From: Journal of Modern Greek Studies
Volume 33, Number 1, May 2015
pp. 187-190 | 10.1353/mgs.2015.0006
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Heath Cabot’s On the Doorstep of Europe is an ethnographic study of the asylum system in Greece. The book traces the ways asylum seekers, service providers, and bureaucrats attempt to make sense of the multiple and challenging dilemmas of governance, information, ethics, rights discourse, humanitarian practice, and sociability that emerge through this legal process posed by both human rights law and European governance. By focusing on the work of the Athens Refugee Service (ARS), an asylum advocacy nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Athens, Cabot investigates the tragedies of asylum in Greece: ethical life, work of judgment, and new possibilities for belonging and citizenship resulting from political violence. Despite the argument’s lack of clarity in some sections, the book underlines the fact that what matters are not simply the observations made by the author that might be newsworthy and relevant, but the lessons and conclusions drawn from these observations on how aid candidates and service providers reshape dominant images of deservingness, victimhood, and vulnerability from within systems of aid distribution.
Through the MSS v. Belgium and Greece asylum-seeking case described in chapter 1, Cabot illustrates that the inadequacies of the Greek asylum procedure should be understood within the wider framework of European governance mechanisms, including legislative, policy, and advocacy trends, regional histories of displacement, and often more global forms of violence and inequality that have positioned Greece in the margins of Europe. Concerning migration and asylum management, Greece’s moral and political marginality in Europe is inextricable from its position in Europe’s land and sea borders. Policies and practices aimed toward safeguarding the EU as an area devoted to freedom of movement, security, justice, human rights, and humanitarian values interact with internal policing and legislative practices of Greece, which bears the main responsibility for maintaining and protecting the EU borders, while migrants and refugees remain in legal limbo.
The second chapter investigates the everyday conditions, processes, and interactions in the Aliens and Immigration Directorate of the Athens and Attica Prefecture, where new applicants meet with the state regulatory authority through encounters with the police. Also, the so-called pink card (identity document) is examined as an entry point into the multiple forms of limbo that characterize asylum seeking in Greece. Cabot follows the pink card’s process from its bureaucratic production by the authorities, through its circulation in the everyday discussions and survival practices of asylum seekers, to its final disappearance at the end of the asylum process. The chapter shows how the document acquires diverse meanings and uses through the interactions of police, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers.
Chapter 3 explores how ARS workers and asylum seekers attempt to navigate the tragic dilemmas that characterize Greek NGO cultures of assistance. NGO workers offer assistance to some while they turn others away, as a result of limitations in labor power and resources, constraints of law and bureaucracy, and ARS institutional commitments. Cabot frequently deploys the notion of tragedy and tragic dilemmas, that is to say, dilemmas that she marks with the word “tragedy” in order to underscore the circumstances that block access to services, recognition, and protection supposedly available to refugees and that reflect the deep structural ambivalence in Greece regarding state and NGO responsibilities to provide services to refugees and asylum seekers. These dilemmas effectively destabilize both the services offered and the capacity to claim them. Not only do they produce restrictions to which NGO workers and asylum seekers must respond and adjust, but they also stimulate engagements through which all parties manage the dilemmas of the asylum process, the work of service provision, and the encounters between them.
The fourth chapter centers on the factors that are important in making eligibility or ineligibility decisions for ARS services by NGO professionals. These factors include empirical and subjective elements such as the opinions and feelings of the NGO professionals and the interpreters, as they emerge in the larger picture of each case.
Aid candidates and service providers shape and refigure dominant images of deservingness, victimhood, and vulnerability from within the system of aid distribution. Cabot tracks the dialogical production of pictures of trafficking victims and unaccompanied minors. She analyzes the narrative and performative dimensions of the interview process and…
Volume 33, Number 1, May 2015
Table of Contents
Articles
Special Section on Modern Greek Studies and Public Scholarship
Yiorgos Anagnostou, Guest Editor
Introduction Modern Greek Studies and Public Scholarship: Intersections and Prospects
pp. 1-13 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0009
Public Scholarship and Greek America: Personal Reflections, Intellectual Vocations
pp. 15-23 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0013
The Academy in Crisis and Scholarship in the Public Sphere
pp. 25-35 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0017
Myths and the Academy: Greek Studies as a Form of Humanistic Enquiry
pp. 37-56 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0020
Response On the Road with Panza and Quixano: Ingenious Stories of the Public Humanities
pp. 57-60 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0001
Response Public Scholarship and Neoliberalism
pp. 61-66 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0004
Response Politicizing Modern Greek Studies
pp. 67-72 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0007
Modern Athens: Illuminating the “Shadows of the Ancestors”
pp. 73-103 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0011
Who Gets Translated and Why?: Anthologies of Twentieth-Century Greek Poetry in Poland
pp. 105-125 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0015
The Nation of Saints: The National Theological Rhetoric of Archbishop Makarios III (1913–1977)
pp. 127-153 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0019
From Resistance to Counterstate: The Making of Revolutionary Power in the Liberated Zones of Occupied Greece, 1943–1944
pp. 155-184 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0000
Book Reviews
The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom by Tatjana Aleksić (review)
pp. 185-187 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0003
On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece by Heath Cabot (review)
pp. 187-190 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0006
Capricious Borders: Minority, Population, and Counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey by Olga Demetriou (review)
pp. 191-193 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0010
Daddy’s War: Greek American Stories by Irene Kacandes (review)
pp. 193-195 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0014
History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction by Gerasimus Katsan (review)
pp. 195-198 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0018
Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the “Long 1960s” in Greece by Kostis Kornetis (review)
pp. 198-200 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0021
Greek Americans: Struggle and Success by Peter C. Moskos and Charles C. Moskos (review)
pp. 201-202 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0002
Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia by Ayşe Özil (review)
pp. 203-204 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0005
Greek Paradoxes: Patronage, Civil Society and Violence ed. by Katerina Rozakou and Eleni Gkara (review)
pp. 205-207 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0008
Colonizing the Greek Mind? The Reception of Western Psychotherapeutics in Greece ed. by Charles Stewart (review)
pp. 208-210 | DOI: 10.1353/mgs.2015.0012