Downloaded by [82.28.181.28] at 02:36 18 February 2016 2 L. KARAMANIDOU of Sociology, City University London investigate and prosecute racially motivated attacks (CHR 2013; Xenakis 2013). Under considerable domestic and international criticism, the government introduced specialized police offices and a phone line for reporting racist violence (Ministry for Public Order and Citizen Protection (MPOCP) 2012a; Ombudsman 2013). An internal affairs investigation into the infiltration of the police by Golden Dawn was ordered in 2013, following the assassination of a left-wing activist by Golden Dawn members in 2013, and several members of the party, including elected representatives, were arrested. Investigations and prosecutions of assaults against migrants, however, remained rare (Ombudsman 2013; RVRN 2014). The Minister for Public Order (hereafter MPO) of the coalition government led by the conservative New Democracy party referred to anti-migrant violence as a ‘new phenomenon’, a ‘terra incognita’ for the Greek police (MPOCP 2012b). While admitting a ‘considerable increase of racist attacks over the last period’ (Government of Greece 2013a, 1) the government claimed that they were committed by ‘specific individuals and groups’ whose ideological beliefs are ‘foreign to our political culture, the values underpinning Greek society, our history and democratic traditions’ (Government of Greece 2013b, 2) and who were disaffected by austerity measures (Government of Greece 2013a). PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), the centre-left coalition partner, similarly rejected the violence as incompatible with the norms of liberal democracies (2013). Racially motivated violence was thus represented as alien to Greek political life and the principles of liberal democratic states, and racism constructed as an ideology of marginalized groups and individuals. This discursive framing of violence perpetrated by the Golden Dawn obscured the extent to which violence against migrants has been exercised – and expansively documented by human rights organizations and the media – by both by state and non-state actors, during and before the crisis. It equally obscures the long-term reluctance of the Greek state to address it (AI 1992, 2012; Baldwin-Edwards 2005; FRA 2013). I argue that government’s discursive strategies drew on existing representations and strategies of legitimation of state and non-state violence against migrants, embedded in discourses and practices of securitizing migration that dominated the transformation of Greece into a country of transit and settlement, and in domestic social constructions of security institutions as protectors of the imagined nation against internal and external enemies. While the significance of these contexts for tolerating hostility is acknowledged in recent scholarship (e.g. Cabot 2014; Dalakoglou 2013; Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2014; Xenakis 2013) there is little systematic analysis on the actual content and argumentation of political discourses on violence against migrants. To this end, I perform a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of a corpus of 138 documents containing political discourse and argue that anti-migrant violence was legitimated through three interlinked discursive strategies