Refugees in borderlands: Safe places versus securitization in Athens, Greece

ABSTRACT

Following the start of the Syrian civil war, the Mediterranean Sea gradually became a cemetery for refugees. As Europe closed borders and criminalized refugee rescue efforts, some gateway cities took on a new role of refugee protection and accommodation. These “cities of refuge” created safe havens for refugees while resisting Europe’s fear-inducing anti-immigrant regime and rising xenophobia. This article analyzes how Athens became an exemplary city of refuge. My ethnographic fieldwork (2017–2019) shows how collaboration among a left-wing municipality and network of local pro-refugee NGOs and activists effectively challenged right-wing populism, racism, and ultranationalism. Complicating current debates on cities of refuge as welcoming places, I argue that the power of Athens does not come from solving Europe’s so-called refugee crisis, erasing conflict, or undoing rampant fear of the Muslim refugee. To the contrary, the city of refuge is built from the bottom up through high levels of political contestation. I argue that the politics of refuge is manifested through the everyday creation of safe (urban) places sustained by inclusion and juxtaposed against top-down securitized spaces that are upheld by fear and exclusion. Athens is a resilient city of refuge that stands as a bulwark against the EU’s border politics even amid economic crisis.

Introduction

During my field visit, in December 2017, Athens looked quite different from how it used to—before the influx of Syrian refugees to Greece through Turkey. Since the peak of the refugee flow in 2015, the city was transformed both socio-spatially and politically. Alexa, a project manager in a pivotal NGO dealing with refugee issues, pointed to the rapid growth of ethnically concentrated immigrant neighborhoods. Contrary to the predominant association between Muslim refugees and insecurity in Europe, Alexa argued that the diverse migrant neighborhoods had become safer places in Athens. Referring specifically to Victoria Square, Omonia Square, and Kypseli, she refuted the stigma attached to these mixed neighborhoods:

There is some misperception that Athens has become very dangerous [owing to the refugee flow] … . This is what the media, the racist and the intolerant say … . But I think Athens is one of the safest cities … . I think that safety is not just about the lack of physical violence or threat, it has also everything to do the refusal of exclusion. When you take your child to school and see people demonstrating and denying education to him or her, you do not feel safe. … The mixed immigrant neighborhoods of Athens welcome and include refugees instead of making them feel out-of-place, unwanted … .

My conversation with Alexa, a Greek citizen, who was born and has lived in Athens for her whole life, left me thinking about how safety and fear are experienced in the daily life of refugee-receiving frontier cities. Most of my interviewees made similar connections between safety and inclusion. Yet, both the policies of the European Union and the bulk of scholarship on refugees have largely downplayed or dismissed this important link in handling refugee issues. The EU has taken an increasingly anti-immigrant turn by enforcing heightened border security in the aftermath of the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement—a deal designed to prevent refugees from entering Europe at any cost. The agreement prompted my fieldwork on the contested safe havens in highly securitized borderlands, where the security of Europe and safety of humans were juxtaposed against each other. My research explores how safe places for refugees are created and sustained despite the hyper-securitization of borders and the anti-immigrant policies of the EU.

Soon after the civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, neighboring countries were hit almost immediately and intensely by the refugee flow. Bordering Turkey, the world’s largest host of refugees, Greece was also affected. When the flow peaked in 2015, Greece, as the main gateway of Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean, was struggling with a catastrophic economic crisis. After European countries tightened border control in 2016, the Mediterranean Sea became a cemetery of refugees. Today, Western democracies increasingly close their borders and ports to refugees who are overwhelmingly cast as security threats. Yet against this dark global background, there is a new role of accommodation that some frontier cities have taken on. My multi-sited field research traces a growing number of arrival cities at Europe’s southern external borders that provide shelter and safe domicile to refugees and asylum-seekers. Several port cities—Palermo, Barcelona, and more recently Marseille—have joined Athens in opening their doors and protecting refugees at the expense of confronting the anti-immigrant policies of the EU.¹ My ethnography reveals how these gateway cities have become both new resources for refugees and also the most hands-on and effective actors of resistance against right-wing populist regimes and ultra-nationalist forces. Yes, the struggle in these cities is not just with security regimes, but also with local anti-immigrant forces, who are fearful of and/or hostile to refugees.

Cities with openness to migrants, welcoming attitudes and pro-immigrant practices and policies have been profiled as “cities of refuge” or (interchangeably) “sanctuary cities.”² Although such efforts indeed “humanize what it means to be a city,” cities of refuge have received insufficient international and scholarly attention (Bauder, 2017; Delgado, 2018, p. 14). Importantly, my findings from 3 years of fieldwork in various borderlands of the eastern and central Mediterranean contradict the public image of sanctuary cities as peaceful, conflict-free places. In fact, I define the city of refuge as an urban space of high political contestation. In cities of refuge, the pro-refugee actors cooperate in their political struggle against anti-immigrant forces and regimes by generating inclusive safe places for refugees and asylum-seekers. Accordingly, I use the term city of refuge to analyze the politicized nature of safe havens for, and inclusion of, refugees. Against the backdrop of the apolitical “neutrality” principle for dealing with refugee issues that is central to international organizations, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), my research reveals that refugee protection and accommodation are enmeshed with political conflict at multiple levels—local, national, regional and international. Hence, there is no smooth accommodation to be romanticized in the city of refuge (see also, Bagelman, 2016; Ridgley, 2008), especially when the EU and member states close their doors to forced displacement.

Clearly, not every port city in the securitized border zones takes on this politically loaded commitment at the cost of standing up to the respective nation-state and the EU. What makes Athens the perfect laboratory to study the success of cities of refuge? Athens showcases an intense political fight as well as the triumph against the (recently abolished) neo-fascist party Golden Dawn. My findings show that the key to Athens’ achievements in refugee politics was its strong alliances. Athens owed its success to the close engagement and cooperation between the municipality’s strong center-left leadership and a large number of NGOs engraved within the city’s progressive activist tradition. The leftist urban legacy that manifested through this cooperation empowered Athens to become a bulwark against seemingly invincible external borders of Europe.

Importantly, the bulk of refugee-related efforts at the local, urban level in Athens has primarily been focused on reception, accommodation, and safety rather than integration. This explains why the emphasis of my research is not migration and integration. Due to austerity measures and large-scale (18%) unemployment in Greece, permanent settlement and integration of the vast majority of refugees would be difficult, if not impossible. Hence, in Athens, the largest city of Greece with more than 3 million inhabitants, the refugee population is generally transitory. The migrants often pass through Greece with the hope and intention of settling in northwestern Europe. Different from migration research that focuses on integration and long-term policies of acclimatizing and socializing immigrants (e.g., Bloemraad, 2006; De Graauw, 2016; Hinze, 2013), inclusion in this work refers to the socio-spatial practice of generating provisional and temporal safe places.

Still, the curious case of Athens begs further questions: How was it possible for Athens to generate safe places for refugees within a country that maintained some of the world’s most unsafe and inhumane refugee camps at the Greece-Turkey sea border (the Greek islands)?³ Why and how was Athens able to rise to the challenge of providing sanctuaries to refugees at a time when rescue operations were banned and criminalized by EU member states, and neo-Nazis violently attacked migrants? The puzzle emanates from the contrast between the EU’s highly securitized externalized deadly borders to Turkey and the safe spaces in Athens (as an exemplary city of refuge). The disparate lived experiences of fear and safety in such close proximity and in the same geography presents a curious situation, and demonstrates that geography is not destiny.

This article makes four major contributions. First, it demonstrates and analyzes the ways in which a frontier city resists, challenges, and sometimes subverts the prevailing anti-immigrant security regime of Europe. Second, it reveals how safe spaces and urban practices of inclusion are generated by the interlinked municipal and NGO efforts across the city. Along these lines, my work contributes to the recent, albeit scant, literature on cities of refuge (Bauder, 2017; Collingwood & O’Brien, 2019; Delgado, 2018; Mancina, 2013; McDaniel et al., 2019; Ridgley, 2008) by revealing and theorizing their highly politicized and contested nature. Complicating the debates on cities of refuge, I argue that the power of the city of refuge does not come from reducing conflict or ending global political crisis, but from its ability to produce new pro-refugee alliances out of strong political contestation. Third, by spatializing fear and safety in the city (see especially, Boyce, 2018; Glück & Low, 2017; Monroe, 2016), I empirically and conceptually distinguish safe places sustained by inclusion and mixing from securitized spaces sustained by fear, exclusion, and discrimination. Finally, my ethnographic fieldwork in Victoria, an immigrant neighborhood in the city center of Athens, provides in-depth analysis of how a city of refuge is built from the bottom up. This bottom-up process, I claim, is a strikingly effective force to counter current top-down securitization of borders and migration.

Methodology

This article is part of a larger multi-sited ethnography that traces cities of refuge on the Mediterranean refugee route from the Greece-Turkey sea border (Greek islands) and Athens to the Italy-Libya sea border (Lampedusa) and Palermo in Sicily. Unlike single-sited ethnographies, multi-sited fieldwork helps deepen the understanding of and theory about global processes as it reveals not only connections and similarities but also discontinuities between different urban sites, cities, countries and regions.⁴

Toward this end, my multi-sited fieldwork in Athens did not treat all sites with “a uniform set of fieldwork practices” (Marcus, 1998, p. 84). Instead, it consisted of mixed qualitative methods that combined semi-structured and ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and focus group discussions. I conducted 35 interviews with stakeholders, NGO representatives, municipal officials, vice mayors, and urban activists.⁵ Nineteen were semi-structured and 16 were ethnographic.⁶ I also conducted participant observation in everyday spaces across the city where migrants gathered, such as shelters, cultural centers, municipal offices, streets, squares, and migrant neighborhoods (where refugees stay temporarily). These places became the loci of my field research, although I paid special attention to Victoria and Exharchia as mixed neighborhoods of diversity-seekers. I participated in meetings of activists and hung out with them in their everyday lives in Exharchia. As my findings revealed the prominence of Victoria Square as a mixed, safe, and inclusive place, I spent much of my time in and around this square, where a substantial amount of refugee activism and NGO work takes place. Eventually, my observations went beyond Athens to four Greek islands at the border and to interactions with Greek representatives at the UN quarters in Geneva and the Greek General Consulate in Boston.

