The politics of aid: discursive boundary-making and the war of position in Greece’s humanitarian landscape

Abstract

During 2017 and 2018, Greece hosted roughly 80,000 border crossers who had arrived in the European Union (EU), fleeing mostly conflict, economic and political instability. Different actors working within the humanitarian landscape offered various forms of assistance and solidarity. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork on Lesvos, this paper explores the tensions that emerged between international solidarians and paid aid workers and state actors. It employs Gramsci’s war of position to argue that discursive tactics used by international solidarians to delegitimise the state and state-sanctioned aid challenge cultural hegemony and subvert the border regime. This paper contributes to research that expands upon the role of civil society in displacement. By analysing discursive tactics as potential sites of power and struggle over norms in society, it also points to tactics that disrupt dominant power hierarchies.

Keywords:

• International solidarians
• border crossers
• war of position
• Greece
• Moria camp

Introduction

During my fieldwork in 2017–2018, Greece had an aid landscape that was an assemblage of government and non-government organisations (NGOs), solidarity initiatives, political activist groups, and individuals who aided and engaged with border crossers in varying, sometimes contradictory ways. Watching how moments of tension and antagonism played out on the ground, I became interested in how each group positioned itself vis-à-vis others. For example, international solidarians often mentioned that certain government organisations and NGOs were ‘part of the problem’ or ‘on the other side’, while interviews with government actors often revealed similar conceptions of international and local solidarians. This paper explores how discursive framings of ‘the other’ worked productively to challenge or maintain the status quo of the border regime. It contributes to research that expands upon the role of civil society in displacement. Through analysing discursive tactics as potential sites of power and struggle over meaning and symbols in society, it also points to tactics that disrupt dominant power hierarchies.

The interlocutors represented in this paper were mainly international ‘solidarians’ – a neologism meaning those who engage in informal, anti-institutional and anti-hierarchical aid (Rozakou 2016); they arrived in Greece mostly from other areas in Europe, were heterogeneous and comprised diverse people who had varied understandings and practices of solidarity, but whose anti-hierarchical, non-discriminatory and egalitarian mission separated them from international volunteers, whose political convictions were not so outspoken. Through ethnographic snippets of an unfolding event between two very different types of camps on Lesvos – Moria, organised and run by the Greek state and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and Pikpa, run by local and international solidarians – I show how tensions emerged and became articulated on the ground. I then trace the discursive boundary-making methods – defined as the construction and maintenance of one’s identity through enacting discursive boundaries between an imagined in-group and an imagined out-group – that international solidarians used to separate themselves from certain humanitarian and government organisations (see Crowley 1999; Yuval-Davis 2006; Mac Ginty 2017). In the discussion that follows, I consider how these discursive methods contribute to the war of position, following Gramsci, to challenge the cultural hegemony of the state – namely, its reification of refugee camps as the most effective method of managing displacement and borders as necessary and inevitable.

Gramsci conceptualised and wrote his theories of state power during many years in prison and hospital arrest in Italy under the fascist government of the early 1930s. He, along with other Neo-Marxist thinkers of his time, questioned why Marx’s anticipation that the mass proletariat would rise up against the small ruling elite never came to pass. In answering this question, he argued that to change society, one had to change the theorisations of the intellectuals, education system and philosophy of society, all of which make up and reinforce the dominant culture. This paper aims to show how international solidarians, through discursive framing of NGO and state actors, have challenged the dominant philosophies of society, and therefore challenged cultural hegemony. This paper also takes up Gramsci’s call to decolonise intellectual space, and follows Holmes and Castañeda, who implore anthropologists to challenge ‘power hierarchies in the production and circulation of representations, including within our own writing’ (2016, 13) through the employment of specific terms such as ‘border crosser’ – a term I apply collectively to all migrants (save for international solidarians, volunteers and tourists) to avoid implied judgement about deservingness. They may be asylum seekers, refugees or irregularised migrants.

The first section describes the context of the humanitarian landscape in Greece, situating it within a history of both hospitality and solidarity. It expands upon literature that discusses tensions in various aid landscapes, and introduces how Gramsci’s concepts of cultural hegemony and the war of position are productive tools to analyse these tensions. After explaining my research methods, I use ethnography of an unfolding situation between two camps on Lesvos to show how tensions became articulated on the ground. I then incorporate interviews with various actors in which they discursively framed the other group to delegitimise them, and I argue that discursive framing is a deliberate attempt by each group to distance themselves from those who maintain or challenge the current border regime. For solidarians, this allowed them to openly challenge how border crossers were managed and to offer alternatives, which I view as acts of counter-hegemony in the war of position. I conclude with a discussion that explores the deeper power struggle behind these discursive tactics.

The humanitarian arena and cultural hegemony

Filoxenia, or hospitality, has played an important role in Greek tradition and history and has been crucial in the Greek state’s representation of itself on the world stage (Rozakou 2012). Hospitality, however, is not unconditional; it may consider the guests inferior or, at minimum, creates rules for their conditional stay, and has historically necessitated reciprocity (Daskalaki and Leivaditi 2018; Voutira 2004; Kravva 2014). Although many Greeks have been active in anti-institutional forms of care and solidarity for decades, it was after the 2008–2009 economic collapse, and subsequent austerity measures, that solidarity movements took strong root in society (Cabot 2014). Grassroots coalitions and individuals provided services and products directly to each other, from producer to consumer. This negated the necessity of the middlemen and created new forms of reciprocity and informal economies. For Cabot, ‘solidarity speaks to new forms of collective action […] inextricably tied to crisis, neoliberalism and austerity’ (2016, 153). Continuing this action, a ‘solidarian’ states Rozakou, ‘emphasises lateral and anti-hierarchical sociality and the contrast with bureaucratic frameworks’ (2016, 187).

