Downloaded by [82.28.181.28] at 02:36 18 February 2016 4 L. KARAMANIDOU by a tradition (or myth) of hospitality (Cheliotis 2013; Rozakou 2012; Troumbetta 2000). Such denials of racism, observed in many national settings, establish both individuals and social collectivities as non-racist, reject racism as an ideology and reaffirm western values of tolerance and non-discrimination (Herzfeld 2007; Van Dijk 1993). In the Greek context, they have been accompanied by the construction of racism as an understandable response the presence of a migrant, threatening Other (Cheliotis 2013; Herzfeld 2011; Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2014). While the socio-economic crisis accentuated intolerance and processes of Othering, it would be misleading to refer to an ‘emergence’ of racism (Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2014, 431) since exclusion, racism and discrimination towards the Other have a considerably longer history in Greece. National identity has been predominantly based on ideas of common descent – expressed through metaphors of ‘blood’ – religion and culture (Just 1989; Ventoura 2004). In the process of nation-building and constructing a homogeneous national identity, minorities – such as the Turkish, Roma, Macedonian and Jewish – were assimilated or excluded (Just 1989; Troumbetta 2000; Tsitselikis 2013). Although membership to the EU and the incorporation of human rights regimes led to a greater recognition of cultural difference and minority rights (Tsitselikis 2013), legacies of intolerance and exclusion of the Other inform policies and attitudes towards migrants in the post-1990 context (Papataxiarchis 2006; Ventoura 2004). Violence against migrants is an extreme manifestation of racism (Solomos and Schuster 2002), perceived here both as an ideology and set of social practices that produce exclusion and inequality on the basis of the social significance attributed to biological, cultural or social characteristics (Miles and Brown 2003; Solomos and Back 1996). For Goldberg (2002), modern states are not overtly racist but racial because they govern through practices of administrative categorization and population control which draw boundaries and hierarchies around ethnicity, race but also national membership and citizenship status. State practices and discourses are thus crucial in racializing groups (Rattansi 2005; Solomos and Back 1996) and denials of racism are instrumental in denying that overt racism motivates actions or informing policies (Herzfeld 2007; Van Dijk 1993). Anti-migrant violence is therefore seen as racialized because it is embedded in regimes of migration controls, which exemplify practices of categorization, exclusion and sovereignty in modern states (Garner 2007; Soguk 1999; Weber and Pickering 2011). It is rooted in processes of racialization, by which social groups are designated as ‘race-like’, are socially differentiated and problematized (Goldberg 2002; Rattansi 2005). Since the modern state owns the monopoly of the means of violence (Weber 1978) its exercise can be defended for protecting its citizens against – often socially constructed – internal and external threats (Malesevic 2010; Wieviorka 1995). Violence against migrants is also racializing because its embeddedness in state practices reproduces migrants as threatening and different.This conceptualization of