My 19 semi-structured interviewees included two former vice mayors of Athens: Dr. Maria Stratigaki (Vice Mayor of Social Solidarity, Welfare and Equality) and Mr. Lefteris Papagiannakis (Vice Mayor of Migrants, Refugee and Municipal Decentralization). The former mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis, appointed Mr. Papagiannakis in March 2016 when the EU-Turkey deal closed Europe’s borders to refugees. The mayor’s goal was to delegate and concentrate management of the crisis in a newly created municipal department. I also talked to the staff members in this new unit, including Dr. Dionysia Lambiri, the project coordinator of Migration and Refugee Coordination Center and Observatory (MRCC&O).⁷ I paid special attention to the MRCC&O project that brought many disconnected but like-minded NGOs together with the strategic goal of facilitating communication and cooperation. The connection I made with Vice Mayor Papagiannakis and Dr. Lambiri during my first round of fieldwork continued throughout my follow-up visits since 2017. In February 2020, I also met the new mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, when he visited Boston to give a talk at his alma mater, Harvard University. After his talk, we chatted briefly and informally about pressing issues in the Athens municipality and changes initiated in refugee politics.

Theorizing the city of refuge: (Re)defining fear, safety, and security

The power of daily local experiences in shaping refugee politics struck me more than ever during a reception at the Greek embassy in Boston in September 2019. The founder and CEO of one of the largest NGOs offering shelter to unaccompanied minors in Athens told us a remarkable story of a local anti-immigrant resident:

Intimidated and frustrated by the fear of terrorists, an Athenian woman with right-wing ultra-nationalist political allegiance stormed to our center and snapped at us about why we protect the children of ISIS in our shelters. It took my staff a few days to calm down her anxiety about security. Shortly after, we let her interact with the minors in these safe environments … Soon, she became one of our reliable benefactors.

The story confirmed a key finding of my field research: that fear was the bread and butter of anti-refugee politics in cities, and that it was fought best and subverted experientially by urban daily practices. On the one hand, Athenians, similar to residents of any other gateway city of Europe, were bombarded by news and propaganda outlets that spread fear of terror posed by Muslim refugees. On the other, refugees learned upon arrival that the uncertainties inherent to their dangerous and violent journey through Turkey to Greece would not end until asylum was granted and settlement was made to a final destination. Unlike the fear propagated for the masses in Athens, refugees’ fear was formally demarcated by definition: according to Article 1 of the 1951 (Geneva) Refugee Convention (as amended by the 1967 Protocol) a refugee is “a person, who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” is unable to reside or seek protection in his/her home country of origin. Yet, the fear, whether construed by propaganda or felt and experienced in actual urban life, has not received sufficient scholarly attention in refugee and asylum studies.

Political conditions: Securitization of migration and the politics of fear

While the so-called refugee crisis may seem to be fueled by emotion, mainly fear of the Other, it is primarily political, resulting from the politicization of fear. Unlike emotions, which are often triggered by impulse, the politicization of fear is a strategy, a “conservative choice” (Body-Gendrot, 2012, p. 10). Shaped by political standing, this choice is made primarily by contemporary right-wing populist and ultra-nationalist forces and regimes that pioneer securitization at a global scale. Different from the term security (which was traditionally understood as stability, order, predictability, and safety), securitization refers to the process in which the state, institutions, discourses, performances, and power relations enframe, circulate, and disrupt the politics of security by constructing an object of threat (see for example, Ackleson, 2005; Bialasiewicz et al., 2007). Accordingly, the securitization of migration is the sum of political acts, performances, discourses, policies, and power relations that enable the proliferation of exceptional practices of emergency. Crisis management is the key strategy that targets refugees and asylum seekers as major threats to security (Bigo, 2001; Bigo & Guild, 2005; Guild, 2009; Mountz & Hiemstra, 2014).

Securitization generates insecurity as a condition of mundane daily life for communities that are targeted by security practices (Martin, 2015). This explains an irony of our time: that we feel less safe and more fearful in a world that is increasingly securitized. “Fortress-like, that is, walled, gated and guarded communities encode fear—materially, not just metaphorically—producing a literal landscape of fear” (Low, 1997, p. 53). Not only do highly securitized spaces such as the borderlines of “Fortress Europe” generate fear, but the persistence of security regimes also depends on the fear of the “undesirable “or “dangerous” others (Besteman & Gusterson, 2010; Goldstein, 2010; Low, 1997, 2001, 2003).

Although the history of harsh treatment and border brutality against refugees and immigrants is long and predated September 11, 2001 (Goldstein, 2010, p. 490),⁸ the post-9/11 “War on Terror” put a special stamp on the securitization of Muslim immigrants and refugees allegedly as potential criminals and/or terrorists (Cesari, 2010; Dikeç, 2007; Sajed, 2012, pp. 23–26). In this sense, 9/11 is often considered to be a “historical turning point in defining a new era of securitization” as it “enabled an unprecedented expansion of state, private, and supranational security practices, along with an amplification of the insecurities that accompany them” (Martin, 2015, pp. 100–101). Borderlands—both actual physical borders and the surrounding geography—are largely impacted by the securitization of migration.

Different from the concept of security that often relies on the national capacity to guard against a feared other (Monroe, 2016, pp. 86–87), I use safety as a framing concept to promote not only a lack of physical violence, danger, and harm toward refugees but also the viability of accommodation and inclusion of these vulnerable populations. Accordingly, I explore how safety is perceived and lived as a daily experience and how actors and groups generate safe places. My approach bridges the themes of “life as politics” coined by Asef Bayat (2009) and “street-level bureaucracy” by Lipsky (1980; see also Ellerman, 2006) to analyze cooperation between ordinary actors (such as NGO service providers and activists) and street-level bureaucrats (such as municipal officials, mayors, vice mayors) in crafting safe places in Athens. Their daily collaborative efforts succeed against a backdrop of multi-scalar security performances and policies (by FRONTEX, coastal guards, central intelligence, state officials and so on).

There are multiple challenges to studying refugee issues from a security/safety perspective. This article builds upon two bodies of literature that have largely talked past each other, and aims to bring them into conversation. The first is the localization of the politics of migration, which helps me to transport refugee politics from nation-state to the level of urban daily life. Crossing the disciplinary lines of urban sociology, urban anthropology and urban geography, this body of research enables me to argue about the rising importance of local receptivity and inclusion of migrants (Mullenkopf & Pastor, 2016; Varsanyi, 2010). In this way, my research parts ways from a rich literature on migration that emphasizes integration practices and policies under the jurisdiction of nation-states in destination countries. As temporary inclusion and protection from discrimination and/or deportation take place in mundane city life, my work reveals, safe places in Athens are just as politicized as securitized border zones. The second literature I engage is the spatial politics of security and securitization. Building upon urban studies research on the spatiality of (in)security (Glück & Low, 2017; Low, 1997; Masco, 2014; Monroe, 2016), I narrow down my focus to urban refugee politics, as the majority of refugees find shelter in cities (Crepeau et al., 2006; Koizumi & Hoffstaedter, 2018). This body of interdisciplinary scholarship enables me to downscale debates on (inter)national security to the local production of “securitized” versus “safe” places in daily life.

Scholars of critical security studies have argued that securitization produces its own destruction. Securitization leads to its own failure and decay by producing the antidotes to preemptive (real or imagined) fear (e.g., Amar, 2013). Concretely speaking, Athens is a perfect laboratory to examine how cities of refuge rise to counteract or play a remedial role against security regimes. Backed by sanctuary movements, cities of refuge like Athens contribute greatly to resistance against anti-immigrant politics and policies. Sadly, the primacy of cities of refuge in fighting the politics of fear and generating safe havens has been largely obscured by the disconnect between security studies and urban studies literatures (see for exceptions Glück, 2015, 2017; Glück & Low, 2017; Monroe, 2016)

While the use of ethnographic methods in security studies is also still marginal (see for exceptions, Feldman, 2012; Glück & Low, 2017; Monroe, 2016), these methods enable me to study the bottom-up processes of building a city of refuge that counter the top-down management of security, borders, and migration. As my findings will show, practices of protection and accommodation of refugees differ depending on geography as well as place (including areas within the city itself). Space matters tremendously in determining the city’s and nation’s capacity to handle political crisis about refugee issues.

Rising prominence of cities and local governance in multi-scalar refugee politics

According to UNHCR, today more than 60% of the more than 26 million refugees reside in urban areas. Yet, the city as a shelter for urban refugees remains remarkably unnoticed and understudied (cf. Koizumi & Hoffstaedter, 2018). Why? As public policies and immigration laws have traditionally been the jurisdiction of the nation-state, individual states have had decision-making authority over the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention despite the supranational EU policies. Although the Geneva convention remains the internationally accepted key legal document to define who is a refugee and what constitutes a refugee’s rights, nation-states apply different criteria and standards when determining refugee status and treating those defined as refugees.⁹ The unlimited powers of nation-states over immigration and refugee matters not only surpass non-binding international agreements,¹⁰ but they also overshadow the central role that cities of refuge play in dealing with the crisis. Paradoxically, however, court rulings over refugee-related conflicts have been inconsistent even within the same country (Betts & Collier, 2017, p. 5), and put the apparently indisputable authority of national security regimes into question.

Cities of refuge encounter major challenges owing to the disconnect between decision-making on international/national scales and local-scale urban practices. This scalar tension is intensified by a communication problem between the main international organizations responsible for handling refugee issues, particularly the UNHCR, and the respective municipalities that host large numbers of refugees.¹¹ The fact that most municipalities receive EU or UNHCR funds directly from nation-states further complicates this challenge.