Beginning in 2015, roughly one million border crossers passed through Greece, seeking asylum in Europe. Largely from the Middle East, they were fleeing conflict, political instability and economic precarity (Oikonomakis 2018). This spurred the proliferation of local aid organisations and solidarity initiatives throughout Greece. Many of these began in an ad hoc way, as the number of people crossing into Greece had increased dramatically in a short period – with roughly 800,000 arrivals from January to November 2015, and arrival rates as high as 6000 per day (UNHCR 2015). Members of solidarity initiatives transitioned their already robust associations to focus on aiding border crossers in addition to the locals they were aiding (Rakopoulos 2014). For example, they offered accommodation in informal (often squatted) settlements, educational and vocational classes, legal and medical aid and logistical information (Rozakou 2016; Cabot 2014). These solidarity associations were structured very differently than the hospitality of the past. As I have argued elsewhere, hospitality requires obligations, making it contrary to the anti-hierarchical, equalising nature of solidarity.

A new trend also emerged in Greece and throughout Europe: the organisation and arrival of international solidarians and volunteers, who began with tasks such as welcoming, food supply, translation and offering logistical information (Chtouris and Miller 2017; Oikonomakis 2018). I term the interlocutors in this paper ‘international solidarians’, as they arrived to Greece from abroad (mainly from Northern Europe and North America) and worked in pro-solidarity associations. For example, non-hierarchy and group decision-making were cornerstones of many of these associations. These initiatives and organisations came to co-exist with national, international and supranational governmental organisations and NGOs that arrived in various regions around Greece to offer professional support, guidance and targeted aid.

Hilhorst and Jansen (2010) describe aid landscapes as ‘humanitarian arenas’, in which competition between various international and local NGOs can lead to antagonism. In the humanitarian arena, state actors and large organisations, such as UHNCR, hold most legitimate decision-making power. For example, they create and organise camps and implement much of the formal aid such as registration, asylum decisions, housing, cash allocation via debit cards, and the distribution of material resources. At least, these are their primary responsibilities on paper. Their aiding of border crossers is often seen by solidarians as conditional, as aid is given to those who can show they have suffered in specific ways (Fassin 2007; Ticktin 2011). Solidarians furthermore frame this type of aid as ‘charity’, which is viewed negatively because it reproduces the hierarchy between a powerful (usually White) saviour, and a powerless (usually Brown/Black) victim (see Ticktin 2011). The charity trope also obfuscates the multiple, overlapping reasons that people cross borders in search of a better life and the agency that border crossers employ in various arenas (Malkki 1996; Ticktin 2011).

Boundary politics, as the creation and maintenance of one’s identity vis-à-vis the other, is not a new phenomenon between solidarians and the state, nor even between solidarians and aid workers, nor is it contained to Greece. For example, in Hilhorst and Jansen’s research in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and in a protracted refugee camp in Kenya, the authors found competition and tension between volunteers, whom they term ‘non-governmental individuals (NGIs)’, and aid workers. Aid workers were viewed by NGIs as bureaucratic and overpriced, while NGIs were viewed by aid workers ‘as amateurs who get in the way of the professionals’ (2010, 1131). An important finding was that each group actively worked to exclude others from the humanitarian landscape (Hilhorst and Jansen 2010). This is mirrored by Martin and Nolte’s research in the European Union (EU) in which volunteers and aid workers viewed each other in a negative light (2020).

Scholarship exploring the humanitarian landscape in the EU has elucidated how international and local solidarians sometimes opposed the type of aid offered by humanitarian and government organisations and how they used individual and collective agency to offer aid to those the government excluded (eg. Castañeda 2013; Vandevoordt and Verschraegen 2019; Stock 2019). What has been missing from this research, however, is how these discursive framings of ‘the other’ affect cultural hegemony, as they work to either reify or challenge the status quo. Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, questions how it is that dominant groups in society maintain power when the masses in the subordinate groups are relatively autonomous and therefore can be seen, at least partially, as complicit in their own domination (Lears 1985). The term ‘cultural hegemony’ can be used to reconcile this contradiction; I employ it loosely as the domination by a ruling class of diverse peoples, in which the dominant group controls the culture – mores, values, rituals, taboos, norms, etc. – so that the status quo appears natural and so well-institutionalised and internalised that it is not questioned and is seen as the norm. The root of the word, hegemonia, comes from ancient Greece and has been variably translated as ‘to rule over’ or ‘to lead’. In ancient times hegemons were states that ruled over other states by force. Gramsci saw the need for this word to evolve for modern use; no longer did states always rule by force; rather, they controlled populations by creating the cultural parameters for their citizens to live within and navigate (Ives 2004; Lears 1985).

For Gramsci, cultural hegemony is perpetuated not only by those in the dominant or ruling group, but by everyone who fails to challenge it. When people act out of self-interest to get ahead in society, they unintentionally reify that system, because their actions help to maintain it. Gramsci makes a distinction between the war of manoeuvre, as the outright physical fight for power, and the war of position, as the fight over the symbols and systems that function to serve the war of manoeuvre (Gramsci 1971; Ives 2004; Holmes and Castañeda 2016).

