As part of an 8-month engagement in one of the ‘hotspot islands’ in Greece, Ignacia Ossul Vermehren shares insights into how FGM/C is an invisible yet pressing issue for female asylum seekers.

Despite its deadly and widespread presence female genital mutilation/cutting^[1] (FGM/C) remains a taboo, particularly in Europe. Managing a Women’s & Girls Safe Space and collaborating with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Samos, Greece, I saw how big an issue this is, and how little is currently understood about it.

FGM/C is a type of harmful traditional practice – grouped with child marriage and virginity testing – which involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia or other injury to female genital organs for non-medical reasons. Present in 92 countries, it is estimated that at least 200 million women and girls have undergone FGM/C. It is entangled in complex relations with culture, economy, politics, and religion, in many cases is a vehicle for women to get married, and thus access resources and acceptance in their communities.

However, FGM/C is a violation of the human rights of women and girls, and it is grounds for International Protection for asylum seekers. In practice, though, despite an increase in the percentage of women and girls potentially affected by FGM/C who arrive in Europe, there are multiple obstacles for survivors to claim asylum and receive the medical, legal and psychological support they need.

In a hostile environment in which violence against asylum seekers consistently increases in Europe – including against women and girls and boys – “the practice of FGM is unfortunately often instrumentalised to serve an anti-migrant and racist agenda.” As a result, upholding human rights has become a challenge, and more needs to be done to provide consistent and dignified support for women and girls in the asylum procedure.

Forced displacement – why women leave home

Whilst women’s motives for leaving their communities amidst humanitarian crises are not dissimilar to those of men, the effects of violence, war, displacement, climate change have specific costs for women. An increase in gender-based violence (both conflict related and domestic violence), early child marriage due to scarce resources in a household, and deprioritising of food consumption for women and girls, are just a few.

There are several reasons why only one fifth of asylum seekers in Greece in 2021 were women and girls. In a long and difficult journey, women are at a higher risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking than men and tend to have fewer financial means to pay for the high cost of the trip. Adolescents, older women and women with disabilities are at an even higher risk. Hence, women are less likely to take expensive, high-risk routes into Europe, such as through Turkey and Libya and on to the Greek islands, The Balkans or Italy. Instead, women tend to move within their country of origin, constituting a much larger proportion of internally displaced population and/or settle in neighbouring countries. Being in the minority means that women’s needs are      deprioritised.

By the end of 2021 and first semester of 2022, most of the women arriving to the Greek island of Samos – the first of the Aegean islands to build a Closed-Controlled Reception Centre as part of the  ‘hotspots approach’  – were from Somalia, Sierra Leone, DRC, Chad and Cameroon. All are countries widely affected by FGM/C.

“When we get our period, we get sick and it is difficult to move”

For five months between November 2021 and March 2022, I worked for Samos Volunteers managing the only Women & Girls Safe Space (WGSS) for asylum seekers and refugees on the island. WGSS is a well-known strategy in humanitarian action to facilitate support, information, and empowerment of women in emergencies, where sharing concerns and finding collective solutions is a key goal. In this context, many women raised specific concerns around FGM/C and access to healthcare.

In a series of participatory workshops on access to health care^[2] women identified the key issues that affect survivors. They mentioned frequent urinary tract infections, extreme pain during periods, complications during childbirth, difficulties having sex and depression among others. They said:

“In the camp the bed bunks are very high, they are difficult to reach if you have your period”

“When we get our period, we get sick and it is difficult to move.”[3]

“The women in the camp are suffering because we don’t get the healthcare we need.”

 

The fact that most women raised FGM/C as an important issue provides important, if anecdotal, evidence of how widespread the issue is in the asylum seekers’ community. However, according to UNHCR, during 2017 alone, 24,000 women and girls could potentially have already been affected by FGM at the time of their asylum application in the EU.

Not all women were against the practice, but all of them agreed that it had serious health consequences for their bodies, particularly for those that had undergone infibulation^[4]. Some went even further and spoke out against the practice altogether, stating that they wouldn’t not do it to their daughters:

“No more girls should go through female genital mutilation, it needs to stop.”

 

The asylum system is broken – and it is failing women seriously

Claiming asylum is a human right. The Greek Asylum Service conducts interviews to identify those people that should be granted asylum based on their vulnerabilities. However, as seen in Samos and in further evidence from the End FGM European network, there are serious obstacles for granting international protection to survivors of FGM/C.

