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'They won't let us come, they won't let us stay, they won't let us leave’. Liminality in the Aegean borderscape: The case of irregular migrants, volunteers and locals on Lesvos
Malmö högskola, Faculty of Culture and Society (KS), Department of Global Political Studies (GPS).
2016 (English)In: Human Geography, ISSN 1942-7786, Vol. 9, no 2, p. 35-46Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This paper draws on ethnographic observations along the south-eastern Mediterranean informal migration route through the Aegean Sea. I focus on the Greek border island of Lesvos as the central stage where the European crisis of asylum has been recently unfolding. In the absence of coherent national and European asylum policies, newly arrived migrants, refugees, and receiving communities (comprised mainly of local residents and volunteers from mainland Greece and Europe) are left to cope with and against each other, leading to multiple personal and collective passages. In this interstitial transit space, subjectivities are made and remade through their participation and resistance to the ongoing production of EU borders. I suggest that liminality provides a useful lens through which to understand the perplexing ‘time-spaces’ and interactions between multiple actors involved in the teetering asylum system on the margins of Europe. I argue that, through various actors’ experiences on Lesvos as a complex social site, liminality emerges as a form of sustained social marginality and exclusion that extends beyond Lesvos itself. The protracted and broadened crisis context in which asylum-seekers and receiving communities of locals and volunteers on Lesvos find themselves provides a salient example of the gradual socio-spatial and temporal ‘stretching’ of liminality from a transitional phase towards a condition of permanent and portable liminality experienced at both the individual and the collective level, and both at and away from borders.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage , 2016. Vol. 9, no 2, p. 35-46
Keywords [en]
Lesvos, borderscape, asylum-seekers, liminality, rite of passage, volunteers
National Category
Social Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-1603DOI: 10.1177/194277861600900204Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85106586770Local ID: 22367OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-1603DiVA, id: diva2:1398334
Available from: 2020-02-27 Created: 2020-02-27 Last updated: 2023-12-01Bibliographically approved
In thesis
1. Affective Borderscapes: Constructing, Enacting and Contesting Borders across the Southeastern Mediterranean
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Affective Borderscapes: Constructing, Enacting and Contesting Borders across the Southeastern Mediterranean
2019 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In the wake of a sociopolitically volatile era, which is increasingly characterized by the intensive and extensive proliferation of borders, the management of borders and migration are considered as predominantly rational and dispassionate processes. Their functions and filtering mechanisms, however, are increasingly underpinned by the instrumental top-down exertion of affective power and by the cultivation of emotional dispositions among political communities. At the same time, compliance to- or contestation of these forces also manifests ‘from below’ through transgressive patterns of human mobilities and mobilisations around borders, which are similarly affectively-driven. This Ph.D. dissertation examines the impact of various actors’ affective practices on the construction, enactment and contestation of affective borderscapes in the southeastern Mediterrane-an and its Aegean appendix, and explores how those processes manifest and link up at multiple scales across space and time from a perspective that accounts for the affective dimensions of border regimes aside from their legal, infrastructural and political causes and consequences. Through long-term ethnographic engagement with communities and individuals that have been passing through or inhabiting several locations along the much-fraught Aegean borders in times of major socioeconomic and geopolitical upheaval, this thesis formulates and puts forth the concept of affective borderscapes. They are liminal, overlapping landscapes that function as contact zones and as charged fields of affective interaction between assemblages of animate and inanimate actors. As an original contribution to border and migration studies, this concept bears great potential for the acquisition and mobilisation of knowledge, as well as for the design and application of human-centered policy and practice.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Malmö University, 2019. p. 355
Series
Dissertation Series in Migration, Urbanisation, and Societal Change ; 10
Keywords
Migration, Affect, Borders, Borderscapes, Mediterranean, Greece, Aegean Sea, Lesvos, Refugees
National Category
Social Sciences
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-7434 (URN)10.24834/isbn.9789178770250 (DOI)30226 (Local ID)978-91-7877-024-3 (ISBN)978-91-7877-025-0 (ISBN)30226 (Archive number)30226 (OAI)
Public defence
2019-12-06, Niagara Hörsal B 02, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1, Malmö, 10:15 (English)
Opponent
Available from: 2020-02-28 Created: 2020-02-28 Last updated: 2024-02-23Bibliographically approved

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Tsoni, Ioanna

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