Despite wide-ranging challenges, cities and municipalities are becoming central actors in dealing with migration and refugee issues (Bauder, 2017; Collingwood & O’Brien, 2019; Delgado, 2018; Lippert & Rehaag, 2013; Mancina, 2013; McDaniel et al., 2019; Ramakrishnan & Wong, 2010; Ridgley, 2008, 2013). Many studies point to a recent explosion of municipal involvement in producing local immigration laws and practices (Mullenkopf & Pastor, 2016; Steil & Vasi, 2014; Varsanyi, 2010). “[L]ocal jurisdictions play a central and crucial role in determining how reforms get implemented and what it will mean for the daily lives of immigrants and their neighbors” (Mullenkopf & Pastor, 2016, p. 3).¹²

As we witness rising involvement of an increasing number of cities and municipalities in migration and refugee matters all over the world (Delgado, 2018, p. 34), it is important to ask why certain cities in the same country engage in friendly practices of reception and immigrant activism—some even pass municipal sanctuary ordinances—while others do not. Among competing explanations such as geopolitical, economic, and demographic conditions, local political partisanship has recently come to the forefront of the debate as a major factor in shaping the city’s political culture, the legacy of local reception, and societal involvement (Ramakrishnan & Wong, 2010; Steil & Vasi, 2014). In analyzing local partisanship, Steil and Vasi draw attention to the proportion of people who vote for parties on the left and right. Despite the ongoing clash between leftist and right-wing social movements, ultra-nationalist support for Golden Dawn remained marginal (8% of the votes) in the face of strong local leftist activism in Athens. When Turkey’s President Erdoǧan, announced opening the Turkey-Greek border upon conflict with Europe and releasing refugees to enter Europe in late February 2019,¹³ hundreds of refugees were refused by the Greek authorities and left to their destinies at the border. NGOs and rescue activists documented how refugees were violently attacked by anonymous groups in the Aegean Sea. Athens did not remain silent to the human miseries caused by border security. Thousands of Athenians marched to protest the border politics between Greece and Turkey that turned refugees into pawns of power politics.

Another key dynamic that differentiates the city of refuge from other cities is municipal governance and involvement in refugee politics. While the governments and the EU maintain official authority to control borders and make entry and resettlement decisions, “it falls to local and regional jurisdictions to frame the living experience” of refugees and locals (Mullenkopf & Pastor, 2016, p. 2). It is important to note that the main blows to the ascendency of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Europe came from the local electoral victories of strong mayors in Europe’s major cities. Budapest in October 2019, after Istanbul in June 2019, witnessed the first big defeats of the long-term illiberal populist rule by Orbán and Erdoğan (Turam, 2019).¹⁴ Along these lines, Palermo’s Mayor Orlando and his team observed to me how the municipality was pro-actively opposing, winning court cases against, and subverting the anti-immigrant policies of Italy’s ultra-nationalist former interior minister, Matteo Salvini. Under the pro-refugee leadership of the municipality, Palermo became “a center of resistance” with open doors to migrants and refugees in a country that closed borders and ports to migrants.¹⁵

Ironically, however, in sharp contrast to the heated political and academic debates over sanctuary cities in the United States,¹⁶ none of my interviewees in Athens, except for Vice Mayor Papagiannakis knew or had heard about the terms city of refuge or sanctuary city. Evi, who worked for an NGO that was responsible for the well-being and housing of refugees, was puzzled by the terminology. When I offered a definition and examples, Evi snapped:

All of the sanctuary cities in the U.S. are very far away from the coast of Turkey, aren’t they? Moreover, they are not used by the EU like Athens is used as a gatekeeper of European borders … It must be easier to welcome refugees, when they do not arrive at your doorsteps on rubber boats in miserable conditions … Our response in Athens does not qualify as welcoming. It is simply about coping ... and survival.

Geopolitics matter tremendously. Evi’s critical reaction speaks to the difficulties inherent to living at one of Europe’s most securitized border zones to the Middle East.

Precarious geopolitics: Distrust in the state and trust in strong municipality

When geopolitics, austerity, and history rub each other in specific ways, this blend of conditions produces complicated outcomes. Greece’s borders with Turkey under the arbitrary rule of President Erdoǧan place the arrival city of Greece in a dramatically precarious position than the destination cities in northwestern Europe. Athens finds itself squeezed between the EU and Turkey, both of which have treated refugee issues as pawns of negotiations in power politics.

Then, which geopolitical factors and socio-political and economic conditions underlie Athens’s political culture and make urbanity conducive to sheltering and accomodatiing refugees? First, my analysis situates the city of refuge into the larger context of Islamophobia (or racializiation of Muslims) in Europe, which was globally triggered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and further intensified with the Syrian civil war. Athens, similar to other cities of refuge in the Mediterranean, accommodates refugees from a large number of Muslim majority states including Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Morocco, Algeria, and Bangladesh. As fear of terrorists and the racialized War on Terror become channeled toward the “Muslim refugee” by security regimes of Europe and the United States (Boyce, 2018; Sajed, 2012), the geopolitics of refugee flow at maritime borders in the Mediterranean require a coherent socio-spatial framework of analysis.

Second, my research uses the period from 2016 to 2019 in Athens as a laboratory to explore a dilemma: How did a city cope with the refugee flow despite the severe financial crisis since 2012, which emboldened ultra-nationalist forces? Indeed, the pro-refugee politics in Athens ran parallel to the city’s adamant fight with the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party and its call for “clean ethnic states.”¹⁷ Prevalent Islamophobia, rising ultra-nationalism, and debilitating austerity measures may seem to be counter-intuitive to the main argument of this study. Yet, these conditions stimulated and often fueled the strong resistance and protest in Athens against EU’s twin securitization policies: securitization of borders and migration.

Third, my work reveals the primacy of city politics as its achievements persist above party politics. While the 2016–2019 period in Athens was primarily defined by SYRIZA’s left-wing political rule both in the municipality and the nation-state, left-wing government alone cannot explain the successful refugee work in the city. Even after the right-wing New Democracy won the 2019 elections at both the national and municipal levels and enforced several new anti-immigrant policies,¹⁸ the left-leaning political legacy in Athens persisted and pro-refugee politics persevered. On October 7, 2020, when the Greek court ruled that Golden Dawn was a criminal organization, thousands of Athenians poured onto the streets to enthusiastically celebrate “their” landmark defeat of fascism. Even under the right-wing municipality, Athenians rejoiced this victory as a form of justice that held members of the neo-Nazi party and the parliament accountable and punished them for their aggressive and violent anti-immigrant acts.¹⁹

“Migration cannot be stopped by obstructions,” Vice Mayor Papagiannakis told me. “People on the move will always find ways to pass through them.” While migration is as old as human history (Betts & Collier, 2017; Isin, 2018; Kasaba, 2009), the Eastern Mediterranean has for centuries been accustomed to continual human mobility and forced migration.²⁰ But before the arrival of ethnically Greek refugees from Turkey in the aftermath of the Greek-Turkish war in 1922, immigration to Greece was relatively rare and unsystematic until the 1980s. The flows intensified after 1991 with the arrival of migrants from former communist countries and refugees escaping the wars in the Middle East and in Africa. However, the refugee influx from Syria in 2015 was unprecedented and had a massive impact in reshaping the landscape of Athens, the country’s primary refugee destination. The current EU border policy lets migrants on boats die unless they were sent back to the third countries, Turkey in the case of Greece (and Libya in the case of Italy). Unlike most EU member states and major destination cities of Europe, Athens carried the bulk of the burden of the EU’s externalized borders in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In addition to economic crisis and high levels of unemployment, two major international agreements were foremost impediments for Greece. First, the EU’s flawed Dublin agreement required that refugees apply for asylum in the first EU member state they enter. This contingency put a large share of the refuge burden on the South, especially Greece, Italy, and Spain, even though most migrants aim to settle in the more prosperous North. Second, Greece was affected by the Turkey-EU agreement signed in March 2016, according to which, all refugees rejected asylum in Greece could be returned to Turkey as a “safe country.”

Even though migration and refugee issues fall clearly under the jurisdiction of the nation-state, the former mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis, decided that “Athens itself needed to respond to the crisis” (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Papachristou, 2018, p. 127). Vice Mayor Papagiannakis explained in my interview that his appointment was abrupt and his position oddly preceded the formation of the department of migration. A new and unique government position in the entire country—Vice Mayor of Migrants, Refugee and Municipal Decentralization—was created in Athens municipality in 2016 during the leadership of Prime Minister Tsipras of SYRIZA.

Lefteris came to this position with substantial experience in international law and with expertise on Muslim migrants. I met him when he was working around the clock to handle refugee-related emergencies. The founder of one of Athens’s NGOs described him as “a man who does not sleep much,” as Lefteris was readily available and responsive whenever the NGOs reached out to him in crisis situations. Similarly, a Greek diplomat observed to me, “He is not one of those soft, fancy leftists we have here in Greece. Lefteris is the real deal.”

Holding a law degree and a post-graduate degree in European Law from France and having past experience working in the European Parliament in Brussels, Lefteris told me in an interview that the EU-Turkey deal was a blunt violation of human rights. While Lefteris highlighted the widely shared public opinion in Greece, by emphasizing how Turkey took advantage of the refugee situation to pressure Europe, several NGO representatives also expressed to me their critical stances about EU’s acts. Gina, an NGO representative said, “The EU sold refugees to Turkey. We should not have paid anyone to get rid of our problem, especially to President Erdoǧan.” In 2019, when Erdoğan openly threatened Europe to release refugees to leverage his power in the region, the flow of refugees from Turkey to the Greek islands peaked again.²¹

“For each Syrian returned to Turkey [from the Greek islands], Europe promised to accept another Syrian” hosted by Turkey.²² Although very few refugees were returned to Turkey in the past, there was an explicit incongruity in the EU-Turkey deal. While the agreement aimed to reduce and eventually stop the refugee flow, this particular arrangement could only be realized as long as the flow between Turkey and Greece continued. This predicament put Athens and the islands on a vicious cycle. Lefteris concretized this paradoxical routine to me: “When we move 128 refugees from the islands to Athens because they were very vulnerable cases, we receive 128 refugees crossed the Aegean Sea on the same day.” As Lefteris went over the conflictual nature of relations between Turkey and Greece,²³ he concluded: “If you give the key to your main problem to Turkey, you can no longer make independent decisions about your internal affairs.”

With no exception, my interviews were inundated with conversations about the top-down management of borders and migration. Most of my respondents expressed degrees of frustration with the EU, particularly the EU’s externalization of borders to Turkey. I probed Athenians about their trust in the Greek state and the EU in dealing with and solving refugee issues. All of my interviewees stated openly that they trust neither their own central state nor the (then center-left) government owing to corruption, economic crisis, unaccountability, incompetence, lack of good leadership, and weak institutions. The majority of people I talked to expressed levels of distrust in the EU in terms of the its dismissive attitudes or disregard for Greece. Only a few respondents (including Vice Mayor Papagiannakis) admitted the EU is the key to tackling the refugee problem.