The case of Samos showed the following:

• Lack of information available for asylum seekers: Women claiming asylum tended to be unaware that they were entitled to international protection if they experienced physical and/or psychological consequences due to FGM. The grassroots legal NGOs working on the island provide information, however their capacity is limited and do not focus on gender issues. For example, they said that women tend to contact them less than men to inquire about legal information.
• Interview mechanism is not geared to support FGM/C survivors: Asylum seekers had the perception that interviewers were not trained to discuss the topic. For those that did mention it in their interview, they did not know if this was translated correctly by the interpreter or if it was a topic that the interviewer had been trained for. Furthermore, applicants need to bring this up in the first interview or use the 5 days after their asylum interview to submit new evidence, after which FGM/C will not be considered in their application, an incredible tight deadline for women that have just arrived in Europe after a long journey.
• Evidence of physical and psychological consequences is hard to gather: Being a survivor of FGM/C is not sufficient to receive international protection in Greece, and furthermore the law states that vulnerable persons “should be certified by a medical certificate issued by a public hospital or by an adequately trained doctor of a public sector health care service provider”. This is challenging as hospital certificates takes a longer time and although MSF could provide with a certificate for the interview, this may be not deemed enough.
• Lack of awareness of the medical, legal and psychological staff: There also seems to be a lack of training for medical and other professionals involved about how to communicate, diagnose and support survivors working in the hospital.
• Women have normalised it and/or are ashamed: For women coming from countries or communities affected by FGM/C, the health difficulties associated tend to be normalised, and thus are not in the forefront when discussing their health and wellbeing during the asylum interview. Some said that they did not know that it was relevant and/or a practice known in Europe.

As a consequence, FGM/C tends to go unnoticed in the asylum application process – and thus, women and girls, do not receive the protection and support they need.

More coordination and gender-sensitive support is needed for female asylum seekers

Collaborating with MSF in Samos during April to June 2022, we developed a dossier based on feedback from survivors to train and raise awareness of FGM/C within the humanitarian response. The purpose was to provide top line information to female asylum seekers about the support available as soon as they arrive to the island. The trainings also included a session for the NGOs medical staff on the island, raising awareness to Health Promoters in MSF and working closely with the affected community. Developing a dossier like this is a fundamental first step to highlight the importance of an issue that is under researched, under implemented and misunderstood in the Greek asylum seeker system.

Despite this initial effort, more coordinated work is needed across the five ‘hotspot islands’ and mainland Greece to raise awareness, work hand-in-hand with survivors to develop more information and support sessions, train NGOs and State staff on the topic, and ultimately change the fact that women are not guaranteed consistent gender-sensitive treatment when they seek protection in Europe. As one of the participants raised in the workshop:

“We thought that in Europe we would get the respect that we deserve as women, but that has not been the case.”

__________

[1] The word “cutting”, avoiding the term “mutilation” on its own, is used by researchers and international development agencies to engage with the complexity of the practice in a more culturally sensitive manner.

[2] Workshops conducted during January and February 2022 with 20 women staying at the Closed-Controlled Reception Centre in Samos. They had arrived in the last 1 to 6 months. The participants were between 17-45 years old and all of them were from African countries.

[3] Quotes from women that participated in the workshops, they have all given their consent to publish them. Their names, ages and nationalities have not been used to protect their identities.

[4] Infibulation or type 3 is the narrowing of the vaginal orifice with creation of a covering seal by cutting and apposition the labia minora and/or the labia majora, with or without excision of the clitoris.

__________

Ignacia Ossul Vermehren is currently deployed to Ukraine as the Gender Coordinator for Oxfam. She holds a PhD from DPU-UCL.

By Rita Lambert, Ioanna Manoussaki-Adamopoulou and Jessie Sullivan

Apart from legal categories and physical markers delineating the limits of nation states and transnational configurations, borders are also socially productive places (Green 2010) fostering experimentations with collaborative models of coexistence. These often develop through cross-cultural, agentive practices that shape, challenge and reconfigure their effects. What kind of knowledge is being produced in borderscapes and how can it support more inclusive and sustainable futures? How and why is it threatened? How can we collect and use this knowledge to inform better migration policies and refugee reception?