The ways in which people, institutions, governments, concepts, etc., are discursively framed can further repression, maintain apathy or, conversely, mobilise revolution. Holmes and Castañeda expose the ‘shifting war of position’ in the various discursive framings of border crossers in Europe during and after the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’; in official discourse, border crossers were framed as either undeserving criminals, potentially threatening to the safety of the citizenry and cultural fabric of the EU, or deserving refugees in need of saving (2016). The authors argue that these discursive framings are ‘simultaneous symbolic, social, political, and legal categories of inclusion and exclusion with potentially fatal consequences’ (Holmes and Castañeda 2016, 13) . In other words, the representations of border crossers are more than discourse; they relate to the ‘politics of life’ in which some people are marked to be saved and others to perish (Fassin 2007).

I consider the ways in which the state and large organisations employ discourse to frame solidarians as opponents of the state and potentially dangerous, as a bid to legitimise and maintain the status quo of the refugee camp and state-sanctioned aid delivery. I also show how solidarians fight back; I consider their discourse and actions as part of the war of position against state hegemony, by framing the state and aid organisations as oppressive and unhumanitarian, and engaging in counter-hegemonic activism and aid. In the next section I explain my research methods.

Research methods

During my 10 months of ethnographic research, I conducted participant observation in camps, squatted settlements, NGOs and spaces of solidarity as well as interviews with a range of actors, from Greek and EU government employees to international and national aid workers and international solidarians and volunteers. I also volunteered in Athens within a legal aid group and on Lesvos for an informal border-monitoring group and at Pikpa camp. My firsthand volunteering/solidarity work produced a deeper understanding of the complex relationship international solidarians had with aid workers and government employees.

I conducted research on Lesvos with the inclusion of a few interviews from Athens. Interviews were semi-structured, ranging in length from 30 minutes to two and a half hours, during which interlocutors were asked about their work, challenges they faced, their conceptions of their own and other organisations, and the effects of different policies and practices on the border crossers, among other questions. I found participants through my own volunteer work, emails, networking and attending meetings with NGOs and government actors, as well as through snowball sampling. Throughout my research and volunteering, it became apparent that tensions between groups played a central role in the humanitarian landscape, and actors themselves often commented on the negative effects of these tensions. Therefore, I iteratively adapted part of the research to focus more narrowly on this aspect.

Participant observation mainly took place within Pikpa camp, which was organised and run by a small core staff, who were paid from donations, and a large group of unpaid international and local solidarians. Additional research was conducted within informal NGOs and associations in and around the capital city of Mytilene and public spaces on the outskirts of Moria camp, which was a state camp, run by the government and aided by UNHCR. I share further findings from one biweekly inter-agency meeting bringing together volunteers and solidarians, aid workers, and government actors to discuss recent events.

My background and positionality granted me access to some spaces but not to others. I was a Canadian doctoral candidate in my early thirties, with a history of travel and volunteer work. International solidarians were mostly in their twenties and thirties, leaned Left politically, were mainly of European origin, and employed English as the main language of conduct. Due to my similar background, it was relatively easy for me to slip in as a colleague, but it took time for me to gain the solidarians’ trust. There was a tension between solidarians and researchers or volunteers who came for short amounts of time; solidarians often questioned the others’ motivations and took time to trust them. Through many months of advocacy and solidarity work, as well as through personal references, I built personal and trusting relationships with solidarians, many of whom remain my friends.

Although this paper explores tensions among three groups, it focuses on international solidarians. These solidarians mostly operated independently from large structured organisations, offering care in a fluid, informal manner with considerable flexibility and autonomy. They viewed their solidarity as necessary because the state and aid organisations were unable to provide adequate care and resources to all border crossers.

The aid workers under analysis had specific training and expertise, coming from large organisations such as the UNHCR, Save the Children and EuroRelief. I only analysed organisations specifically mentioned by interlocutors. Others, such as Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), did not accept government funding, and unlike other humanitarian NGOs that have a tenet of apolitical neutrality, MSF took a clear political stance on the 2016 EU–Turkey Agreement. That organisation pulled out of Moria camp after the implementation of the EU–Turkey Agreement, stating,

continuing to work inside [Moria camp] would make us complicit in a system we consider to be both unfair and inhumane … and we refuse to be a part of a system that has no regard for the humanitarian or protection needs of asylum seekers and migrants. (MSF 2016)

As I will explain in more detail later, the claim of apolitical neutrality by NGOs can unintentionally help maintain the status quo of the current regime; MSF’s refusal to uphold this status quo resulted in the organisation being thought of as an ally by solidarians in their war of position against the cultural hegemony of the state.

Finally, government actors comprised police, border patrol, local and regional authorities, and civil servants. Solidarians often described them as ‘the state’ and conceived of them as a single entity, which, because their actions reproduce state hegemony, is largely how they are referred to here, although they were a heterogeneous body pursuing varying interests and actions.

According to Ellis and Adams, ‘concerns about research being an invasive and oppressive colonialist enterprise is directly connected with the ethics of researching and representing others’ (2014, 11). Due to the ethical considerations involved in representing vulnerable populations and the possibility of re-traumatisation, I chose not to interview border crossers. Representation, however, is important, especially of marginalised peoples. Spivak distinguishes between ‘speaking for’ and ‘speaking about’; the challenge, according to Dhawan, is ‘how to ethically and imaginatively inhabit other people’s narrative – without appropriating it and without doing violence to it’ (2012, 52). In attempting to meet this challenge, I have aimed to ‘speak about’ rather than for border crossers, and have kept the analysis close to the empirical material.

The other point I want to bring to the fore is my position as a scholar from the Global North, doing research in Greece. Anthropologists, like humanitarian actors, sometimes chase crises, and like aid work, scholarship is a business (Andersson 2014). This can lead to short-sighted funding applications, rapid ethnographies and decontextualised research. This is further problematised by the fact that local scholars often cannot get funding due to the economic precarity of academia in Greece (Cabot 2019). I have done my best to address and not reproduce knowledge inequalities by spending 10 months in Greece and contextualising my findings within the canon of Greek scholars, specifically in relation to solidarity.