Although there have been discussions about making other EU member countries responsible for opening their borders to refugees,²⁴ the onus remains so far on the port cities, particularly Athens and Palermo located in the borderlands with Turkey and Libya, and are thereby subjected to the EU’s hypersecuritization. A press release by the Council of the European Union on November 8, 2019, outlined its adoption of a revised regulation of border security:

The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX) is being strengthened in terms of staff and technical equipment. It is also being given a broader mandate to support member states’ activities, especially on border control, return and cooperation with third countries. The new regulation will incorporate the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) into the European Border and Coast Guard framework, to improve its functioning.²⁵

As the “borders of Europe are stretching far beyond its territory,” and as the EU governs its security strategies from a distance on the soil of third countries (Ferreira, 2019, p. 167), the geopolitical importance of cities of refuge at Europe’s frontiers is exponentially increasing to save human lives and defend human rights.

Spatiality of safety: The contested Victoria Square and beyond

At the heart of the politics of fear and safety in Athens lies the story of a place called Victoria Square. Over the last couple of decades, this neighborhood became a hub for migrants and refugees, their shops, and their informal networks, interactions, and exchanges. In time, Victoria transformed into a multi-faceted sanctuary for refugees in its own right. In every visit I paid to Athens, I spent most of my time in Victoria interacting with diverse immigrant populations and meeting with friends and interlocutors in the refugee sector.

Victoria Square transformed gradually from an affluent downtown neighborhood into an ethnically mixed, transitional, immigrant neighborhood. As large migrant groups from the Philippines in the late 1980s, Albania in 1991, and Eastern Europeans after the fall of the Berlin Wall settled in Victoria, upper-middle class Greeks began moving out of the downtown neighborhood to new suburban housing. Immigrants moved into the vacated buildings and rented relatively cheap apartments in the city center, allowing them to form ethnically concentrated urban pockets.

Eleni, who lived and worked in Victoria for many decades witnessed this slow but steady transformation. Over coffee, she discussed with me how Golden Dawn formed its strongholds in Victoria in order to spread and capitalize on fear: “The fear justified their presence … as saviors. Using their populist strategies, for example, they escorted elderly ladies to the ATM, you know, to ‘protect’ them from potential migrant thieves.” Similarly, Cynthia, a young activist who works for a shelter of unaccompanied refugee children located close to Victoria, told me how Golden Dawn took advantage of the economic crisis by manipulating economic frustration and spreading fear of refugees.

Mimi, another experienced service provider I met in Victoria, worked for an organization focused on pre- and postnatal care for refugee women. When they opened their center in a spacious first-floor apartment in Victoria Square in 2016, neighbors were terrified. The center was next door to another UNICEF-funded NGO, crowding the entire block with refugees waiting in lines for services. Mimi remembers locals throwing water at refugees in order to make them go away. Among many services, the center offers appointments with midwives to some 300 women per month. According to Mimi, physical proximity on that street and face-to-face interaction ended up working as an antidote against preestablished stereotypes and fear of the stranger. “When locals see a woman’s water break with three other little children crying at her skirts, and she was at their doorsteps, they forget about their fear and run to help.”

Victoria Square was a microcosm of the intermittent tensions between a wide range of leftist activists and locals and a much smaller group of anti-immigrant ultra-nationalists who paid random visits to the neighborhood. Yet the fear-invoking efforts of the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, went beyond Victoria. In fact, they culminated in the murder of an anti-fascist rap singer named Pavlos Fyssas on September 18, 2013. The murderer, a supporter of Golden Dawn, was associated with party leadership.²⁶ Fyssas’s murder was followed by communists’ attacks on Golden Dawn’s headquarters, another instance of the ongoing clash between right- and left-wing residents of Athens. Eventually, this murder and the following court case and trial brought to surface the criminal acts of the party members, who were convicted in 2020.

The persistence of tension between the political left and right on Athens’s streets presents an important case of what Steil and Vasi (2014) refer to as the “new immigrant contestation.” Former research established that successful protests might either trigger further demonstrations by the same movement or eventually instigate the mobilization of a countermovement (Meyer & Staggenborg, 1996). But few studies went beyond mainly temporal triggers to explain the spatial aspects of the interplay between movements and countermovements. Taking spatiality into account, Steil and Vasi examined “the impact of movement protests not only on the intended outcome but also on the social construction of threat by a countermovement in nearby locations” (Steil & Vasi, 2014, p. 1107; italics are mine).

Victoria Square was the perfect laboratory to capture and analyze the salience of spatial politics in two major ways. First, it was the hub of ongoing conflict between left- and right-wing local activism in urban life. Even while the trial of Fyssas’s murder was going on, the ultra-nationalists continued mobilizing locals and maintaining their hold in Victoria on the basis of a solid 8% of electoral support for their party. Second, Victoria Square was the place where the politics of fear met with the resilience and agency of safe places that drew refugees together and provided a strong sense and experience of socio-spatial inclusion.

Despite high levels of contestation in urban space, most refugees prefer to live in cities rather than refugee camps. To understand this tendency, it is crucial to consider that the refugee camp and city of refuge are often juxtaposed along the continuum of safety to violence. The city of refuge is perceived as a “place-based” effort of inclusion and protection (Bagelman, 2013), whereas the refugee camp is regarded as a sterile, isolating, and hostile place that violates human rights and strips people of their identities and personal histories (Diken, 2010). Nevertheless, research shows that major safety threats and risks exist in both places; they simply manifest differently.

Interviews conducted in cities of refuge in South Wales show that undocumented people frequently avoid reporting crimes that have happened to them, including attacks and rapes (Hintjens & Puori, 2014). Similarly, all of my respondents agreed that it would be impossible to assure safety to refugees whether a city qualifies as a refuge/sanctuary and pro-immigrant or not. The issue then becomes whether urban sanctuary practices and initiatives are at all helpful for ensuring the safety and inclusion of refugees. In which ways are safe places created and sustained in cities of refuge that are most often highly contested between leftist human-rights activists and anti-immigrant right-wing populists and ultra-nationalists?

While it is difficult for activists, researchers, and service-providing NGOs to reach out to refugees at camps, it is even more difficult for them to have direct access to refugees’ private lives once they move into their own dwellings in the city. Facing different challenges to identify domestic (and other forms of) violence and to ensure refugees’ safety, local service providers invent spatially creative and practical solutions.

Nadina, the founder of the Melissa Foundation, an NGO of immigrant and refugee women, explained how a place-based shift in the strategy of the foundation made an important difference. Instead of begging for and negotiating access to camps or housing at the mercy of the officials, Nadina and her team decided to attract and bring refugee women to the cozy welcoming foundation building in Victoria Square. Nadina told me about a significant learning moment for the organization:

On International Women’s Day (March 2016), we were invited to participate in an event that was taking place at one of the camps. The mayor was there, the UNHCR, the Red Cross … all the big organizations, and the state. There was good intention but not enough dedication to do it properly because they forgot to install a sound system, and people could not hear anything. So, unfortunately, it was like a show a little bit. We and the refugee women politely sat through the speeches … And one of our activists, an African woman, was at the same panel. At the end of the speeches, three refugee women went up to our African activists and reported an instance of gender-based violence.

Although it was difficult for NGOs and activists to enter the camps, it was easier for refugees to leave the camps to reach service providers. This seemingly simple awareness led to useful strategy and improved refugee women’s quality of life and experience of safety. It also made entry and inclusion possible by extending their safety networks. As they met other migrant women from various ethnic and racial groups and countries, they socialized and mingled in the square.

Victoria Square humanizes refugees’ lives by enabling them to get out of inhumane conditions in the camps and be accepted in the public sphere. In crowded parts of cities where daily life flows at a relatively high pace, refugees often feel out of place when “doing nothing,” being still or just people watching. The square as a welcoming migrant venue disrupts the stigma of idleness and the embarrassment of exclusion for refugees who do not have work permits or disposable income. Still, many refugees invented daily routines in the square. I often observed small groups of migrants sitting, talking, and looking around in a leisurely and relaxed manner. The square was socio-spatial facilitator for refugees to build new bonds and experiment safely with their newly found communal ties outside of the tormenting camp life.

Nadina proudly said that, “no logo can build, and no international funding can accomplish the trust” established gradually between immigrant women who had similar experiences. As Melissa Foundation campaigns to entice refugee women to the center soon became well-known across the city, refugee women started coming by word of mouth with many ideas and goals of their own.

The center aims at women’s empowerment and liberation. It offers a range of programs in literacy, art and creativity, advocacy, psychosocial counseling, information and networking, capacity-building, and individual and community care. Practical programs like Greek language classes appear to be the “pull factor!” to get the women out of the camps to this safe place. But what exactly makes these vulnerable refugees feel safer at Melissa? How, if ever, were they able to experience safety, when they were surrounded by fear, exclusion, and insecurity during their long journeys and while at the camps? In which ways was space itself capable of transforming risky and dismal experiences into safe, comforting, and sometimes even cheerful ones?

Though lost in my own theorizing, I couldn’t stop staring at the walls. They were covered with migrant women’s art, a feminist tableau that praised women’s agency and encouraged their empowerment. Every room, including Nadina’s office, was full of art by immigrant women that displayed their skill, potential, and power. A nicely organized, colorfully decorated playroom welcomed the children of migrant women by design. Kids played while their mothers participated in programs and projects. Melissa even had a small, charming backyard with a large table and chairs to hang out, mingle, relax, and socialize in the fresh air.

In the middle of my long conversation with Nadina, three migrant women from the Philippines who worked for the foundation came by to update her about their activities for the day. They were taking food they cooked to a squat, the City Plaza Hotel, inhabited by refugees. As Nadina praised their dishes, she told me that good food was one of the things that glued migrant women together. Good food, she emphasized, was a social basis for solidarity. In Athens, Melissa became famous for the flavors and aromas wafting from its kitchen run solely by immigrant women. The center was known especially for freshly baked pastries from different culinary traditions. Whether it was through food, art, friendship, or much needed trust bonds, this renovated home with modern furniture and elegant bathrooms provided the feeling of a collectively owned sanctuary co-created by immigrant and refugee women from around the world.