Given that population displacement due to conflict and climate change is increasing, a qualitative analysis of borderwork is imperative for future planning. In the Hotspot action-research project[1] we seek to answer these questions by drawing from the experience of five Greek islands close to Turkey, where the life of inhabitants has been shaped by the humanitarian reception crisis that developed within their shores. Following the arrival of over 1 million people escaping conflict, violence and unsafe living conditions in 2015, the islands of Chios, Kos, Leros, Lesvos and Samos (Figure 1) were designated as ‘Hotspots’ by the EU, becoming one of Europe’s more securitized borderfronts. Approaching the five islands as a comparative interactive system and involving independent care practitioners working in them as project partners, we attempt to map the evolution of border processes and practices, using participatory research methodologies that focus on reflexivity and interconnection.

 

 

Bordermaking, innovation and displacement of knowledge

Bordermaking is a process in constant flux, marked by violence, enclosures, shifts in notions and practices of care and hospitality, of legal concepts and categories such as internationally defined rights, as well as by resistance and social innovation. As a new mode of governance in the Aegean, it has had profound social, political, and environmental consequences for local societies, and for the neoliberal management of migration more broadly. Historically, the Aegean islands have been loci of transnational encounter, and in the past seven years they have fostered multiple experimentations with innovative, sustainable, and re-humanising care practices in response to insufficient humanitarian/governmental aid and increasing bordering restrictions.

The care innovations that have been identified by our project partners in the research (Figure 2), share five key characteristics that are important for designing care provision in wider contexts : (1) inclusivity – connected with the ability to both provide for communities and include them in decision making; (2) equitable and fair participation of recipients in the care initiative; (3) embeddedness in the physical, economic, and social environment to benefit the local context – wellbeing, economy, and ecosystem; (4) capacity building, both short- and long-term of stakeholders involved; and (5) sustainability, by centring flexibility and adaptation capacity to overcome challenges and remain operative over time. Understanding how these characteristics are maintained within an increasingly hostile environment and how people in the Aegean experience and mitigate the effects of the EU’s evolving border policies, hold broader lessons for socially sustainable practices of living with migration.

 

 

Despite the depth of knowledge and experience that exists in this context, we observe that this valuable knowledge is being displaced. Analysing the interaction between top-down and bottom-up practices by plotting them on a timeline spanning from 2015 until now, the research evidenced how the institutionalisation of the hotspot approach goes hand in hand with increasing bureaucratisation and criminalisation of solidarity networks and other independent care initiatives. In parallel, we also observe that the presence of Frontex – the EU Border Agency – on the islands since 2015 has not prevented border-crossing deaths and illegal pushbacks, which have instead radically increased since 2019, highlighting the crucial role of independent practitioners in monitoring legal violations.

Prior to 2015, migrant detention facilities operated on some of the islands. Border-crossers were largely treated by authorities as illegal and were swiftly transported to the mainland, where they had a chance to apply for asylum, work undocumented until they were able to apply for residency papers, or continue their journey into Northern Europe at their own risk. While the islands acted as the physical EU border and entry point, the legal border defining the first country of entry in the EU as the one a person could legally claim asylum in was instituted in Brussels,[2] and was implemented in Athens.  Following the arrival of an unprecedented number of refugees in 2015, local authorities and the few international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) operating on the islands at the time, were unequipped and unable to effectively respond to their multiple needs (Rozakou, 2017). Civil society stepped in to provide emergency care, organising projects in solidarity with border-crossers, that further diversified with the arrival of international volunteers. Dozens, if not hundreds of independent non-profit organisations mobilised or were created for this purpose. The European Commission responded to this infrastructural gap with the introduction of the hotspot approach, coming into effect in 2016 with the opening of five Reception and Identification Centres (RICs) on Chios, Kos, Leros, Lesvos and Samos. It was coupled with the release of humanitarian funds through set contracts with listed INGOs and a selected number of national NGOs, that subsequently begun operating on the islands.

The hotspot was conceived as a camp structure and a legal mechanism for the registration of people on the move, where all relevant EU agencies – Frontex, EASO, Europol and Eurojust – were concentrated. While its proposed purpose was a more effective and humane approach to migration management, the signing of the EU-Turkey agreement in March 2016 recognising Turkey as a ‘safe third country’ for the return non-Syrian nationals, imposed illegal geographical movement restrictions to incoming migrants, turning RICs into captivity devices and the islands into a liminal territory through the suspension of their rights (Papoutsi et al. 2018). This led to the subsequent entrapment of thousands of people in dehumanizing and lethal living conditions in camps such as Moria for indeterminate periods of time, paving the way for a systemic adoption of illegal pushback tactics[3], and more recently, for the construction of prison-like closed camp facilities.

