On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot

      Preface

      This book is about the regime of political asylum in Greece and how asylum seekers, aid workers, and bureaucrats alike have sought to make sense of the dilemmas, often insurmountable, posed by both human rights law and European governance. It has been almost ten years since I first began research on this project. My first research trip to Athens was during the lead-up to the Olympics of 2004, when the city had been polished, cleaned, and marketed as a revived European capital. Athens now faces economic instability and increasing poverty, often brutal policing, and race-related violence. The story of asylum in Greece precedes the inception of the current Greek financial crisis, but many of the themes are similar, including Greece’s marginality in Europe, the disciplining forces of Europeanization, and the ways persons and communities navigate seemingly impossible situations. I believe there are important lessons to be learned through what I will later describe as the “tragedies” of asylum in Greece: about ethical life, the work of judgment, and new possibilities for belonging and citizenship in the wake of political violence. There is also something ineffable but equally crucial that may be found: the haunting, but often powerful ways in which people come together, perhaps only fleetingly, to create attachments, intimacies, and even justice.

      Three particular dilemmas of writing deserve mention at the outset. The first is the problem of how to take appropriate account of the Greek sovereign debt crisis without making it the assumed telos of all the events I convey in this book. The institutional instabilities and sociopolitical ferments that have emerged in Greece since 2008 have demanded that Greek, European, and international publics rethink the impacts of Europeanization on both migration management and fiscal policies. Here I show that while the financial crisis was certainly not predictable, it invokes and even replicates longstanding discourses and patterns of governance, which have been similarly problematic in the arenas of immigration and asylum. I also hope that my analysis will show that there are other pasts and potential futures beneath the dominant one of crisis that are equally important to note. The “crisis” is certainly a crucial set of events at the present moment, and just as importantly, it is a powerful trope through which many have come to describe and apprehend their worlds. But the future is open: no one knows what will happen next—economically, socially, or politically—and chances are it will be something that none of us can imagine.

      Second, I attempt to highlight the dramatic, even artistic components of ethnographic practice and writing without simply celebrating them. I seek to recount stories in a way that, like tragic drama, will bring the reader in, and spark active emotional and intellectual engagement. Biehl and Locke (2010: 336) liken ethnography to art in its capacity “to invoke neglected human potentials and to expand the limits of understanding and imagination.” Perhaps most importantly, they underscore (drawing on Deleuze 1998) how ethnography (like all art) must speak to an audience that has not yet emerged but which perhaps is emergent: “a people yet to come.” I do not hope to accomplish such a feat, yet I take this as an important reminder of what we are really doing here and why writing can be important. As Iain Chambers (2008:19) articulates, writing “seeks to open a fold in time to be invaded by other times, by others,” with the potential to create openings not just into overlapping and divergent histories but also into possible futures. I thus also draw on the potential