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
