Border Violence and Migrant Subjectivities

ABSTRACT

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork material from Greece to investigate the types of subjectivities migrants develop when they are confronted by the material border violence. It utilizes an aleatory materialist theory of subjectivity and mobilizes four analytical categories to illustrate the diversity of migrant subjectivities: abject, religious, nomadic, and dissident. The article further demonstrates that migrants might move from one category to another or belong to multiple categories at the same time. This article contributes to the critical literature that challenges the mainstream reductive representation of migrant subjectivity (either as victims or criminals) by developing an aleatory materialist framework and emphasizing the intersections and shifts among migrant subjectivity categories.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all migrants who participated in this study and shared their stories. I also would like to thank NGO workers and other participants of this study and those who facilitated the fieldwork. The comments of the three anonymous reviewers improved the manuscript. I also appreciate the flexible word count policy of Geopolitics which made it possible for this manuscript to be reviewed in the first place.

Notes

1. In this paper, I use the term ‘migrant’ in order to avoid making distinctions (and therefore establishing hierarchies) among different forms of mobility. It should, however, be noted that all migrants in this study, regardless of their legal status, are subjects of forced migration due to war, conflict, and/or poverty.

2. A similar difficulty was noted by Dimitriadi (Dimitriadi 2017, 59) who was able to interview only 5 women in her fieldwork in Greece (2012–2014). Most of Dimitriadi’s research participants were similarly single young men.

3. Interview with a GCR representative (2012).

4. For further analysis of the Greece’s dysfunctional asylum system and the legal limbo in which migrants found themselves in Greece, see Cabot (2014). While the Greek government restructured the asylum system in 2013, as Dimitriadi (Dimitriadi 2017, 66) notes the system has remained inaccessible and inefficient for most migrants.

5. The murder an anti-fascist Greek citizen by a Golden Dawn supporter in 2013 led the Greek authorities to take action against the party. The leader of the party and its 69 members were charged with running a criminal organization and organizing attacks on migrants, leftists, and the LGBT community. At the time of writing, the trial is in progress. Despite these steps, however, racially motivated violence against migrants continues. Anti-migrant protests and attacks are on the rise again (see Holman 2016).

6. The contrast between the experiences of these migrants and those cited in Alexandrakis (2013, 94–98) is worth mentioning. Alexandrakis’ fieldwork covers the period of 2006-2011 where violence against migrants was relatively low. Within this background, as Alexandrakis explains, football game provided migrants the opportunity to build social bonds and express agency. While these dimensions were not totally absent during my fieldwork (see also the religious subjectivity section), the changing material context made it increasingly difficult for migrants to exercise such collective agency in open public.

7. All included migrants in this section are Muslims.

8. In Athens, despite the existence of a large population of Muslim migrants, there is no official mosque, making Athens the only European capital without a Mosque and demonstrating the level of “fear of Islam” (Sakellariou 2017). Muslims pray in underground makeshift mosques that are converted from basement apartments. There are over 100 makeshift mosques in Athens, which are run by unofficial imams.

9. No interviews were conducted with migrants who converted to Christianity.

10. For a detailed analysis of Afghan’s journey to Turkey see Kaytaz (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.