 

Through state-enforced institutionalisation of care provision, the role of independent NGOs and civil society groups is intentionally diminished, though many recognised needs are still not covered. Moreover, several independent aid workers supporting refugees were criminalised as ‘human traffickers’. As a result of increasing criminalisation and restricted access to the new closed camps, many independent NGOs have recently stopped operating. These escalating hostile conditions have created an anti-social environment where migrants, volunteers, and local people on the hotspot islands have become less able to work together sustainably, with vital knowledge about service provision and the migration experience of the hotspot approach being ‘lost’ with each person who moves away or moves on.

 

Participatory archiving through networking

A qualitative analysis of the evolution of the securitization/care border nexus does not only salvage a piece of transnational world history, but also allows us to envision more sustainable futures rooted in the praxis of the present. Beyond documenting institutional and policy shifts, it is imperative to record the multiple perspectives and experiences of the social actors involved in them overtime, to recognise their long-term social effects. Archiving and critically analysing this transient knowledge can, in turn, inform the design of better policy and care provision. However, conducting research in situations in constant flux, such as this one, presents several methodological and ethical challenges. The continuous turn-around of people on the move and many of the care actors themselves, puts knowledge on innovative practices that carry important leanings, at risk. The increasing criminalisation of both refugees and independent civic actors adds extra pressure to an already volatile context, pushing us to think beyond the notion of ‘doing no harm’, towards devising methodologies that promote sustainable and supportive research practices.

Adopting an engaged, participatory approach to archiving that involves local actors as knowledge producers can help us identify knowledge gaps, co-design locally relevant research categories and produce spaces for collective reflection that are often lacking in emergency contexts. Research approached in this way can contribute to better archiving practices in rapidly shifting contexts and to processes of healing through collective remembrance centring marginalised voices. It can also support resilience, allowing for challenging experiences to be unpacked and reflected upon in a controlled and caring environment. This engaged approach to knowledge production can lead to the creation of sustainable practitioner networks by connecting actors through continuous knowledge exchange, action and advocacy coordination across islands, civic society, humanitarian and academic spaces.

Archiving through networking was a central research method from the start of the Hotspot action-research project; from the initial stage of identifying relevant analytical categories, through to data collection and analysis. The core research team network involved foreign and native cross-disciplinary academic researchers and independent care practitioners working on the five islands. The latter were selected based on the independent and holistic nature of the projects they worked in and their current knowledge of the bordering context. We subsequently met regularly online over several weeks to share experiences, ideas and epistemological lenses and co-establish the research framework. In order to document the evolution of the hotspot approach we adopted a longitudinal, essentially decolonising, method that materialised in the collective construction of a timeline spanning from 2015 until the spring of 2022, that included the different organisations that operated on the islands, alongside key local, regional and national events, policy and political shifts and human rights violations (Video 1).

 

Video 1: Extract from timeline showing main events in each of the five islands and the evolution of the hotspot approach and changes to RICs.

 

For data collection on each island, project partners mobilised active and former local care networks and networked across boundaries, acting as and reaching through other gate keepers, former care practitioners and displaced people, populating the timeline with multiple and diverse temporal accounts. In that way, the timeline acts both as a reconstruction of the evolution of bordering processes and as a space of shared memory for each island, including local voices and those of people that have lived and worked on them, that have shaped and have been shaped by the bordering experience. Although certainly incomplete, it allows for a cross-comparison between islands and a reading of the dialectical interaction between policy shifts and their on-the-ground effects over time, which can be analysed in several ways. For the purpose of this project, we focused on a qualitative analysis of the development of care provision, colour-coding data based on the type of care provided and their organisational form; solidarity, grassroots humanitarian, EU-funded, governmental, etc. This allowed us to understand the kind of needs that were identified by the different actors, the various ways that care provision was organised and how it was affected by subsequent policy changes.

The feedback on the method of collecting data and archiving through networking from each island, was overwhelmingly positive. New care providers had the chance to familiarise themselves with older practices and care actors, bringing them together into a fertile dialogue that validated previously ‘silenced’ experiences and allowed healing through collective reflection. An expanded network focusing on alliance-building across islands and partners was established during our physical workshops in Athens, where we invited academics from the Aegean Observatory into the conversation, that have the capacity to actively maintain and strengthen this alliance for the future. Our discussions focused on new learnings from collected data and on how we can work together to mitigate the effects of increasing bordering hostility through coordinated monitoring and advocacy.