Although Athens does not officially claim sanctuary status in the way that the city councils of American cities vote for it in the United States, my interviews and connections with stakeholders and activists revealed that Athens is indeed a city of refuge that spearheads the protection and inclusion of refugees. Among many remarkable examples, Nadina told me about how Melissa helped the city become agentic by generating resistance from the ground up against anti-immigrant sentiment and the fear of the refugee:

In eight municipalities around Athens, we launched a project with 45,000 students, … who packed gifts for refugees … I mean it’s not just the packing, it’s the fact that if you pack a bag with that thought in your mind, you’re not going to become a racist … It was a bonding time to really seed empathy and express compassion …

As Nadina paused, I interrupted to ask how politics of emotion and feelings of empathy were then translated into the next step, for producing safe places, for creating inclusion? Nadina responded:

At that time all the international NGOs came in, and the state, and the United Nations … and then borders were about to close. A lot of women from the refugee camps … were passing by and asking, “Is there anything we can do?” It was high time for us to start seeing them not just as transient rescued refugees heading elsewhere, but at the prospect of the borders closing, to start thinking about their inclusion. And by the winter of 2016, right before the borders closed in March 2016, we shifted focus from aid, to living together, to coexistence, and to think of them not just as refugees, but as our new neighbors. (Italics added by the author).

Nadina received one of ten Child 10 awards in 2019 for developing the Melissa foundation into a home-like haven out of previous dire situation:

Previously, refugee women didn’t actually have strong, solid, and sustainable links to one another. They lived in parallel but disconnected ethnic groups. I would go to the Filipinos on a Sunday morning, and they would run a micro-cooperative for women … Then in the afternoon, I would go meet the Georgians for another community meeting, and they were discussing the same issues … The idea [of] the community center emerged to link them together and to resources.

Despite these impressive community and refugee networking endeavors, sexist stereotypes about women’s organizing abounded. Youly, who worked with international donors for many years, sarcastically told me:

When you go to seek funding, people from the international human rights organizations and from the ministries, who were very sympathetic to our cause, would often say: “Okay you know, maybe we can give you a grant of 1,000 euros, you can go make a social kitchen, or you can organize a bazaar, or you can organize a fashion show … ”

Such stereotypes obscure the reality that Athens hosts strong female leaders in immigrant communities who engage in refugee politics in addition to cooking activities. Sexist blind spots, inefficiencies, and bureaucratic obstacles create multiple challenges. Those involved with refugee work typically go beyond standard office hours and try to respond or attend to never-ending emergencies that turn their work into a 24/7 goodwill effort. These extraordinary efforts are backed up by a vocal network of activists in the city, many of whom were associated with the Solidarity movement and were dedicated to the protection, well-being, and safety of refugees. One of the places the activists watched closely and protected was a famous Athenian hotel where refugee families squatted, called the City Plaza.

Activism beyond Victoria Square: The City Plaza and Exarchia

On a warm, sunny day in the winter of 2017, I walked from Victoria Square to the City Plaza. When I arrived, refugee children were playing on the street in front of the main hotel entrance, and loads of laundry were hanging from the windows of the multi-story structure. City Plaza was sheltering families at full capacity. After watching people go in and out for half an hour, I tried unsuccessfully to enter the building. To guard refugees’ safety, activist gatekeepers sat at the entrance at what looked like a reception desk. I tried to convince them to let me in. Despite my multiple identity cards as a professor and researcher and my official research permit, I was not allowed. The only outside visitors permitted that day were the immigrant women from the Philippines, who came to cook for the hotel residents. Overall, the refugee community looked friendly and comfortable, and the squat appeared to be safe for refugee families. More importantly, the solidarity between the migrants and the pro-immigrant activist groups was unbreakable, and the trust between them was strong.

Later that week, I met a few activist friends at a bar in Exarchia, a historic neighborhood associated with radical political activism and outbreaks of protests by anarchists in the city. Although Exarchia bordered the economically well-off homogenous neighborhood of Kolonaki, where only rich locals could afford to live, and although Exarchia itself was being rapidly gentrified, it was still one of the diverse and migrant-welcoming parts of Athens.²⁷ The neighborhood was distinguished by politically significant street art, live music in neighborhood bars, low-key taverns, and eco-friendly lifestyles, including ample availability of vegetarian food. On this warm night, the neighborhood was breeding a strong community feeling. Locals were overflowing from the indoor space of bars to the sidewalks and even the streets, casually mingling, socializing and chilling with their drinks in their hands (for a similar political ethnography of the neighborhood, see Turam, 2013).

I asked the activists—three of whom were living in Victoria Square and one who was based in Exarchia—whether they consider Victoria and Exarchia to be safe. They laughed and asked me sarcastically, “Have you been hanging out too much in Kolonaki? ” As we sipped ouzo in small glasses, they each expressed strong dislike of class inequalities in the city. They talked about how migrants were excluded by “the privileged and the loaded,” and how the rich people in Athens would rather fence in their neighborhoods, not only to keep the refugees out, but anyone else who did not look or live like them. Here, the politics of emotion (fear) that keeps out the refugee stranger is similar to the urban fear and the logic behind the gated communities (Low, 1997, 2001). My activist friends told me that such fear-ridden urban exclusion targeted them, too, the local activists and the solidarity movement, as potential threats. When people grow fearful of refugees committing crimes, stealing jobs, being potential terrorists, and so on, all refugees are relegated to a state of constant agony due to exclusion and hostility. This agony adds on top of the refugees’ fear of deportation. This is how security produces its own spaces of fear, insecurity, and exclusion, while also generating its own “particular geographies of power.” (Glück, 2015; Glück & Low, 2017, p 282).

The construction of fear and its consequences underlie the common sense assumption that the city of refuge has higher crime rates and insecurity. Yet, the reality is different from this stereotypical view. Similar to my conversations with NGOs and service providers, my activist friends assured me that Victoria and Exarchia were the safest and most inclusive parts of Athens. Recent works on cities of refuge align with the activists’ views about the safety of the mixed migrant neighborhoods and low crime rates (O’Brien et al., 2017; Ridgley, 2013). As I walked the streets of Exarchia alone later that night on my way home, I experienced first-hand how safe I felt in this diverse and mixed part of the city.

To facilitate my access to protected safe places, my contacts introduced me to other activists in the city, and the vice mayor and his team connected me with NGOs participating in the MRCC&O platform. While the activists were critical of the overwhelming presence of local police in places like Exarchia, they concurred on and applauded the efficient refugee work done by Vice Mayor Lefteris. Just as all of my respondents did, they referred to him on a first name basis.

The refugee squats in the city were probably the most contested sites between pro- and anti-refugee actors. All activists that I met in Athens supported and/or safeguarded these places from violence by ultra-nationalists. While being protective of all squats, they were particularly concerned about City Plaza as the owner of the hotel was pressing to get it back. The hotel was receiving so much coverage from both national and international media that it could jeopardize its future as a safe place for refugees.

The next couple of years proved the concerns of my activist friends to be well-founded. Soon after the center-right wing party won the elections at the national and local levels in 2019, refugee politics started to change in Greece.²⁸ City Plaza was immediately vacated by refugee squatters, followed by the closure of all refugee squats in the city. Although Lefteris clearly explained in his public announcements that the municipality could not legally support and officially sustain the squats (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Papachristou, 2018, p. 129), actual closures took place only after the left-wing government was replaced by the right-wing New Democracy party. During my short chat with the new mayor of Athens, I asked him why they closed down the squats. Mayor Bakoyannis is a Harvard-educated and highly skilled and experienced politician, who also happens to be the nephew of Prime Minister Mitsotakis. He gave me a full-fledged security rationale elaborating that the squats were disasters waiting to happen for the safety and security of everybody in the city. As “processes of security are rarely purely local” (Glück & Low, 2017, p. 282), Bakoyannis’ local government manifests securitization of migration at multiple scales. Nevertheless, his remark upended our conversation about security: “I am the most leftist-minded member of New Democracy, and I only care about the residents’ well-being.”

The significance of safe havens

All of the safe spaces I visited in Athens illuminated the juxtaposition between the EU’s highly securitized closed borders and local activists’ welcoming inclusion and trust. As an engaged activist and hands-on service provider, Clio was preoccupied with helping out and saving refugee women and children, particularly boys who were exposed to violence, domestic, physical, and sexual. For many cases, she received help from the vice mayor’s office. The municipality and the vice mayor was a phone call away any time of day or night. From reporting the abusive husband who walked the streets of Victoria bullying and posing a threat to his refugee wife (hiding at the shelter) and the female social workers at the shelter, to asking for help to deal with the traumatized teenage boys who were sexually harassed or violated in the refugee camps and on the streets of Athens, Clio and all stakeholders I met expressed gratitude for being fully supported by Vice Mayor Papagiannakis.

Safety is a complicated proposition for refugees. Maria worked for an organization that ran several shelters for unaccompanied children. She unequivocally commented on my inquiries about safety.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Refugees are not safe. It’s not a safe travel for anyone, no matter if you’re a child, young adult or an adult … Safety is partly having some sense of control of life, physical integrity and knowing your direction. The road of refugees does not have a certain beginning and a determined ending. They are deprived of the ability to make a plan, imagine the next step or even a vague direction in this inhumane journey. Most of what we are doing here is creating temporary safe places for vulnerable refugees in passing.

In all of my interviews, I asked what makes a space safe for refugees. Depending on the type of refugee work, the emphasis shifted from curfews (for minors) and unisex centers (for pregnant and/or teenager women), to welcoming and helpful staff, to facilitating access to services, to friendly reception, to creating safe and reliable connections in the city, and to offering regular psychological counseling. Many service providers highlighted the importance of establishing a routine in order to create a sense of stability against the backdrop of trauma and never-ending mobility in forced migration. A commonly shared point about safe havens was the surveillance of who was allowed to enter. Panos, who worked for one of the shelters for unaccompanied children in Athens for a long time, told me:

When we tell children, this is your home—your private space—we make sure that strangers will not be allowed in. In arrival cities of Europe, smugglers and traffickers are everywhere to take advantage of young refugees. We do not trust anybody to enter into our shelters. Kids may have arrived here by someone they call “uncle,” but in reality, that person might be a trafficker. The key to create a safe place for refugees is hyper-vigilance.

With the exception of the Humanitarian Corridors that enabled safe legal entry for thousands of Syrian refugees from Lebanon to Italy, refugees are typically transported illegally by smugglers or traffickers.²⁹ The journey is often violent and abusive, and violates basic human rights. Even at the long-anticipated finish line, assuming it happens, it is unlikely that refugees can easily resolve the feelings of insecurity and fear that accompany such experiences. With the exception of a few relatively safer destination countries for refugees, such as Germany and Canada, creating a new and entirely safe life is often illusory for refugees, as family reunification has become an increasingly unlikely endpoint for many.