Informed consent was gathered in writing, except for a few cases in which I recorded it verbally. All interlocutors are anonymised for their protection, which includes the use of pseudonyms. Initially, I had agreed with interlocutors to keep the name of their organisations anonymous. However, as an incident that makes up the case study progressed, it became clear that I could not describe it without giving away the background or details of Pikpa camp. Therefore, an agreement was reached after much of the research and volunteering, in which I was given verbal recorded permission by the parties interviewed (including the organisation contact of the camp) to share this information. Although the data presented here shows that some solidarians had strong feelings of opposition towards government actors and large organisations, the analysis and conclusions in this paper are my own and may not reflect the official views of the camp management.¹

From Moria to Pikpa and back

In 2016, with the implementation of the EU–Turkey Agreement, an ‘island restriction’ stipulated that migrants entering Greece via one of the islands (Lesvos, Leros, Kos, Samos or Chios) could not leave that island until the outcome of their asylum claim, which could take well over a year. In the meantime, they were confined mainly to dismal island camps such as Moria, with only those migrants categorised as ‘most vulnerable’ eligible for transfer to the mainland.

In the summer of 2018, Moria camp, run by the Greek government and managed by the military and UNHCR, had nearly 8000 residents yet a capacity of roughly 3000. Resources including water, food, blankets, hygiene materials and space were in short supply. Conditions were squalid, with garbage and sewage overflowing on various occasions (MSF 2019). Medical staff were overwhelmed and turned away patients daily, resulting in some residents cutting their wrists outside clinics, desperate to prove they were in need. A variety of organisations worked inside this camp, providing medical, education and protection services. They were run and operated by government employees, aid workers and volunteers for organisations officially permitted to operate there, such as EuroRelief, the camp’s main housing organisation. International solidarians offered aid at nearby locations outside the camp or in the capital city of Mytilene, accessible by a 30-minute bus ride.

On 25 May 2018, fights broke out in Moria between Kurdish border crossers and Arabic-speaking border crossers.² No one was killed, but many were stabbed and slashed with knives and makeshift weapons. The fighting resulted in roughly 1000 Kurdish border crossers fleeing the camp. Police officers found 40 Kurdish men, women and children hiding in a park in the city centre and brought them to Pikpa, hoping the camp could accommodate them safely. Run by the Greek NGO Lesvos Solidarity, this camp had been operating since 2015; its residents were border crossers transferred by UNHCR because they were considered ‘highly vulnerable’, such as those who were members of the LGBTQ + community, in late pregnancy or had lost loved ones on the Aegean Sea en route to Greece. Pikpa camp did not own the land it used, although negotiations to acquire it from the government were ongoing. It was set up to function differently than other refugee camps, emphasising collective decision-making among paid staff, unpaid solidarians and border crossers – referred to as ‘residents’. Residents shared a common kitchen, cooked and cleaned for themselves, gardened and engaged in many other activities as part of a community. Although Pikpa had housed close to 30,000 individuals (with a maximum of about a thousand at any one time) since its inception as a refugee camp, its official capacity was only 120 people. It therefore came to be seen, above all, as a symbol of solidarity rather than a viable solution for hosting thousands of border crossers (Lesvos Solidarity 2018; personal communication with Pikpa staff).

Over the next few days, roughly 350 new residents arrived at Pikpa. The staff leading the camp and the solidarians, me among them, worked around the clock erecting tents, making and distributing food, distributing hygiene items and other resources, and addressing medical and legal issues. During this period, many organisations came to offer services. Solidarians and volunteers from a number of them as well as on an individual basis arrived to help however they could – whether it be through interpretation, building tents, moving, cleaning, engaging the children or coordinating logistics.

A couple weeks later, tensions surfaced among local business owners, hotels, government bodies and larger organisations, as questions about a long-term solution abounded. Pikpa faced a lawsuit from local hotel owners and individuals for being over capacity; the hotels claimed it affected their business. Interestingly, these hotel owners did not appear to be concerned with the capacity of Moria camp, some 12 km away, which, at 8000 people, was filled to almost three times its capacity. Pikpa camp was geographically much bigger that its limited capacity maximum of 120, and it was not overcrowded nor, in my experience, did it feel unsafe at this time. We can therefore infer that this discursive framing by local hotel owners of Pikpa being ‘over capacity’ was an attempt to maintain the status quo of how border crossers were housed – farther away and out of sight in the overcrowded Moria camp, to the detriment of border crossers’ mental and physical well-being.

In conversations with locals, I heard complaints of increased garbage at the local beach, and that men were walking the neighbourhood in groups, possibly scaring nearby hotel guests. The framing of these border crossers as unclean is reminiscent of colonial attitudes towards the ‘uncivilized masses’ of the Global South, in need of saving. More problematic is the representation of border crossers as potential dangers, which reinforces a culture that sees border crossers as ‘“pre-emptive suspects”, always already untrustworthy’ (Holmes and Castañeda 2016, 19).