 

 

Conclusion

Exposing the unorthodox colonial practices that continue to disenfranchise refugees, local people and territories becomes pertinent, as displacement defines the future. Placing particular attention on how knowledge erasures occur unintentionally, but also as part and parcel of a bordering strategy that institutionalizes the hotspot approach, is key for exposing and understanding ‘colonial’ tactics and raising awareness on what is at stake. In the case of the Aegean islands, at stake is the loss of a wealth of knowledge for doing things differently – more humanely, equitably, and sustainably. Recovering, protecting and continuously learning from this knowledge requires methodologies that feed into live archives, fostering and strengthening knowledge exchange networks and the inclusion of multiple voices, especially of those that are typically excluded or less heard in decision making. Beyond drawing learnings for policy design and care provision, such methodologies can also better support the reconstruction of the long-term social memory of contested and multifaceted governance periods marked by violent separation, as well as by cross-cultural contact, collective resistances and social ingenuity. Equally important when conducting research in such contexts, is the need to move beyond ‘doing no harm’, by conceiving research processes as healing and empowering for the different actors dealing with the effects of bordering on a daily basis.

Notes

[1] The project is led by Dr Rita Lambert with Ioanna Manoussaki-Adampoloulou and Jessica Sullivan from UCL, in collaboration with the University of Deusto (Dr Edurne Bartolome Peral) and five NGOs working in Greece (Samos Volunteers, Zaporeak, Echo100 Plus, Glocal Roots and Refugee Biriyani and Bananas).  The project was funded by UCL Knowledge Exchange and Innovation grant and aims to support institutional memory and create a platform for transdisciplinary knowledge exchange between academics, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CBOs) working in/and from Greece on the refugee crisis.

[2] For a critical approach to the Dublin regulations, see https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/MPIe-Asylum-DublinReg.pdf

[3] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/07/04/violent-and-illegal-migrant-pushacks-must-end-now-eu-warns-greece

References 

Green, S. 2010. ‘Performing Border in the Aegean’. Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 261–278.

Papoutsi, A., Painter, J., Papada, E., and Vradis, A. 2018. ‘The EC hotspot approach in Greece: creating liminal EU territory’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, pp.1-13. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2018.1468351

Rozakou, K. 2017. ‘Solidarity humanitarianism: The blurred boundaries of humanitarianism in Greece’.  Allegra Lab. https://allegralaboratory.net/solidarity-humanitarianism/

By Rita Lambert and Edurne Bartolome

As the EU welcomes tens of thousands Ukrainians fleeing war described by the UN as the largest humanitarian crisis Europe has seen since World War II, those escaping conflicts and hardships from places in the middle East or Africa, are denied similar humanitarian consideration and receive a more hostile treatment.  Although the double standards and racialised approach of the EU and US has been criticised by many, limited attention is placed on the experience of these ‘other’ asylum seekers entering into the EU reception system. Almost a decade since the start of the 2014-15 crisis, that saw the world’s refugee population increase by about 9 million according to United Nations Refugee Agency data, important lessons can be learnt from examining how the EU’s policy has evolved and how it materialises in particular places.

Greece has been a major gateway into the rest of Europe. In particular, the five Greek islands closer to Turkey- Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos- are the first port of entry and thus major sites for refugees reception. The EU’s designation of these five islands as ‘hotspots’ in the Aegean Sea since 2015, means that refugees and asylum seekers that arrive on these islands cannot continue their journey into Europe and are instead taken to camps to wait for the outcome of their applications. After the signature of the EU-Turkey Statement in March 2016, the hotspots essentially became centres for returns to Turkey and provided for the automatic detention of new arrivals for up to 25 days in Reception and Identification Centres (RICs), even if an asylum application has been initiated. In many cases, the time spent in the RICs can extend by many months or even years before a definitive decision is made on the asylum application.

