Trubeta: ‘Rights’ in the grey area: undocumented border crossers on Lesvos 59 networking and an apparently more egalitarian structure, as opposed to the topdown, hierarchical and tight regulation of more traditional bureaucratic organisations. The question is, can coercive technologies of power be utilised by activists as a possible source of professional capital, while still maintaining the humanitarian character of their intervention? In addition, I will explore the endeavours of refugees and immigrants to achieve the status of administrative detention in respect of two developments that have affected the content of their rights and how they attempt to move on, i.e., the current worsening of conditions for refugees and the augmentation of border surveillance technologies. How specific to Lesvos is the phenomenon of ‘administrative expulsion orders’ enabling the transition through (administrative) detention, and how far does it correspond to the refugee condition and global border surveillance generally? My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including the collection of documents from organisations and the solidarity network on Lesvos, reports in the local press, interviews with local civil agents, and participant-observer research. The research covers the period autumn 2012 (when Lesvos started once again being targeted by undocumented border crossers and civil society was playing the most important role in receiving them) to autumn 2013, when a screening centre was established. Visibility of hardship, solidarity and administrative internment Extreme, highly visible social deprivation can evoke different reactions in the immediate social environment. Deprived individuals become ‘quite visible’ when they appear concentrated in the centre of a provincial town, even more so when they are foreigners deemed ‘illegals’ who have crossed borders clandestinely seeking to reach Europe without legal authorisation. This was the case in Mytilene, when, on 27 November 2012, the local press reported on the arrival of a group of immigrants: Today, the picture in front of the Municipal Theatre of Mytilene gives reason for scepticism. More than 30 immigrants, children and elderly, are encamped there and … are waiting to get arrested! It is as if they were shadows. They came neither legally nor illegally. Whatever the case, they are visible in the public place; in the centre of our town … But, in the front of the theatre the refugees are not alone; there are also people of this town … The police declared they were unable to arrest them [the refugees] – they say there is no place available. But are the municipality and district unable to find a place to host them provisionally? Does the law come before human lives?3 In view of the authorities’ inaction (either to arrest the migrants or to care for them), local citizens spontaneously took the initiative by providing aid but also warning about the imminent emergence of a ‘social question’, in the form of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ that needed to be contained, given the worsening weather. Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016