Furthermore, government actors from the Region of the North Aegean sent inspectors to Pikpa during this time. Including forestry and hygiene inspectors, they took issue with a few small deficiencies – a ‘broken net in the food distribution area, [a] leak in a water tank for the laundry machines and deficiencies in the common kitchen’ – but still declared that Pikpa was ‘dangerous to public health and the environment’ (Lesvos Solidarity 2018). The Region of the North Aegean called for Pikpa’s closure within 15 days, meaning that new and old residents would have to find somewhere else to live. The framing of Pikpa as ‘dangerous to public health and the environment’ was an attempt to discredit the camp and the solidarians who ran it. Although the government had the power to close the camp at any point, they used this discourse as a way to legitimise the continued housing of border crossers at Moria camp. In other words, the state used discourse as a tactic of hegemony to ‘win the consent of subordinate groups to the existing social order’ (Lears 1985, 569). The Greek state did not need this consent to close Pikpa, nor to house border crossers in Moria, but by gaining legitimacy, they would ultimately maintain cultural hegemony among the Greek population, and more widely, as Moria camp was continuously in the international news during this time for its crowded and unsafe conditions. However, Pikpa staff quickly fixed the hygiene issues and used public discourse themselves in their war of position against the hegemonic forces of the state when Lesvos Solidary published the following on its website:

We are puzzled by the fact that the Hygiene Service – although it was aware of the emergency situation in the island those days – refers to the 350 Kurdish refugees and refers to ‘crowded living accommodation’ in PIKPA, whereas there is no reference or report about the exposure of these people to the dangers and extreme overcrowding in Moria hotspot. (Lesvos Solidarity 2018)

Gramsci argues that consent to state power is manufactured through a variety of institutions such as the education system, religious spaces and printing press. However, it is not only the ruling class that has the power to influence the symbols, values, rituals and attitudes of society; rather, power is exercised by diverse individuals and groups, all of whom have the ability to challenge the status quo (Gramsci 1971; Ives 2004). Counter-hegemony – organised through the war of position – is about ‘creating alternative institutions and alternative intellectual resources within existing society’ (Cox 1983, 165). Pikpa could be seen as an alternative institution to the state-run Moria camp. And, as shown in the quote above, solidarians who ran Pikpa published a counter-narrative to that of the state, arguing that Moria, not Pikpa, was a danger to border crossers.

Solidarians furthermore challenged the closure of Pikpa, and did not consent to the state’s narrative. They created the #SavePikpa campaign, which was spread through existing social networks such as WhatsApp chat groups, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; solidarians, volunteers, and even aid workers on Lesvos and beyond posted photographs of themselves holding ‘#SavePikpa’ signs. The campaign was reported by MSF, Oxfam and Amnesty International (MSF Sea 2018; Oxfam International EU Advocacy 2018; Amnesty International 2018). This widely shared social media helped to spread awareness about the necessity of dignified aid, and some media included articles that helped to spread a counter-narrative of government neglect of border crossers and criminalisation of solidarity.

While this campaign was happening, the lawsuit and shutdown threat pressured Pikpa staff to close the main gate and bar new border crossers from entering – a move Pikpa solidarians described as ‘heart-breaking’, ‘unhumanitarian’ and ‘antithetical to Pikpa’s core values’. During this time, the governing actors of Moria camp attempted to make a safe corridor for Kurdish border crossers to return to Moria without fear, which was essentially through increased security and surveillance in the camp. The governing bodies and large government agencies tried to coerce the population to move back to Moria by threatening to withhold their monthly allowance of cash (via the UNHCR-led ‘cash card’), and threatening to delist those who were in line to be transferred to the mainland. In Lear’s reading of Gramsci, ‘consent and force nearly always coexist, though one or the other predominates’ (1985, 567). In this example, consent (in giving the Kurdish border crossers the time to make their own decision of which camp to stay in) devolved into coercing them to return to Moria. These threats, though not enacted, created tensions between solidarians – pronouncing the threats ‘unethical’ – and larger NGOs and government actors operating in Moria, who desperately wanted to control the situation. Solidarians challenged the dominant discourse of the state as benevolent and of large humanitarian organisations that ran Moria as humanitarian, through the use of certain words such as ‘unhumanitarian’ and ‘unethical’, furthering the counter-narrative of the state as neglectful and of solidarity as a necessary alternative.

Roughly three weeks after their arrival at Pikpa, the Kurdish border crossers returned to Moria. They did so willingly; a main motivation for their return was so that their temporary stay in Pikpa would not be the reason (or scapegoat) for Pikpa’s closure. It is unclear whether the #SavePikpa campaign affected the decision of the Region of the North Aegean, but Pikpa camp continued to run until evictions in late October 2020. The exodus of Kurdish border crossers out of Moria camp, their settlement in Pikpa and their ultimate return to Moria exposes how the Greek government enacted power – both through hegemonic discourse to gain consent of the populace, and through coercion – to maintain the status quo of current mechanisms of border crosser governance. It also shows how the counter-hegemony of solidarians emerged through discourse as a tactic in the war of position. The next section explores how discursive practices were used by various actors in a public meeting on Lesvos to discredit the other, and later, how boundary-making tactics were used by solidarians to distance themselves from UNHCR and government.

Discursive practices and the war of position

Shifting responsibility and blame

Convened by a UNHCR spokesperson, biweekly meetings on Lesvos aimed to bring together all actors on the island interested in collaborating or discussing the main issues concerning the hosting of border crossers. For analytical purposes, I expand on one meeting that took place during Pikpa’s hosting of the Kurdish border crossers. The meeting began with a Pikpa representative, Polly, explaining the difficulties solidarians faced through hosting many hundreds of border crossers with few resources. She asked what plans UNHCR and government actors were enacting to find a solution. No one answered her question. Instead, one man yelled out, ‘You always like to play the hero. You are inviting people in for your own gain!’ Polly then pointed out that it was government actors (police) who brought the first group of Kurds to Pikpa, thereby asking the solidarians to take responsibility for these people. The contradiction in this revelation is that the police, who in part make up the state, chose to bring border crossers to a camp that the state had, many times previously, framed as illegitimate and dangerous. And only weeks after this incident, the state again made these claims and threatened Pikpa’s closure. The discursive framing of Pikpa as ‘dangerous to public health and environment’ confers illegitimacy, exposing the differing ways that state power is manifested. In other words, the state ‘collaborated’ with solidarians when it was useful to them and delegitimised the same solidarians when they threatened the state’s hegemony – which solidarians did through both offering better housing and publicly discrediting the state-run camp.