Dehumanising spaces and practices of the hotspot approach

Examining the trajectory of the hotspot approach, it is difficult to ignore the adoption of increasingly dehumanising spaces and practices and how these become institutionalised over time. Having visited the sites of the previous and current camps (in Lesvos- Mória Refugee Camp (figure 1) and its successor Kara Tepe; in Samos- Vathi Camp, the ‘jungle’ (Figure 2) and reports from the new Zervou camp; in Chios- Vial Refugee camp), as well as the proposed sites for new RICs, we see increased restrictions on camp dwellers’ movements, their isolation from the social and economic life of the islands, and restrictions that impact their agency and autonomy. The newest camps are even more disconnected, out of sight, and disempowering for migrants, who are spatially and symbolically bundled with all that is ‘unwanted’. In Lesvos for example, the proposed RIC is located by the largest dump site, while in Chios it will be built in a rocky, barren and water scarce area in the Northeast of the island. The new phase of the hotspot approach, based on establishing remote and inaccessible camps away from city centres, is condemning thousands of displaced people (of all ages and backgrounds) to challenges that impact their ability to act in the present and also plan their future.

In Samos, the Zervou RIC has already been built. Despite numerous reports highlighting the dehumanising architecture and practices, it is hailed as the cutting edge of refugee reception and a prototype for others to emulate. The land is cleared of all trees and grass, tons of concrete has been poured to support the structures, and a gridded street layout facilitates surveillance and control. The environment is hostile and stark, devoid of social spaces or children’s play areas.

These RICs require considerable infrastructure investments to connect water, electricity, sewerage, and roads to their remote locations. The way they are planned clearly indicates their physical permanence. At the same time, they operate through a seemingly temporary logic. This logic is deeply problematic, as it manifests in processes that are dehumanising. This is evident in the practices adopted by RICs around food amongst others. Instead of preparing meals in situ, the camps depend on ready-made meals and a bottle of drinking water per person brought from outside. These meals do not always provide for a balanced diet and overlook recipients’ cultural or religious preferences. They also produce a lot of waste as one refugee highlights: “Every meal comes in a disposable container, so if we are getting it three times a day and there are 4000 people within the camp, that is 12,000 plastic containers that go straight to the island’s dumpsites every day since there is also no recycling”.

Despite the allocation of EU funds to meet camp dwellers’ needs, the food provided does not reach all who need it, and some might forego it because it is not in line with their religious beliefs. Hence many people still experience food and water poverty. Daily cooking in camps is prohibited. Accessing food is also difficult due to the limited resources asylum seekers might have, the remote locations of camps and the restrictions on movement. Asylum seekers and refugees are thus reduced to passive agents receiving food over months and even years, not being allowed to decide how to fulfil the basic human need of feeding themselves and their families. Moreover, the endless queues, held in cage-like structures, stretching for hours to receive the cooked food, contribute to the experience of dehumanisation, oppression, and control. As a refugee, who experienced life in the camps told us: “we have time for little else but queuing, it’s exhausting, demoralising and frustrating. Food can run out without everyone receiving their share and fights can easily break out in such a tense environment”. Authorities who work in the camp, as well as informal leaders within the camps, can exacerbate the unequal access to food and other supplies, also contributing to the experience of scarcity.

 

Rehumanising practices of solidarity care networks

Despite the fact that Greek authorities seeks to take full control of the refugee reception services, various NGOs and civil society organisations have stepped in as solidarity care networks to attend to the unmet needs of camp dwellers.  Although discouraged, and sometimes criminalised by the state, the NGOs we met take the role of service gap fillers. They also play an important part to counteract the hostile experience in RICs and rehumanise reception for migrants. There is thus a dehumanisation-rehumanisation dynamic in place. This plays out between the space within the camps and the space just a few meters from the tall fences where NGOs can operate out of full view.

The NGOs and grassroots organisations we visited highlight the importance of food beyond its nutritional value. Food and cooking represent not only activities of one’s daily life,  but are also implicit carriers of cultural and religious identity, deeply rooted in people’s daily practices and cultural codes. Cooking and eating together represents an important social moment where families sit and share their experiences and exchange thoughts. Food practices are acquired and transmitted through habitual socialisation processes, and find themselves at the core of culture. If families are prevented from cooking, and conversely, have to queue for prepared food, this daily cultural practice is interrupted, and a relevant part of identity and collective family life is negated.

