‘How did you get in?’ Research access and sovereign power during the ‘migration crisis’ in Greece

Abstract

The ‘migration crisis’ has turned migration governance in Greece into a popular research field. At the same time, it has triggered the reconfiguration of sovereign powers with an assemblage of disparate actors engaging in addressing the ‘crisis’. This excess of sovereign power has contributed to a migration maze. In this article I use access to the migration field and in particular the Moria camp in Lesbos, as the lens for an exploration of these fragmented and emergent sovereign powers. In particular, I reflect on the materiality of my research permit and the figure of the humanitarian gatekeeper. As I show, any research access attempt encounters different spheres and agents of jurisdiction and responsibility. This fragmentation provides opportunities for research access, but it also poses methodological and epistemological questions. I finally interrogate the question of research access and knowledge production itself. In particular, I argue that the abundance of accounts does not necessarily produce a more thorough and in‐depth picture, but only a limited one, like the access that enables it. As researchers of a blossoming crisis scholarship, we are often complicit in epistemologically reproducing the very border we seek to scrutinise through our critical work.

Springing Amir

“…Th e turn to recognizing the migrant's "journey" (Brigden and Mainwaring 2016) is concurrent with researchers committing to continuous/retroactive and informed consent, sharing stories before publication, and observing refl exive or situated standpoints (see, e.g., Clark-Kazak 2009Rozakou 2019). Totemic analytic conventions, concepts, and categories are being interrupted by intersectional and feminist methodologies (Andrijasevic 2009;Conlon 2011;Johnson 2013;Mountz 2011;Mountz et al 2013) and ethnographic approaches (e.g., Andersson 2014;Bosworth 2014;Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015;Griffi ths 2014a;S.…”

Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration

“…From 2013 to 2015, the Moria camp operated as a RIC under the authority of the Greek Police and, in late 2015, the Ministry of Migration Policy. Over the next few years, the Moria camp became more and more an assemblage of diverse agents and jurisdictions, a place of confinement and a site of violent and unruly order (Rozakou, 2019). 5 During the 'long summer of migration' of 2015, the Moria camp primarily functioned as a first arrival point.…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…The denial of access to key areas of migration data by state authorities is revealed by Rosset and Achermann (2019) to be a considered and strategic bureaucratic process establishing cognitive authority over a field in which researchers are prevented from reaching the emic or the para‐ethnographic in the representations at work within. Greece has been in the eye of the migration hurricane (Rozakou 2019) with clear evidence of a fragmentation of governance being the consequence of the state being overwhelmed by the sheer scale, not simply of the refugee crisis (more than 800,000 refugees crossing the Aegean Sea in 2015) but of the vast humanitarian landscape that has emerged in its wake. Ethnographic research carried out in a refugee holding camp on Lesbos reveals an assemblage that, due to its disjointed character, produces illegibility, a form of systematic chaos and unruly order.…”