Rather than arrive at a solution, the conversation devolved into individuals yelling accusations aimed at solidarians, aid workers and government actors. In turn, each actor shifted responsibility to another. For example, the European Commission representative made clear that he was not affiliated with the Greek government. He lamented the Greek government’s inability to properly use the hundreds of millions of euros given to Greece by the EU to help with the ‘refugee crisis’. He blamed the appalling conditions and violence in Moria camp on the Greek government. This boundary-making tactic did little to rectify the situation at hand; it only shifted the blame. However, it allowed the EU actor to distance himself from the negative implications of the current border regime, a key tactic that I saw in these discursive framings. Similarly, a Greek government actor who was responsible for much of Moria camp’s operation blamed the persisting situation on the Kurdish people themselves, stating that they were exploiting the opportunity: in refusing to return to Moria, they sought to be moved to the mainland, thereby evading the island restriction. By representing these Kurdish border crossers as culpable, this state actor was able to legitimise their continued subjugation in Moria camp. Holmes and Castañeda, in discussing the framing of border crossers in media, political and popular narratives, state that these ‘discursive frames … can help us learn a great deal about how the responsibility for suffering is shifted; how fears of cultural, ethnic, and religious difference are mobilized; and how boundaries of social categories are made and unmade’ (2016, 13). In the latter case, one could argue that this state actor was remaking the category of the Kurdish border crossers from ‘deserving refugee’ to ‘undeserving’ or ‘untrustworthy’ migrant. This creation of the ‘out-group’ allows for legitimising current management tactics, reifying the status quo.

During a lull in conversation, a man yelled out, ‘You aren’t listening to the locals!’ This ignited a chaotic debate among all parties involved. Before the meeting adjourned, with no definitive answers and with increased tension between the groups present, a number of people stated that their organisations were helping the situation for the local people by taking the border crossers ‘out of sight’ and caring for them so Greek people would not have to; they were frustrated at the way this help was received by the state, which was largely through tactics of delegitimisation and criminalisation. For example, many small organisations were being shut down by the government and solidarians were being increasingly criminalised although they offered valuable services. I have elsewhere argued that the criminalisation of solidarity is a response to civil society challenging and interfering with ‘state policies and practices of hostile hospitality’ (Schack and Witcher 2021). The Greek state and the organisations that ran Moria camp offer a conditional, or hostile, form of hospitality that necessitates refugeeness. Solidarians, by contrast, offer unconditional hospitality to all border crossers and they arguably offer better, more dignified housing.

Although I focus on solidarians’ discursive practices that make up the war of position, actions from the state, such as criminalisation, work in tandem with hegemonic discursive framing to delegitimise solidarity. Shortly after the conceptualisation of the EU–Turkey Agreement, criminalising solidarity became increasingly common. For example, in early 2016, five Search and Rescue (SAR) personnel operating in Greece were arrested and charged with smuggling. A month later a law was passed that allowed the prosecution of those who offered food or shelter outside official state-sanctioned avenues (Maccanico et al. 2018). And, since the EU–Turkey Agreement came into effect, more than 50 investigations and prosecutions have been levied against solidarians (Vosyliūtė and Conte 2019). Whether or not these have had the consequence of delegitimising solidarity in the eyes of the public, the majority have resulted in decreased SAR operations as many solidarians have been afraid to continue.

Boundary making and discursive practices

Clara was an international solidarian from Northern Europe who had lived on the island of Lesvos for three years. She was part of a border-monitoring³ SAR activist team and also engaged in solidarity and teaching in an educational space. She described herself as an activist rather than a volunteer and chose not to collaborate with certain organisations. When I asked what she thought of large organisations, such as UNHCR, she responded:

We are definitely not working on the same thing […]. I think UNHCR is legitimising what is happening; their job is to support the government with logistics […]. They are even officially supporting the EU–Turkey deal. Then we are not working on the same side at all […]. I think they’re part of the problem. I think it would be better if they leave.

Clara used a boundary-making tactic to distance herself from UNHCR, whom she considered to be ‘part of the problem’. I heard solidarians repeatedly criticise how UNHCR was helping the government and that it supported the EU–Turkey Agreement, which were both actions they considered detrimental to the health and well-being of border crossers. Solidarians like Clara denounced the EU–Turkey Agreement as ‘violent’, ‘against human rights’ and ‘illegal’ due to its resulting island restriction, which kept border crossers in overcrowded camps, and on the basis that Turkey had not signed the 1967 Protocol and so was not legally bound to confer rights to refugees. Solidarians furthermore saw the government as enacting increasingly restrictive measures to keep border crossers contained and out of sight, for example by forcing them to stay in extremely overcrowded camps, such as Moria. This conception of UNCHR as part of the problem is in opposition to its supposed role as the world’s pre-eminent humanitarian refugee agency. Through supporting the Greek government, UNHCR, according to many solidarians, had abandoned its apolitical humanitarian ideals in exchange for the power to run operations in the country. I argue that the distancing of solidarians from organisations like UNHCR helps in their war of position against the dominant border culture, as solidarians create a clear boundary between themselves and others who maintain the status quo in the humanitarian arena.