To counteract this, the NGO Refugee Biryani and Bananas in Chios, delivers dry provisions, carefully selecting the type of food and tastes people want, so families have the ability and autonomy to cook. They can also choose the right moment for them to do so within the course of the day and eat according to their cultural codes. This is only possible where camps authorities turn a blind eye to cooking in camps or for those refugees and asylum seekers who have had the possibility to move to alternative accommodation outside the camps. When independent cooking is not possible and ready-made meals are the only option, the example of the NGO Zaporeak’s practice, displays a number of respectful considerations. Zaporeak hires people from the refugee community, who are trained and employed as chefs to cook food which is sensitive to people’s desirable tastes and customs. These NGOs take considerable care to build and maintain trust with asylum seekers, by providing a sense of predictability and fairness in the delivery process amongst other strategies. A lot of effort is placed on the micro-processes of re-socialising the experience of receiving food by exchanging smiles and greetings in the many different languages and by considerably shortening the length of queues, avoiding preferential treatment, and minimising the potential for conflict.

Although they fill an important gap, these NGOs are forced to adopt a temporary logic too, through practices based on emergency response rather than sustainable solutions that acknowledge that the displacement of people is here to stay. The supplementary cooked meals, for example, can only reach recipients if packed in disposable containers. This produces considerable waste which impacts the islands’ fragile ecosystem. As our interlocutors have also highlighted, when the process of supplying food is perpetually based on a crisis mode, opportunities to work closely with food producers and local vendors from the islands to enhance sustainability along the entire food value chain are missed. In the Greek hotspot islands, ‘crisis mode’ has been the dominant operational temporality for almost a decade now and is ongoing.

 

 

 

Working through the paradoxes of permanent temporariness

Dominant paradoxes are found within the hotspot approach, that have long term destructive consequences. Although hotspots give all indications of being permanent, their practices are still firmly lodged in the temporary logic of emergency. Consequently, this clash not only negatively affects asylum seekers and refugees’ mental health and self-worth, but also the islands’ fragile social, economic and ecological systems. The large amount of waste and intractable problems that this logic creates will accumulate over time on the islands but will also be felt across geographies, as the final destination countries will have to address migrants’ traumas that have been produced in the process.

The very conceptualisation and planning of the hotspots, and the RICs within them, through a permanent temporariness, is deeply problematic. The seemingly permanent, stark and controlling physical environment is socially violent and ultimately, dehumanising. Furthermore, the practices that are embedded in the temporary logic legitimise further dehumanisation to the point of institutionalising it with every iteration of this camp model. This also serves to deter newcomers and asylum seekers from remaining in the EU entry point and amplifies the message for those still coming to seek refuge, no matter their circumstances. It is therefore important to understand how the hotspot approach can become part and parcel of a hostile strategy for dissuading and preventing migrants from arriving into Europe. In this environment, we see that NGOs and grassroots organisations try to compensate through rehumanising practices. Despite their efforts, they are also forced to adopt a temporary logic that in turn can create unintended negative impacts. There is thus an intricate connective link between the top-down and bottom-up approaches. Although the two seem to be disassociated and to work in parallel, the top-down policies are preventing the bottom-up responses from becoming more sustainable.

Given that displacement of people due to conflict and climate change will continue, and is expected to grow across the globe in the following years, it is important to better understand the impacts of the hotspot approach as it guides the way that refugee movements will be dealt with more widely, producing rather than mitigating crisis. Many lessons can be drawn from solidarity care networks as they retain the flexibility, adaptability and creativity to respond to people’s shifting needs. The externalities produced by the present approach could be avoided if the role and lessons of solidarity care networks were recognised in EU policy and planning circles dealing with migration. The inclusion of these networks becomes vital to devise strategies for dignified, socially and environmentally sustainable refugee reception. Understanding the top-down and bottom-up approaches, their interaction and possibility for working together is key for enhancing a more just system.

This blog draws from the project ‘Understanding the impact of the ‘hotspot approach’ to tackle the refugee crisis on fragile island systems’ funded by the UCL Global Engagement Fund. The project is led by Dr Rita Lambert from the DPU-UCL, in collaboration with the University of Deusto (Dr Edurne Bartolome Peral) and five NGOs in Greece (Samos Volunteers, Zaporeak, Echo100 Plus, Glocal Roots and Refugee Biriyani and Bananas).