In the context of multilayered fear, cities of refuge offer the only thing they can—a safe place for refugees to stay put temporarily—while the majority of states sacrifice their well-being and security. Under these circumstances, the feeling and experience of safety is primarily temporal and spatial for refugee populations. There is not much beyond that safe place—embodied in a community center, a bedroom in a shelter, or a church on a square—to provide a reliable, albeit transitory, sense of socio-spatial inclusion.

A proactive municipality pioneering collaborative refugee work with NGOs

I met the vice mayor of migration and his team in their offices, which were located in a rundown building that was separate and dissimilar in appearance from the stately looking municipal building. I waited in a room that looked as if it were under construction with unfinished floors, randomly collected furniture, and ruined paint on the walls. The entire place seemed to be making a blunt statement—a denial of glamor went hand-in-hand with exclusive focus on crisis management. Lefteris’s team occupied several floors, one of which was reserved as a “safe place” for refugee mothers and their children. The social worker who worked in the so-called safe room was so busy that she struggled to find a moment to talk to me. While observing the high turnover of refugee mothers, I witnessed the municipality’s open doors to refugees and asylum seekers who were seeking safety rather than bureaucratic processes. I asked one of vice mayor’s team members, Vasilis, why a municipal office would even have a safe room. He told me it was to make refugees feel comfortable and get them used to coming to the offices:

We would like the refugees not to shy away from us and feel free to enter municipal buildings. They need to know that Athens municipality does not only serve local citizens but everyone who resides here. You can think of it as a symbolic way of expressing our inclusivity, but it also gives us first-hand contact with them without a need for mediators.

“Importantly,” Vasilis added, “as Athens is full of centers and associations that offer safe places, we are not trying to do their job or compete with them.” To the contrary, the municipality created a new platform to connect dispersed NGOs and centers under a new umbrella organization, the Migration and Refugee Coordination Center and Observatory (MRCC&O).³⁰ Established under Lefteris’s leadership, MRCC&O brought disconnected but like-minded NGOs operating in Athens together with the goal of facilitating communication and cooperation. In this endeavor, the municipality went far beyond the “traditional refugee service provision” that local governments typically perform. The center distinguished Athens from other cities of refuge across the world by providing a model for creating close and systematic engagement among the local government, NGOs, and activists. The municipal action kept NGOs on same page, working together rather than parallel or toward different ends. Most importantly, they were similar in their left-wing humanitarian resistance against the right-wing populist and ultra-nationalist regimes and policies in Europe. Dr. Lambiri, the project coordinator of MRCC&O, explained that their ultimate aim was “the creation of an effective and evidence-based mechanism that can actively support the City of Athens, and prepare for refugee-related emergencies.” Lefteris explained that they offer services to migrants and refugees, which were not offered by the municipality before. He stated, “People without documents can access municipal services, like healthcare and education, because we have an anti-discrimination policy” (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Papachristou, 2018, p. 128).

Greece has never been a typical destination country for migrants. Most of the achievements in refugee work in Athens, including municipal services, have been in the areas of reception, sheltering, and protection rather than integration. But this focus aligns not only with Greece’s history and geopolitics but also with the understanding that “[r]efugees are not like other migrants: they are not moving for gain, but they have no choice. They are seeking safety abroad” (Betts & Collier, 2018, p. 1). Facing the exceptional circumstances, the Athens municipality played a pivotal role in handling refugee issues in the city and beyond by developing skills in spontaneity, adjustment, and flexibility. Ironically, these qualities are the opposite of how the locals describe their bureaucracy: inadjustable, inflexible, inefficient, and out-of-date.

A severe economic crisis left Greece unable to take care of local problems, such as orphans, the unemployed, and a large segment of the native population that felt left behind. At such challenging times, Athens municipality worked hard to include unaccompanied minor refugees and orphans and find housing and food for refugee population. Unlike most NGOs that had private funding from international donors or the EU, funding for MRCC&O came from ECHO (European Community Humanitarian Office), the EU’s humanitarian agency.³¹ This atypical funding source safeguarded the center somewhat from the experience of most NGOs whose funding was inconsistent and unreliable for longer-term commitments. Moreover, nonprofit organizations were supposed to be registered officially, but bureaucratic processes were so inefficient and time-consuming that many remained unregistered. This unstable landscape of refugee work underlies the strikingly high number of NGOs, which seemed to appear and disappear casually on a regular basis. Neither the municipality nor the civil society knew day-to-day the exact number of NGOs that were serving, forming, or expiring.

Despite the primacy of refugee work in Athens, I was consistently reminded by the mayor’s office and the pro-immigrant NGOs that refugee issues were the jurisdiction of the central state, not the municipality. Consequently, unlike the practice of American sanctuary cities, local police in Greece do not have leeway to refuse to cooperate with national law enforcement on refugee issues.³² Nevertheless, with regard to reporting local crimes, NGOs in Athens are similar to sanctuary cities in the U.S. in that they facilitate interaction with the police by giving refugees a choice and voice. Anna, who works in the main branch of a large NGO that provides health, education, medical, and psychosocial services to the refugees in Athens, explained the organization’s interaction with the police:

If the refugee wants to report a crime, then we go along. If the person does not want to, we do not go to the police on our own without the person’s consent. But if the police want to come here to check on the papers of a person, the police have no rights to enter our building. Unless they have gotten a prosecutor’s order, the police cannot enter our premises. We do not collaborate with the police. If an undocumented person comes here, we are interested in their needs for our services, medical or psychosocial, not their asylum status.

During my field research, I observed multiple interactions of refugee workers with various branches of the state in everyday life (for everyday interactions between the state and people, see Migdal, 2001; Monroe, 2016; Turam, 2007). It was striking to witness how little they trusted their own state and state officials, while fully trusting to and fighting for the rights of refugees.

Trust in the municipality: “We learned to take care of mess on our own in Athens”

Housing and accommodation were the most pressing needs requiring engagement between the municipality and NGOs. To discuss these issues, I met with Olivia, the lead architectural consultant to the Athens municipality. We sat down at a downtown coffee shop on a sunny day in the winter of 2017. Olivia is an architect and urban planner who is passionate about shaping how her city evolves. She was keen on bringing together experts from different fields to find fast-track, practical, and fair solutions to emergency situations in Athens and internationally.³³

At the time we met, Olivia had just finished a consultancy for a large NGO based in the U.S. that provided emergency relief to refugees around the world, in places like Baghdad, Afghanistan, and Turkey. When the NGO arrived in Greece on the heels of the country’s initial phases of the refugee influx, Olivia’s job was to prepare copious housing units in Athens. It seemed like a “mission impossible” to move thousands of refugees from camps to the city in a very short time span. This feat became possible only because downtown Athens had a large number of vacated flats owing to the country’s economic crisis. With funding flowing from ECHO, UNHCR started working with the Greek Asylum office to place refugees in those vacated flats. Luckily, rushed preparations to house refugees were put in place just before the EU-Turkey agreement was signed and Europe’s borders were closed.

Refugee housing facilities were scattered throughout downtown Athens, but there was a high concentration in Victoria Square and Omonia Square. I wondered whether the municipality strategically placed refugees into existing immigrant neighborhoods. Olivia commented that they did offer a lot of housing in those immigrant neighborhoods, but this was mostly because of high vacancy rates and relatively lower housing prices compared to other downtown neighborhoods, such as Kolonaki. She also noted that the uneven distribution of the flats across the city center created an unplanned and unintended advantage, “because it was easier to integrate the refugees into the city life when they lived in the diverse city center instead of ethnically segregated places in the periphery.”

There is an unresolved debate about whether ethnically concentrated neighborhoods are conducive or not to mixing and inclusion. Mustafa Dikeç’s (2007) Badlands on Muslim neighborhoods in France on the outskirts of French cities, the banlieue, reveals racial profiling and police brutality along with the politics of fear, discrimination, and insecurity in the aftermath of 9/11. These neighborhoods are much different from the highly gentrified “Turkish neighborhood of Berlin,” Kreuzberg, that displays multiple patterns of interaction and degrees of mixing between native Germans and Muslim immigrants (Turam, 2015). As Muslim immigrant neighborhoods became a complicated issue for Europe, I asked if the ethnic neighborhoods in Athens were regarded as dangerous or safe. She responded:

Do I feel safe completely when I pass by these places … ? I mean, completely? Not really. But it’s only a perception that I might not be so safe … When something is closed and/or secluded from the rest of the city, you just do not know about it. It might be intimidating only because it is the unknown. When these places become the hubs of actual mixing, then they feel really safe. In Athens, I see refugees being really open, especially Syrians, because they are placed in various parts in the city center rather than being clustered.

Olivia also commented on how housing strategies of refugees intersected with other cultural and societal factors:

All needs to be achieved without disrespecting their culture. Syrians are very close to the Greek culture in the way they talk and work with us … But for example, Afghanistan is very, very different. Especially how women, in their society live and so on … is quite different, and makes everything challenging …

Then, to what extent were cultural differences of refugees presenting a challenge to Athens in achieving inclusion? Wimmer and Soehl’s quantitative study tested the role of culture in explaining the different trajectories of immigrant accommodation and challenged previous research that relied primarily on cultural explanations (Wimmer & Thomas, 2014). The authors examined whether “distant linguistic or religious origins (including Islam)” were the underlying factors of failed acculturation to the host country. The research showed that legal or social disadvantage—rather than cultural distance—was the main determinant of failed integration. Put differently, rather than a specific ethnic or Muslim cultural background, the institutional infrastructure and state policies led to failure by disadvantaging certain migrant groups.

Projecting Wimmer and Soehl’s findings, I asked Olivia whether she trusted the political institutions that shape refugee politics. She responded with a firm “no.” She did not trust the Greek state or other EU member states, the policies of which inflamed the political crisis instead of offering solutions. In contrast, she emphasized her commitment to working with the municipality:

I do trust the people that I work with in the municipality—not the entire structure of the local government. My trust is based on years of collaboration with those dedicated people … When you collaborate in the midst of a crisis and under pressure, and when they have your back in panic situations, you know they’re really trying to find a solution. The solution is right here in the city and right now. It is not in some slow-motion bureaucratic process of top-down policy-making by the state. We learned to take care of mess on our own in Athens. (Author’s italics)

With little faith or trust in the immigration policies of EU’s member states, most of Olivia’s efforts go into creating a safe urban environment. After finishing her work on housing for refugees, she began working as a project manager to create inclusive public places. Her major effort was to ensure a safe environment in which people from different walks of life, ethnicities, classes, and genders could come together publicly to mingle, interact, and cooperate regardless of their migrant or refugee status.