A key reason that solidarians were so critical of government and large organisations was the way that aid was carried out and how border crossers were treated. Most organisations that worked in Moria camp were by and large considered by the international solidarians to be legitimising the ‘inhumane’, ‘unhygienic’ and ‘undignified’ camp. Furthermore, these organisations were considered too slow to respond to border crossers’ changing needs because of the heavy bureaucracy with which they contended. For example, many border crossers often went without blankets and were left freezing in Moria camp over the winter. Some solidarians fundraised to buy new blankets and wash used ones because as Suzanna, a Dutch volunteer, told me with exasperation, ‘Winter comes every year. It’s not a surprise’. I heard solidarians continually lament how UNHCR was unprepared, and that as the world’s major refugee protection agency, the organisation should have the money and technical knowledge to ensure there are enough blankets to go around. This exasperation from solidarians is one example among many that shows how solidarians felt that the current status quo was not working. The hegemony of the state and UNHCR had to be subverted, and through fundraising for blankets, solidarians took another step in their war of position to show that there were other, better ways to manage displacement.

As I have written about elsewhere, solidarians in Athens lamented that Save the Children could not help a majority of the homeless unaccompanied minors they brought to the organisation in the immediate term; solidarians sometimes ended up hosting the minors in their personal apartments so they would not be left on the streets, where they faced multiple risks (Witcher and Fumadó 2021). This case shows that solidarians were able to offer alternative services and aid in ways that were often faster and considered more dignified by border crossers than those offered by government and large aid organisations; this challenges the dominant narrative that border crossers must be managed by the state in camps and state-run housing. In another interview, a solidarian from a SAR group lamented how poorly Frontex – the EU border agency – treated border crossers when rescued at sea: Frontex, ‘leaves [border crossers] for hours freezing on the deck of the boat without giving them blankets or water, while they search among them for human traffickers. They don’t seem to care about people’s health or well-being’. For solidarians, this inhumane treatment was an extreme example of upholding the status quo of a violent regime. I heard solidarians repeatedly lament that the government wanted border crossers to be treated poorly during rescue, and after, in camps, for the purpose of discouraging others from attempting the journey. These two narratives directly contrast how the Greek and EU governments have represented themselves, which has largely been as benevolent saviours.

Those working for large organisations like UNHCR did not always want to be conceptualised as helping to maintain state hegemony. They often viewed themselves as engaged in the war of position, because they were ostensibly helping border crossers, and therefore sometimes considered themselves similar to solidarians, fighting for rights. For example, Kasey, a long-term international UNHCR employee on Lesvos, relayed to me how a volunteer accused her of being ‘on the other side’. She responded: ‘What side is that, aren’t we both here to help refugees?’ The solidarians generally did not agree; they considered themselves to be helping border crossers and UNHCR and government actors to be hindering border crossers’ movements, dignity and rights. On the other hand, some UNHCR employees seemed to be more aligned with the state and created boundaries between themselves and solidarians. For example, a UNHCR representative on Lesvos told me that some solidarians were ‘dangerous’ in their SAR operations because they lacked proper training. In this case, he framed the solidarians as untrained and lacking in expertise, in contrast to government actors who were mandated to patrol the borders and ostensibly had more training.

This section showed how boundary-making methods were used by all actors involved to legitimise their own actions. UNHCR and government actors have put forth a narrative of their own competency in managing border crossers by framing alternative sources of aid and solidarity as illegitimate. According to Ioannidis and colleagues, ‘dominant discourses around migration … produce knowledge believed to be “true” representations of the world and which, in turn, shape individuals’ understandings of migration, of themselves and of relationships with others’ (2021, 3649). Solidarians’ counter-narratives show how the ‘refugee crisis’ was, at least in part, manufactured. The destitution faced by border crossers was an outcome of the border regime, not an a priori condition that the border regime sought to remedy. Solidarians, through both discourse and action, have challenged state discourse around border crosser management and have shown that alternatives to the current border regime are possible.

Discussion and conclusion

Through the literature I discussed and my own ethnographic data, I have shown that considerable tensions existed between international solidarians and state actors as well as between solidarians and aid workers. The international solidarians were discursively delegitimised through being framed as dangerous or untrained. However, as agents with cultural capital, international solidarians engaged in the war of position, framing state actors and large aid organisations as unhumanitarian and harmful to the health and well-being of border crossers. I argued that each group engaged in these boundary-making tactics to distance themselves from those who either maintained or challenged the current border regime. In this discussion I expand upon the solidarians’ war of position to think about how these shifting power dynamics affect conceptions of the border regime and citizenship more broadly. Linking my work to other scholarship, I show how international solidarians continue to challenge cultural hegemony and create new ways to conceptualise borders.

Claims of apolitical neutrality allow humanitarian practices to operate in contested conflict zones and spaces of exclusion, but in reality, according to Kalir and Wissink, humanitarian organisations often uphold the sovereign rhetoric of the states within which they work (2016). The authors call attention to the deportation continuum in that some NGOs no longer question the apparatus of deportation; rather, they work within these oppressive systems (in part due to their funding from the EU) (Kalir and Wissink 2016). Solidarians, by contrast, problematise this as a reification of violent policies, and they aim to work outside, and often contrary to, this continuum. These tactics aim to help border crossers in the immediate term but are simultaneously political acts, as they destabilise dominant forms of offering aid and doing citizenship.

