18 Lena Karamanidou and Bernd Kasparek Further, borders are racialized and racializing because they sustain and reproduce racial and colonial boundaries between populations (Sharma 2020; Walia 2021). Bordering regimes stratify populations within states through interlocking ideologies of nationalism, racism, territoriality and patriarchy, and seek to filter and exclude populations on the basis of racialized hierarchies, manifested, for example, in visa and asylum regimes regulating the mobility from the Global South to the Global North. Illegalized through the global border regime, mobile subjects are politically and discursively constituted as the Other, culturally different, threatening the order and security of the state and the boundaries of identity and belonging shaped by nationalism and racism (De Genova 2017; Walia 2021). These exclusions situate mobile populations outside the liberal state and legitimate the exercise of border violence against them (Isakjee et al. 2020; Walia 2021). Despite the problematization of Greece as a state subject to, rather than part of a hegemonic position within the global and European postcolonial order (Koutouza 2019; Sammadar 2016), the Greek state has been both a geopolitical space and an agent of technologies of mobility control in the context of the European border regime (Demetriou 2019; Topak 2021). Narratives of protecting the Greek and the European border against external enemies, whether Turkey or people on the move, have been employed to legitimate violent practices (Demetriou 2019; Karamanidou 2016). The securitization, illegalization and criminalization of migrant groups, informed by Greek exclusionary ethnic nationalism, have been a constant pattern since the 1990s (Demetriou 2019; Karamanidou 2016). In addition to cultural boundaries built around language, whiteness and ethnicity, Greek identity relies on the juxtaposition between Christianity and Islam, the latter being associated with Turkey, designated as an enemy country through histories of nation building (Demetriou 2019; Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2018). Mirroring the bordering of ethnic minorities, and in particular the Muslim minority of Thrace, migrant populations have been constructed as a culturally different and dangerous Other, associated with Turkey on the basis of—often assumed—religion, likely to be manipulated by Turkish interests and thus posing threats to national security (Demetriou 2019; Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2018). These racialized bordering dynamics are heightened within the borderscape of Evros. Being part of Thrace, where predominantly Muslim minority populations historically lived, bordering and Othering processes drawing on hostility to Islam and Turkey shape encounters with border-crossing populations (Demetriou 2019; Lafazani 2006). By virtue of containing the territorial land border with Turkey, Evros has been mythologized as a heroic borderland of akrites—the border guards of the Byzantine empire—defending Greece against the “double threat of migration and Turkish aggression” (Demetriou 2019: 26; Lafazani 2006). Histories of border violence and pushback practices, which we explore in the following State Crime 11.1 2022