Ambivalent feelings: ‘filotimo’ in the Greek migration regime

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ambivalent feelings that police officers demonstrate in their encounters with migrants at migration governance sites in Greece. Police officers are notorious for their anti-migrant and racist attitudes, and migration governance sites are infamous for their poor conditions. However, very often police officers exhibit care towards migrants, providing them with medicine, food and other goods. This care is not a matter of individual exceptions in the dominant xenophobic police feelings, but related to the culturally significant sentiment of ‘filotimo’ (love of honour). This article discusses the cultural conventions that organize this rhetoric in the particular historical moment of the overlapping of the austerity and migration crises in the country. As embodiments of an amoral state, police officers defend their moral self-worth by drawing upon the virtue of ‘filotimo’. This rhetoric of ‘filotimo’, however, also resonates with nativist claims to morality and moral superiority towards migrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• ‘filotimo’
• migration
• police
• the state
• Greece

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Identities editorial team and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. I would also like to thank Heath Cabot, Kostis Kalantzis, Akis Papataxiarchis, Efi Plexousaki and Marica Rombou-Levidi for their feedback in previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names mentioned are pseudonyms.

2. The term ‘migration crisis’ has dominated public discussions and scholarly work since 2015. However, the term echoes a Eurocentric problématique and frames the arrival of hundreds of thousands of border-crossers to the Greek islands in terms of ‘crisis’ and ‘rupture’ of a presumed normalcy. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this article, I think it is important to examine the ways in which the police officers who are actively engaged in governing and controlling migration reflect on this historical moment.

3. The Returns Department (former Deportations Department) is responsible for the deportation procedures, manages cases and oversees the detention conditions in the detention facilities in Attica region.

4. After a protest, the Elliniko pre-removal detention centre was closed in January 2017 and the detained women were transferred to the Petrou Ralli pre-removal detention centre where detention conditions were even worse than the Elliniko centre and accessibility to visits by support groups was limited.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council, “The Social Life of State Deportation Regimes: A Comparative Study of the Implementation Interface” [Starting Grant 336319].