The public sphere has for long been applauded as the heart of democratic inclusion by melting artificial walls of unfamiliarity, distrust, and disagreement between diverse groups (Calhoun, 1992; Sennett, 1998). However, most theories about the public sphere dismiss power dynamics between unequal participants in the public realm, and thereby overlook the safety of vulnerable groups, marginalized racial and ethnic minorities, migrants, and other outsiders. Olivia’s vision of the city went beyond Habermasian optimism and other prescriptive expectations of the public sphere.

Even diverse public spaces are not self-generating “magic zones.” Public sphere is not innately capable of taking care of social conflict, smoothing away sentiments of fear and threat of the Other, undoing exclusion, and fighting discrimination. Olivia’s project was proactively creating inclusive public space in Athens by introducing commonly shared quotidian tools for the inclusion of diverse residents, including immigrants and refugees. She achieves this by inviting non-citizens to become active in the creation (not just utilization) of safe and welcoming public places. (For a similar idea, see Harvey, 2003.) Olivia’s excitement was impossible to miss:

This is about giving all residents incentives to co-create the public realm, and thereby urban life. There is a small funding that citizens can access and apply for … Think software though, not hardware! So, software would be equipment for streets or squares that are temporary, such as a commonly shared landscaping cart. Basically, right now I am strategizing with the municipality to set up the procedure for having a bottom-up (as opposed to a traditional top-down) mechanism. This means civil groups learn to demand their needs from the city, but at the same time, the municipality proactively exercises how to take on the responsibility to respond to and provide services to all residents, including the refugees.

The passionate words of this architect with a vision reflected an uplifting urban spirit blooming in the midst of an ascending anti-immigrant regime across Europe. Between 2017 and 2019, I witnessed how the vice mayor of immigration, his team, and their projects expanded beyond Athens to reach several other cities in Greece and beyond Greece. Similar to the innovative edge in Olivia’s projects, Lefteris empowered his team to develop ideas, projects, and networks. Dr. Lambiri proudly admitted that the “vice mayor trusted and gave [his staff] freedom to act independently,” even though this sometimes meant “not going by the book,” as “Greek bureaucracy would have prevented [them] from being spontaneous and acting upon crisis situations promptly.” The city facilitated and supported the production of inventive ideas for inclusion and safety.

Dr. Dionysia Lambiri, project coordinator of MRCC&O, informed me about developments in the municipality of Athens and their projects up until the local and national elections in the summer of 2019. When New Democracy replaced the left in central government, the new prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, began introducing major changes to refugee politics. As Greece’s new deputy defense minister, Alkiviadis Stefanis, declared that the operations of NGOs performing refugee and migrant work would be “subject to new criteria,” Athens was already alert to the impending political shift.³⁴ Stefanis’s intervention was a clear affirmation that the new government identified the NGOs’ refugee work with the realm of defense and security as opposed to rescue missions and human rights.

Although Golden Dawn lost its seats and was left out of the parliament with the electoral victory of New Democracy, the new right-wing national and local government posed new challenges to refugee work in Athens. The party aligned with policies of heightened securitization to enforce its mission of creating order. Although Lefteris’s platform of NGOs is still intact, the leadership in MRCC&O was left to junior members. Most of the NGO representatives and activist friends I am in touch with feared that the MRCC&O might lose its power and influence over time. Likewise, activists from the solidarity movement are frustrated about the closure of the squats. When I asked the new mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, why he closed down the squats, he defensively retorted, “Have you not seen the situation in those squats? Seriously? They were accidents waiting to happen.”

Athens, as a city of refuge, is nurtured by and relies upon the (leftist) justice-seeking, humanitarian cooperation among strong leadership and a large number of NGOs and activists. These alliances are so deeply rooted in the heart of Athens that changes in municipal government have not eradicated this historically engrained urban legacy. Upon taking mayoral office, Bakoyannis had eliminated Lefteris’s position as vice mayor of migration. Nevertheless, a few months later, when I spoke briefly with Bakoyannis in Boston, he told me that the position was reinstated owing to the need in the city. I was not surprised. Athens’s commitment and resilience burst forth on October 7, 2020, when thousands of Athenians celebrated in the streets about the Greek court’s landmark ruling that Golden Dawn was a criminal organization, thereby finalizing the “first significant trial of a neo-Nazi party in Europe after World War II.”³⁵ This was a remarkable moment in history that Athens’s urbanity could not celebrate more.

With a long history of urban protests, Athenians did not shy away from the 2,000 riot police who guarded the court house with tear gas and water cannons. They rejoiced, as one of the main enemies of the pro-refugee alliance was officially ruled out of existence. The court’s verdict sent the important message to the world that individuals—even the members of the parliament—who conduct racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-human-rights activity in Greece and across Europe will not go unpunished.

Conclusion

No doubt, Golden Dawn’s closure was a milestone in overcoming one of the main enemies of refugees in the city of Athens. Moreover, the EU’s ferocious refugee politics has failed to stop the flow of refugees into the region (Andersson, 2016). Yet, the highly securitized, externalized borders continue risking human lives, benefit human traffickers, and empower corrupt or authoritarian third countries to take advantage of vulnerable people. With the support from right-wing populists, ultra-nationalists, racists, Islamophobes, and others, Europe violates its own (Geneva) refugee agreement signed after World War II. As the EU receives refugees from outside of its borders for the first time, EU member states replace former integration efforts with harsh border policies that prioritize deterrence, deportation (Johnson, 2012, p. 111), and criminalize rescue operations.

It has become clear that the political crisis can no longer be solved by amending integration policies. No matter how well integration policies might have developed, they can begin to be helpful only after (if ever) refugees are safetly settled in the destination country where they are offered asylum. Hence, at this historical moment of hypersecuritization of borders, the management of ongoing refugee flow falls de facto on the shoulders of gateway cities in arrival countries. By showcasing Athens as a city of refuge, this article demonstrated the ways in which the most resilient and meaningful resistance to the multi-level securitization of migration comes from particular frontier cities at the external southern borders of Europe. My findings revealed two opposing and clashing forces: the power of safe places to deal with the political crisis about refugee issues and the politics of fear that sustain anti-immigrant sentiments in urban life. As safety and fear are reproduced politically and spatially in deep tension and close proximity at the borderlands of Europe, the (inter)national prominence of cities of refuge has become more explicit than ever, rendering them worthy of serious scholarly attention.

Nevertheless, controversial debates carry on as city of refuge is not a legal term, and thereby, there is no law or legislation to qualify any city as a “city of refuge.” Ongoing political and scholarly disputes raise the importance of indepth qualitative data on the urban spatial politics of refuge. The present work makes a contribution to these politically taxing disputes by empirically revealing how a city of refuge and safe places are built from the bottom up as the city contests and fights against the top-down securitization of migration.

Importantly, arrival cities in Europe, or elsewhere, are not destined to become a city of refuge simply by the given geopolitical conditions. Nor is the city of refuge the inherent outcome of a particular historical and socioeconomic trajectory. Becoming a city of refuge requires political skills that are developed experientially and collaboratively, and are backed up by a certain legacy of urbanity. The city of refuge, as illustrated by my field research in Athens, developed through the sum of numerous politically responsible and humane choices and practices made by local actors and officials on a daily basis between the municipality, NGOs, activists, and migrant communities.

Then, how do party politics and ideological shifts at the national and municipal governments affect the capacities of cities of refuge? With the promise of law and order, the recently elected right-wing New Democracy implemented different practices and policies since 2019 at both national and municipal levels. These changes ranged from the termination of health care services to refugees and the closure of refugee squats to the intrusion and securitization of immigrant-friendly neighborhoods, such as Exarchia in Athens.³⁶ While these policies and actions by the new government should not be underestimated, it is important to acknowledge that the accumulated experience and accomplishments of the former municipality of Athens, NGOs, and local activists have not been defeated. By the time this article was being finalized, the refugee network platform MRCC&O created by the previous vice mayor was still in place. Although my key informants have told me that “dealing with the new municipality has been a pain,” they have doggedly continued their work. While many have expressed frustration with the new local government, and often feel unsupported or undermined by it, their acquired skills and firm agendas persist. Athens’s urbanity elaborated in Olivia’s words and dovetailed with human right activism from all over the world keeps the frontier city going on.

Bluntly expressing his ideology and refugee politics, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of New Democracy declared that he will no longer accept that “Europe regards arrival countries such as Greece as a convenient parking spot for refugees and migrants.”³⁷ Perceived as parking spot or not, my research reveals that cities of refuge in arrival countries are distinguished by their refusal to become a bystander or docile placeholder for the violation of rights of vulnerable refugees. To the contrary, these cities are agentic and resilient against everyday manifestations of anti-immigrant security regimes.

Finally, having demonstrated that safety is explicitly socio-spatial, I do not, by any means, conclude that the safety of refugees is inherently and exclusively an urban phenomenon. As more and more refugees live in urban space (as opposed to refugee camps or the countryside), cities of refuge develop the socio-spatial capacity to generate protection for these populations. These cities handle the refugee situation by carving out safe places through their encounters with security regimes and by facing and resisting the politics of fear these regimes bolster. Hence, rather than being miraculous heroic saviors, cities of refuge are often politically messy spaces due to deep political contestation. Precisely because of this, social sciences must recognize that these urban sanctuaries are the prime counterforces against the securitization of migration and borders. Cities like Athens carry the flag of this mission. Under the pressure of heightened global forced displacement, Athens and other cities of refuge continue to experiment with remaking themselves as bulwarks against the rising tide of right-wing ideologies that exclude, ostracize, and harm vulnerable refugee populations. It is time for all of us to follow their lead and take the urban and socio-spatial aspects of this matter seriously.

Acknowledgments

I thank John A. Hall, Yeşim Bayar, Petros Vamvakas, Youly Diamanti-Karanou and Feyzi Erçin for their invaluable comments on various drafts of the paper, and the Athens municipality, NGOs, activists and the local Athenians for their cooperation in my field research.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Max Planck, Dahrendorf and Erasmus fellowships.

