. They were telling UNHCR staff openly that they were not running away from war in Pakistan but coming to Europe to find work, in order to earn money to send back to their families. As the banners they held during a demonstration outside the hotspot read, ‘We are not refugees, we are economic migrants’. A UNHCR employee related with surprise that he could not understand why they were refusing to claim asylum: ‘If they don’t claim asylum they will never be able to leave the island and they will, for sure, be deported to Turkey’ (AS Interview with UNHCR Employee, September 2016). An EASO officer working inside the hotspot seemed rather disturbed with the directness and frankness of the Pakistani migrants she encountered; for, as she put it, they were complicating the way the asylum process should proceed, and, indeed, undermining the very raison d’être of the hotspot: ‘They are disrupting the logic of the hotspot, the reason why we are here, to see whether these guys are eligible for asylum or not’ (AS interview with EASO officer, September 2016). Similarly, a police officer exclaimed,

these guys are asking for their deportation. By saying that they want to move on to Europe for work, they will never be allowed to leave the island, they will be trapped here for god knows how long causing great disturbance to the locals here on Samos. (AS personal communication with Hellenic Police officer, September 2016)

The logic of the hotspot places the burden on asylum applicants to prove that they are not lying about their need for protection, their ‘refugeeness’. Hence, migrants arriving at the hotspot who preempted the asylum process by refusing the category of the ‘refugee’ provoked not only the surprise of both Greek and EU authorities and NGO personnel, but also their annoyance at migrants’ refusal to recognise the order of the border. Accepting their criminalisation on the spot, Pakistani migrants instrumentally sought to be given the deportation order so that they could continue their clandestine journey. We discerned this annoyance in the words of the Greek police officer who seemed to not know how to deal with this openness and directness of the Pakistani migrants who were refusing to call themselves ‘refugees’: ‘Why are these guys provoking their fate, are they asking to be deported? Why are they disturbing the order of things?’ (AS, personal communication with Hellenic Police officer, September 2016). All actors that form part of the border spectacle (De Genova, 2013) felt perplexed: the spectacle was being interrupted, not only by a protest or riot but by a refusal of the very logic of the border, the temporal and spatial categories that it produces, and their naturalised application to particular nationalised groups.

While one strategy of resistance is to undermine the distinction between ‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’ by claiming ‘We are all refugees’, here we discern the opposite strategy: claiming, from the outset, that one is an economic migrant, and refusing to entertain the spectacle of a just process of distributing asylum. Further, this strategy refuses the conditionality of mobility on legality, circumventing the authority of the border by inhabiting the category of the ‘illegal migrant’. As one Pakistani migrant put it,

It is a waste of our time. They will keep us on the islands, they might never deport us, but what is sure is that they will never give us papers. Why can’t they just let us move to Athens where we can work at least, we have lots of friends there who tell us there are job options, we can join them, we don’t even need papers, once we get to Athens they will never deport us but here on the islands we are always at risk [of being deported]. (AS Interview with Pakistani protestor, Samos, September 2016)

In this sense, Pakistani migrants face what can be termed a banal illegality, that is by the very fact that you are an ‘economic migrant’ you are guilty, you are illegal. However, the Pakistani migrants appropriate this exact hotspot strategy (of dismissing them on the spot due to their nationality) and reverse it into a strategy of resistance, by saying ‘yes, we are here for work’. In other words, ‘we are telling you the truth, we are not going to lie by claiming we are refugees’. This reverses the hotspot logic that an asylum applicant is always assumed to be lying so she needs to prove that she is telling the truth. What the Pakistanis were saying in Samos might be rephrased along the lines of: ‘we are telling the truth and we are not going to prove that we are innocent (refugees) by lying’. At the same time, this reaction challenges the construction of Greece as a country of transit (promulgated by the hotspot approach) according to which ideology, refugees, prototypically Syrians, are eager to pass through on their way to ‘Europe’ (see Kallius, 2019). Indeed, an established and well-organised Pakistani community exists in Greece since at least the 1970s, when migrants who first arrived as so-called guest workers during the time of the junta (1967–1974) came to work in construction projects that were flourishing during this period (Broesma and Lazarescu, 2009). In the early 2000s, ‘Pakistani’ became normalised as a derogatory, generic synonym for the ‘illegal immigrant’ used widely to refer to undocumented migrants in Greece. The hotspots draw on this culturally available justifying discourse to naturalise the technocratic management of migration in the Aegean borderspace. Relegated to this category, Pakistani migrants strategically deployed this category to assert their right to stay in Greece – for decades reliant on their hyper-exploited labour.

Conclusion

Hotspots and their logic are experienced unevenly within what we have identified as a ‘border within a border’. The border within a border refers to the construction and management of so-called mixed flows (i.e. the juridical entitlement of the EU to criminalise migration by denying international protection or right to remain) on the Greek islands on which the hotspots are operating, and the ways in which Greece is being constructed as a borderland. As the hotspot system was being implemented, its explicit function – of sorting people at the border into ‘potential refugees’ and ‘illegal economic migrants’ – was clearly based on the criminalisation of the ‘economic migrant’. Three years in, and after the implementation of the EU–Turkey Deal, the ‘deportable’ subject is no longer only the so-called economic migrant, but also the asylum seeker who did not remain in Turkey, ostensibly a ‘safe country’, but crossed the Aegean Sea to arrive in Europe. We introduced the analytical framework of the ‘mobile hotspot’ in order to explore the ways in which Greece as an uneasy borderland of Europe is experienced and challenged by migrants as they move or are prevented from moving between the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland.

Using the naturalising logics of time and space, the state attempts to divide the ‘migrant mob’ (Tazzioli, 2017) into discrete, self-evident nationalities, and to divide refugees and migrants from each other, but also from the local society, including established migrant communities. The cynical use of the islands’ topography to trap and contain people on the move is a transnational, transhistorical technology of fascism: ‘unruly’ political exiles were sent to remote islands during the junta in Greece, while the Australian offshore prisons of Nauru, Manus, and Christmas Island have been exported as the ‘Pacific Solution’ to ‘unmanageable flows’. If seeking asylum has become synonymous with immediate (and sometimes indefinite) detention, and the hotspot model is about pushing the border to the mainland, refusing passage to the city, and facilitating the EU’s segregation and deportation projects, resistance in and to this bordered reality means denaturalising the logics through which land, sea, and sky become prisons. How we want to live, that we want to live, where we want to live, with whom, and for what, these are the simple decisions we negotiate through our struggles against a transnational regime that tries to run a border through our very hearts.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Aila Spathopoulou is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ESRC funded project titled “Financial Inclusion and Digital Connectivity in Refugee Governance” at the department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London and co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens. She holds a PhD degree from the department of Geography at King’s University of London. Her doctoral thesis focused on the migration hotspot regime in Greece and the various categories that it (re)produces. Her research interests include processes of bordering, racialized/emotional labours, and feminist and participatory research methodologies.

Anna Carastathis is Co-Director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, the co-author of Reproducing Refugees: Photographia of a Crisis (Rowman International, 2020), and the author of Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). She received her PhD in philosophy from McGill University.

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