The asylum process in Greece, as I approach it here, is a venue for a series of “social dramas” (Gluckman 2006 [1965]; Llewellyn and Hoebel 2002; Turner 1967, 1974) currently taking place in Athens around questions of governance, citizenship, rights, and ethics. While I recognize the limits of “social drama” as an analytical device, including its potentially teleological character and tendency to convey a stage-based theory of social change, this model highlights some important elements of the relationship between formal law and the wider sociopolitical processes that it both reflects and affects. For Turner (1974: 37), “social dramas” entail the “contestation” and, in many cases, transformation of dominant frameworks of social organization; they are “aharmonic or disharmonic processes, arising in conflict situations.” This analytical framework underscores how legal processes are often venues for the exposure and contestation of prevalent forms of structural pressure and violence, which often go unacknowledged.
Turner (1974: 39) writes that particularly during periods of “crisis,” when dominant social and political formations are turned upside down, it is “least easy to don masks and pretend that nothing is rotten in the village.” The krisi of asylum makes visible a number of underlying and perhaps irresolvable tensions in Europeanization and rights politics more broadly: how to reconcile humanitarian and security concerns, how to distinguish refugees from other kinds of migrants, how to rearticulate the insides and outsides of the Greek nation-state, and the question of what kind of polities Greece and Europe are becoming. Asylum claimants, bureaucrats, and service providers engage these dilemmas through their face-to-face encounters with each other. Some of these tensions are peculiar to Greece at this particular historical moment. These include the problems of EU governance in the arenas of immigration and asylum, and the often untenable positions in which Greek institutions currently find themselves in sites of entrenched geopolitical and economic marginality.
More deeply, however, the dramas I explore highlight how ethically engaged individuals face the tensions embedded in an international regime of rights-based protection that, even in supranational contexts, depends on nation states for its realization. This tension is endemic to the “national order of things” that Liisa Malkki (1995b) so artfully elucidates, and which Hannah Arendt (1976 [1951]) outlines with striking clarity. At least in theory, asylum, based on the framework of international human rights, is for those who have been driven from home countries and must now seek protection in the territory of a foreign nation state. Yet in practice, this national order persistently goes awry. People fleeing violence often cannot make it across borders, giving rise to that anomalous category of the “internally displaced person.” Meanwhile, barring the willingness or capacity of nation states to offer protection, there has been a proliferation of no-man’s lands, camps, and other non-nationalized spaces, where refugees are confined to zones of limbo as they await resettlement, processing, and the distribution of services (Agamben 1998; Hyndman 2000). When claimants do, however, find a way to cross borders, to a nation state deemed by the international community to be “safe” and capable of providing protection, refuge is awarded by the very virtue of their being “alien”: a citizen of another nation where citizenship has failed. Thus, while the law of protection is grounded on an ahistorical vision of humanity, a “universal” citizenship invoked through the regime of international human rights, this framework simultaneously reinscribes the refugee’s “alien” origins. At stake in asylum law, then, is the question of who among these “alien” subjects are worthy of or entitled to refuge.
I explore how this problem at the heart of asylum law is expressed and engaged both through the encounters of everyday life and in the practical concerns of asylum claimants, adjudicators, and those who take on the mediating role of service provision. I argue that the asylum procedure, in its formal application, presents applicants and decision makers with “tragic” dilemmas. “Tragedy,” as I discuss it both later in this Introduction and in greater detail in Chapter 3, entails the material, legal, and political constraints that limit claims to protection (see Calabresi and Bobbitt 1978), as well as conflicting ethical commitments in the rendering of these judgments (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]). Decision makers who assess asylum applications, in both governmental and nongovernmental spheres, must balance material limits to their capacities to offer protection with the demands of law and policy, as well as more fluid ethical concerns that may reflect cultural practices, affective modes, and dominant notions of right action.
These problems of ethics are also about citizenship: who gets to make claims to belonging and entitlement and on what grounds—a question that has powerful implications for the claimant’s quality of life and even life itself. As adjudicators, claimants, and service providers negotiate the tragedies of asylum in Greece, they also redelineate the insides and outsides of the body politic. These ethical engagements, generated in the space of law, reflect changing notions of who inhabits the viable center of the polis, and who is cast to its margins or beyond. They also point to new possibilities for who might be brought into the topography of the city itself, becoming “kindly” rather than merely “alien.” As Gluckman (2006 [1965]) and more recently, Herzfeld (1982) and Ngai (2004) show, though in very different ways, it is the “alien” or “stranger” (in Greek, ksenos; ξένος) who forces the body politic to (re)constitute and rearticulate itself.5
Such reshaping of the body politic in relationship to the “other” occurs across multiple scales and entails a constantly shifting constellation of who or what is near or far, inside or outside. Writes Simmel (1950: 405): “The stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us.” This telescopic reorienting of relationships between inside and outside, self and other, unfolds across global, European, and national scales, transecting the shifting topography of Athens and sites of face-to-face encounter. Greece—its own European membership on trial—has become a kind of test case for European dreams of the free movement of people and capital. The Greek asylum system thus speaks directly to the failures and potentialities of European citizenship: Who can make legitimate claims to belonging and entitlement in Europe, and what does this entail? And with a European migration “apparatus” that attempts the incongruous melding of security with the values of freedom and justice (Feldman 2011), what are the possibilities and limits of rights and international protection? Further, with regard to global landscapes of human rights and humanitarian intervention, are there ways of responding to claims for refuge that invoke a more flexible and inclusive image of the “generally human” that pays appropriate attention to both difference and common ground (Goodale 2009)? What alternative visions of humanity, ethics, and citizenship might tragedy unveil?
The asylum process and its adjudicative logics also entail a wealth of epistemic practices, through which both claimants and decision makers seek to make sense of each other, the law, the state, and bureaucracy, including bureaucratic tools such as documentation, interviewing, form filling, and file making. Yet far from being simply technocratic, these practices rely heavily on more indeterminate forms of knowledge production: storytelling and narrative; pictures, images, and other aesthetic forms; and rumor and fantasy. These creative and fluid knowledge practices emerge, I suggest, from profound epistemic problems embedded in the Greek asylum process. Gaps in power between decision makers and asylum seekers also entail gaps in knowledge of each by the other (Laing 1983 [1967]). Furthermore, as I highlight in Chapter 2, the Greek state and its tools of regulation are deeply mystified, even for service providers and bureaucrats, who may be even more perplexed than asylum seekers themselves. The asylum procedure thus readily weds bureaucracy with practices of what I describe as mythopoesis or myth-making, through which all parties seek to make sense of radical uncertainty, unpredictability, and even absurdity.
Asylum seekers, adjudicators, and service providers are engaged in trying to acquire usable knowledge of the asylum process, each other, and their everyday lives. Since the “real,”