Notes on contributors

Berna Turam

Berna Turam is a political sociologist and an ethnographer. Turam has an abiding interest in conducting research on state-society interaction, particularly on the interaction between ordinary Muslim people and secular states. She is the author of Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford University Press, 2007), and Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2015), and the editor of Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She wrote several articles in journals including British Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, Journal of Democracy, and Nations and Nationalism. Currently, Turam is working on two major projects. First, on the basis of her fieldwork at the external Southern borders of Europe, her research explores refugee-receiving and refugee-hosting cities by focusing on the politics of fear and safety at the hyper-securitized borderlands of the Mediterranean. Specifically, her project reveals and theorizes the ways in which frontier “cities of refuge” carve out safe places for Muslim refugees at the cost of resisting, confronting and sometimes subverting the anti-immigrant regimes of Europe. Concurrently, she is also coauthoring a manuscript on the role of the Bar associations and the legal profession in fighting the freedom violations of the right-wing populist authoritarian regime in Turkey.

Notes

1. Lorenzo Tondo and Maurice Stierl. “Banksy Funds Refugee Rescue Boat Operating in Mediterranean,” The Guardian, August 27, 2020. The rescue boat, named Louise Michel and funded by Banksy, which “set off in secrecy on August 18 from the Spanish seaport of Burriana, near Valencia” was carrying over 250 refugees, when the Mayor of Marseilles opened the port, while European countries refused docking. See also, The Connexion, “Marseilles Mayor Welcomes Bansky Rescue Boat Refugees,” August 31, 2020.

2. Bauder, 2017; Collingwood & O’Brien, 2019; Delgado, 2018).

3. Ferreira, Susana. Ferreira, 2019, pp. 3–4. See also, “We have Found hell: Trauma runs deep for Children at Dire Lesvos Camp,” October 3, 2018. “Better to Drown” A Greek Refugee Camp’s Epidemic of Misery” New York Times, October 2, 2018.

4. “By moving out from the single site and local situations of conventional ethnographic research design,” multi-sited ethnography examines an issue or problem “in diffuse time-space.” (Marcus, 1998, p. 79).

5. Although this particular project is not directly focused on immigrants and refugees, but rather how the city accommodates them, the actions and voices of refugees were influential and included to the extent that they were active participants in co-creating safe spaces.

6. For semi-structured interviews, I use similar lines of questioning in each city of refuge, but add questions or make adjustments owing to different sociospatial and/or political conditions in each location. Typically, ethnographic interviews are unstructured and consist of conversations that take place during participant observation and field visits.

7. Athens Coordination Center for Migrant and Refugee issues (ACCMR) is one of the pillars of the MRCC&O project. ACCMR is more well-known and is therefore used when presenting the project internationally. https://www.accmr.gr/en/

8. See Goldstein (2010) with regard to his juxtaposition of rights against security.

9. Independent, November 14, 2018. “US Only Country in the World to Vote against Work of UN Refugee Agency.” In July 2018, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) assistant high commissioner Volker Turk proposed a draft to limit detention and to reserve detention only as a “last resort.” Although the annual resolution on the work of UNHCR has generally been approved by consensus for more than 60 years, the U.S. rejected the resolution as incompatible with sovereign interests of the United States. While rejected by the U.S., the draft was adopted by the General Assembly human rights committee with 176 votes in favor. There were three abstentions and 13 countries which did not vote.

10. Despite the UNCHR’s firm commitment to the convention ratified by 145 countries, EU members and the U.S. varied in their treatment of asylum seekers at the cost of violating the multilateral agreement.

11. In my fieldwork at the UNHCR in Geneva and in several cities of refuge in the Global North from Europe to North America, I observed the missing link and difficulty of communication between the UNHCR and local agents (activists and NGOs doing refugee work on a regular basis). The efforts at the city level were often disconnected from the UNCHR, unless one of the local service providers or activists used their privileged personal contacts to reach out to Geneva or some high-ranking official at the EU or UN to seek help.

12. While Steil and Vasi (2014) examined the role of social movements in the new local lawmaking, Varsanyi (2010) explored factors that explain the recent rise of local immigrant activism in the United States. (For a comparative work on local immigration activism in Europe and the U.S., see Nicholls & Uitermark, 2017.)

13. Kathy Fallon and And Boersma. “There is no Future: The refugees who became pawns in Erdoǧan’s regime,” The Guardian, May 8, 2020; Bethan McKernan and Daniel Boffey. “Greece and Bulgaria crack down on Turkish borders as refugees arrive,” The Guardian, February 28, 2020; BBC News, “Turkiyenin ‘multeci aciklamasi sonrasu Yunanistan’da ordu alarma gecti, Kastanyes sinir kapisi kapatildi” (After Turkey’s announcement about refugees, Greek military took action and border is closed) February 28, 2020.

14. The Guardian “Blow for Hungary PM Orban as Opposition wins Budapest Mayoral Race,” October 13, 2019. Since 2010, Orbán has “regularly clashed with Brussels over migration and rule-of-law issues. Orban’s party Fidesz attacked his opposition for an allegedly pro-migration stance and his ‘unsuitability’ for the job.”

15. Al Jazeera, “Sicilians have Affinity for the Islamic World in their DNA,” May 13, 2019. Asley Powers. September 17, 2019. “How Palermo Became of Host to African Refugees, ” Medium; The Independent. “Italy Passes the Law to Fine People who Rescue Refugees at Sea,” June 12, 2019; New York Times, “Italy’s Government Collapses Turning Chaos into Crisis,” August 20, 2019.

16. Following the failed attempts of the Muslim travel ban, the Trump administration launched another failed policy aimed at separating migrant families and confining children in late spring of 2018. See for example, New York Times, “How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families,” June 16, 2018. The New York Times quoted Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, who has been the strongest advocate and most vocal defender of this inhumane practice: “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.” The critics, such as Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, condemned the practice as an unacceptable policy: “This is not a zero-tolerance policy, this is a zero-humanity policy, and we can not let it go on.”

17. Joanna Kakisses. “Golden Dawn: Greek Court Delivers Landmark Verdicts against Neo-Nazi Party,” October 7, 2020: “Party loyalists portray themselves as patriots and even endorsed Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 because they believed he promotes, in their words, ‘clean ethnic states.’”

18. Molly Crabapple. “The attack on Exharchia, an Anarchist Refuge in Athens,” The New Yorker, January 20, 2020.

19. Joanna Kakisses. “Golden Dawn: Greek Court Delivers Landmark Verdicts against Neo-Nazi Party,” October 7, 2020; Yiannis Baboulias. “How to Beat the Nazis,” The Atlantic, October 8, 2020.

20. Although forced immigration has been handled differently by regimes and states at different times, “mobile peoples” have often been denied as political subjects: “[M]obile peoples find it impossible to constitute themselves as political subjects precisely because they cannot be coextensive with a territory as they remain peoples without geography (Isin, 2018, p. 120; my italics).

21. Prior to the 2016 Turkey-EU agreement, a very large number of refugees arriving from Turkey passed through the Greek islands with a high turnover rate, only staying for a few days before being transferred to Athens. At that time, Germany was still accepting large numbers of refugees and the borders of European countries were not yet entirely tightened or closed. Conditions dramatically changed on the five Greek islands after March 2016, when refugees were confined upon arrival to refugee camps at hotspots in Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Leros, and Kos. Upon receiving asylum, refugees are transferred to the mainland Greece, mostly to Athens. When the already overcrowded camps can no longer contain the number of refugees and as emergencies erupt, such as the fire in Moria camp of Lesvos, Athens takes the charge and responsibility.

22. The Guardian, “What does the EU’s Deal with Turkey Mean?” March 18, 2016.

23. NewYork Times, “There is a New Game of Thrones in the Mediterranean,” August 31, 2020.

24. With an agenda of fixing the Dublin agreement, the EU interior ministers met in Malta to draft new measures and a new approach for Europe. While Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and Malta concurred to receive a fair share of migrants rescued at sea, it remains to be seen which other countries will participate in the pact. Bloomberg Opinion, “Europe’s Promising new Approach to its Immigration Crisis,” September 27, 2019.

25. Press Release, European Council “European Border and Coast Guard: Council Adopts Revised Regulation, November 8, 2019, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/

26. The Guardian, “Greek Golden Dawn Member Arrested over Murder of left-wing hip-hop artist” September 18, 2013; Independent, “Greek Anti-fascist Rapper Murdered by ‘Neo-Nazi’ Golden Dawn Supporter.” September 18, 2013.

27. Molly Crabapple. “The Attack on Exarchia, the Anarchist Refuge in Athens,” The New Yorker, January 20, 2020.

28. The Guardian. “Greece to Replace Island Refugee Camps with ‘Detention Centers,” November 20, 2019.

29. See Ferreira (2019, pp. 43–46). While trafficking involves coercion and exploitation, such as sex trafficking, smuggling aims at assisting the illegal journey. Yet, the boundaries between these two experiences often become blurred, as both involve violence to maintain control of refugees. In both cases, human rights violations occur frequently, as refugees are exposed to inhumane conditions, lack of water and food, or being stuck in small airtight spaces during transportation.

30. See also Athens Coordination Center for Migrant and Refugee issues (ACCMR), an important pillar of the MRCC&O project. https://www.accmr.gr/en/

31. ECHO (European Community Humanitarian Office) is the largest single collaborator in humanitarian aid to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

32. American sanctuary cities try to enable refugees and immigrants to safely report crime without being fearful of deportation. They do so by by claiming that enforcement of immigration law is not their job.

33. Olivia explained the international aspects of her job to me: “I observe and assess a situation. So, I have been working in Greece and in London and in New York. I was, for a while, working on sustainability, city-making, collaborative design, integration, um, through an architect’s kind of point of view or lens.”

34. The Guardian. “Greece to Replace Island Refugee Camps with ‘Detention Centers,” November 20, 2019. “Only those (NGOs) that meet the requirements will stay and continue to operate in the country,” said Stefanis.

35. Joanna Kakisses. “Golden Dawn: Greek Court Delivers Landmark Verdicts against Neo-Nazi Party,” October 7, 2020. See also, Yiannis Baboulias. “How to Beat the Nazis.” The Atlantic, 8 October 2020; Niki Kitsantonis and Iliana Magra. “Golden Dawn Found Guilty of Running Criminal Organization in Greece,” NewYork Times, October 7, 2020. The party’s leadership, Michaloliakos, and six of his deputies were found responsible for the actions of members of their party, which included multiple assaults, human trafficking, illegally possessed weapons and explosives, and the leftist rapper Fyssas’s murder.

36. Molly Crabapple. “The Attack on Exarchia, the Anarchist Refuge in Athens,” The New Yorker, January 20, 2020.

37. The Guardian. “Greece to Replace Island Refugee Camps with ‘Detention Centers,” November 20, 2019.