To cite this blog please use:

Lambert, R. and Bartolome, E. (2022) The paradox of refugee hotspots: De/Rehumanisation within logics of permanent temporariness, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Available online at: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dpublog/2022/05/18/the-paradox-of-refugee-hotspots-de-rehumanisation-within-logics-of-permanent-temporariness/

This is a short story from a contested place: the town of Kilkis, located 40 km’s away from the border between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) where, as in other rural areas in Greece, the economic crisis brought unemployment and depopulation. For its crucial location at the crossroads of migration routes, Kilkis has also been at the centre of the tragic events during the so called refugee crisis of 2015. Over a mid-November night that year, Macedonia, Croatia and Serbia decided, almost simultaneously, to close their borders and modify the conditions of entrance to those in transit towards Northern Europe.

Thousands of people found themselves stranded in a small village of 154 inhabitants. This is how Idomeni became the largest unofficial camp in Greece and remained such for more than a year. In the absence of international aid, activist and citizen groups were active in the area since the summer of 2015 providing basic assistance to those living in the camp or in transit. Lately in 2016, with the arrival of international agencies, two military-run camps were formed in the surrounding areas of Kerso and Nea Kavala hosting 4.000 persons each.

Camp accommodation remains an inadequate and hopeless response to displacement, generating exclusion and contributing to increase physical and social segregation between residents and newcomers, preventing any form of encounter and reinforcing the narrative according to which displaced population constitute a threat to the local community. The unsustainability of the situation became evident to a group of local volunteers from Kilkis who soon started mobilising local resources to find a better solution to the crisis. Capitalising on hospitality practices rooted in the history of the country (Greece welcomed displaced population after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and from the Republic of Turkey between 1918 and 1930), families in Kilkis opened their doors to refugees.

It is in this context that the OMNES volunteer association started operating to implement a three-folded pilot project based on: 1) providing dignified housing for vulnerable people; 2) facilitating trust-building between residents and newcomers through the creation of an inclusion centre; 3) supporting income and skills generating activities to promote social and economic development starting from local resources. OMNES’ holistic approach to inclusion recognises home as the core of physical, social and psychological wellbeing of its occupants (Dayarante & Kellet, 2008) with the belief that, by providing dignified housing solutions, people in transit become better able to find security and trust toward collaborating with the local community.

As part of a small initiative funded by seeds research funds of DPU and embedded onto a longer term action research engagement with local governments and NGOs operating in refugee housing provision and hosting practices in Southern Europe, I embarked on a visit to Kilkis during an international workshop/Urban Laboratory held in Thessaloniki between 12th-15th of April. The initiative, ‘Planning for Inclusive Cities’, aimed to bring together Mayors, Institutions and CSO from Greece and others cities in Europe to open a cross-country dialogue  and a learning exchange platform on inclusive practices.

As the Vice Mayor of Athens argued during the workshop “Inclusion is our future challenge and cities are the ‘battleground’”; but “cities” another participant argued “cannot be left alone in dealing with inclusion. The task requires the broad involvement of state actors and the effective coordination of multiple stakeholders”. Across the discussion panels, from both politicians and local actors, Kilkis’ pilot project was regarded as the paradigmatic case for the promotion of inclusion through local development.

Nevertheless, despite its successful outcomes, some questions arose. What is the long-term sustainability of a pilot project if it remains an isolated case within an atomised landscape of accommodation practices? How could the Kilkis project be scaled up at country level, and what is the potential applicability in cities such as Athens or Thessaloniki that present a completely different social fabric? What became clear during the three-day workshop is that Greece is working toward the decentralisation of reception, accommodation and housing for refugees, as part of a national effort to reconcile inclusion and development.

The challenges to think differently the city, its design and its management in this era of increased migration and movement are great therefore calling for more action research to experiment solutions and policies that could inform new visions for city. The workshop, and the alliances that emerged with locally active NGOs as Help Refugees,  OMNES, Philoxenya International, Greek Universities such as Harokopio, Crete and University of Macedonia in Thessalonikki , and the involvement in European pilot projects for Urban Integration (UIA Urban Innovative Actions)  will be conducive to the development of a research proposal aligned to existing DPU projects led by Camillo Boano, Giovanna Astolfo and Ricardo Marten, including Refugee Cities and Borders and Camps; it also capitalises on and creates further opportunity for the annual BUDDcamps and the DPU SummerLAB 2018 in Athens.

 

Carlotta Fontana Valenti is a recent graduate of the MSc In Building and Urban Design in Development. Trained as architect, she works between Italy, Portugal and France. Recently, her research interest focus on migration studies, reception practices and the relationship between society and space.