Other scholarship that has explored civil society initiatives within Europe illuminates their alternative or subversive quality. In Germany, for example, Castañeda (2013) has shown how civil society actors engage in ‘acts of citizenship’ in the form of volunteer medical personnel offering medical care to non-citizens, therefore including people in services who would otherwise be excluded. Vandevoordt and Verschraegen (2019) have shown how political activism throughout Europe can be thought of as ‘subversive humanitarianism’ in that it aims to include people into the polity that even humanitarian organisations largely exclude, such as undocumented migrants. And Stock describes international solidarians who help border crossers slated for deportation as enacting ‘a certain kind of civil disobedience’ (2019, 129). Here we see that international solidarians are embedded within the dominant culture but act in ways that subvert cultural hegemony: they aim to include border crossers who would normally be excluded from the states within which they work, while simultaneously excluding various normative structures of these states, such as laws relating to citizenship. I follow this line of reasoning but focus on the role of discourse, and specifically its relation to counter-hegemony.

Foucault describes ‘the statement’ as a ‘function’, with a ‘special mode of existence’ (1972, 98); Graham extends this to argue that statements are invested ‘with particular relations of power’ (2005, 7). Rather than viewing the dominant group as exercising power over subordinate groups in society, I view power as multiple, resistive and multifaceted. Foucault argues that the categorisations and descriptions ‘enable [the object] to appear … to be placed in a field of exteriority’ (1972, 50).⁴ In other words, statements can bring ‘objects of discourse’ into being. Put differently, through statements, people or groups are made into ‘objects of discourse’ and ‘through the [discursive] process of objectification, individuals not only come to occupy spaces in the social hierarchy but, through the continued subjugation, come to know and accept their place [emphasis original]’ (Graham 2005, 19). Graham, following Foucault, maintains that through repeated statements and dispersion, a ‘discursive field’ is created, along with the ‘knowledge and practices through which that object is disciplined’ (2005, 19). In analysing the statements by and about each group – solidarians, state actors and aid workers – we can consider each of them as inhabiting the object position at one time or another. They are each, then, simultaneously objects in hegemonic or counter-hegemonic power relations, interacting with the categorisations and discourse imposed upon them, and also agents of discourse, with the power to transform perceptions and attitudes of the people.

Ioannidis and colleagues consider borders to be ‘performative’ within various power relations; borders are ‘performed in the lack of access to health, housing, education, safety and work; they are constituted … through fortification and militarisation, [and] also through humanitarian reasons and interventions’ (2021, 3645). State and state-sanctioned aid organisations perform the border regime through the creation of overcrowded refugee camps, neglect of border crossers’ dignity and delegitimisation of solidarity – all of which is legitimised through objectifying border crossers and solidarians in hegemonic discourse. Border crossers are objects that are disciplined by the state by being considered only the ‘deserving refugee [or] the undeserving immigrant, both always being other, potentially threatening, and suspicious’ (Holmes and Castañeda 2016, 19). Through these actions and many others, the state has produced a regime that considers borders inevitable and immutable. Yet although borders may appear immutable, Mezzadra and Neilson show that border crossers are ‘differentially included’ into Greece and the EU through cheap undocumented labour (2012). Migrant labour (and exploitation) is normalised, while at the same time migrant ‘illegality’ is fetishised to the point at which the border is considered sacrosanct and its crossing by ‘undesirables’ constitutes a deep transgression (De Genova 2013).

However, because ‘borders are constituted through everyday social interactions’ (Ioannidis, Dimou, and Dadusc 2021, 3645), they can be resisted and contested. This paper has shown how discourse helps to maintain or challenge the status quo of the border regime; through both subversive actions and discourse, the solidarians in this research point out that there is nothing ‘normal’ or inevitable about the current border regime. Their discourse exposes how this border regime has, at least in part, manufactured the ‘crisis’ by keeping border crossers in precarious refugee camps when there are other, more dignified ways to manage displacement. Solidarians have offered alternative ways of interacting with and advocating for border crossers, which I view as acts of counter-hegemony. These discursive tactics form part of the war of position to counter damaging cultural norms and help lay the groundwork for more inclusive societies.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the years-long support, editing and comments from my supervisors Barak Kalir, Rene Gerrets and Kristine Krause. I am additionally thankful for colleagues Carola Tize and Meelan Thondo, and the attentive peer reviewers, who have my deep gratitude.

Disclosure statement

I have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Funding

This work was supported by an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellowship, SGA2016-1346, under FPA2013-0039.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellowship, SGA2016-1346, under FPA2013-0039.

Notes on contributors

Ashley Witcher

Ashley Witcher is a joint Doctoral Candidate at the University of Amsterdam, within the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR) and the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD), the Institute for Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, and the Institute for Global Health, Barcelona. Focussing on the experiences of civil society actors who aid border crossers in Greece, her PhD research explores themes of inclusion and exclusion, categorisation, agency and state sovereignty. Her research contributes to new ways of thinking about civil society action in displacement and explores how interactions between state agents, humanitarian workers and civil society volunteers affect the well-being of border crossers.

Notes

1 Ethical permission was granted by the University of Amsterdam and by the organisations and individuals who participated.

2 The Kurdish people who fled to Pikpa camp described themselves as ‘Kurds’ and the others as ‘Arabs’. I have used this terminology but aim to continually update the terms used, based on how these groups experience the categorisations and how they prefer to be named.

3 Border-monitoring groups patrolled specific points along the island’s east coast to rescue people from boats that made landfall and to monitor and report on the legality of actions of border guards and Frontex. For example, they helped the boats dock safely and offered immediate medical care, bottled water and emergency blankets. These groups also reported illegal pushbacks of boats into Turkish waters, an action that counters international asylum law.

4 Foucault was referring to mental illness categorisations in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).