ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 13 in the centre of Athens were necessary in order ‘to protect the rule of law, to stop the violent squads which replace the state’ (HP 2012, 1855). However, the discursive tactic of constructing violence against migrants as a public order issue to be solved by intensified migration controls rendered Dawn an extension to the state’s migration control mechanisms (Dalakoglou 2013). Downloaded by [82.28.181.28] at 02:36 18 February 2016 7. Conclusion: legitimating and reclaiming anti-migrant violence Based on the analysis of political texts covering a period of twenty years, I argued that official discourses representing Golden Dawn’s attacks on migrants as outside liberal democratic norms, individualized and contextual to the austerity crisis have obscured the long-term legitimation of violence against migrants, rooted in racialized discourses of migration and racism in the Greek context. Political actors and institutions have legitimated the employment of violence through three enduring discursive strategies: denying the social or systemic nature of anti-migrant violence, based mainly on a narrative of ‘isolated events’ and doubting the truthfulness of claims of mistreatment; disengaging violence against migrants from racism and rationalizing violence as a response to perceived threats posed by migration. While some changes were observed over the years – for example a shift to adopting the trope of ‘pending investigations’ in responses to reports by the CPT – these strategies are enduring in time and employed by both governing parties, New Democracy and PASOK. This refutes a left/ right dichotomy (e.g. Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2013, 2014) and points to the racialized dynamics of migration control, informed by dominant and shared discourses of securitization and illegalization of migrants. The reactions of the Greek political mainstream betray the contradictions inherent in the relationship between democracy and violence on the one hand, and the violence of relations between the state and migrants on the other. States simultaneously perpetrate violence against migrants, condemn it and designate it (or not) as a social issue (Goldberg 2002; Goodey 2007, Solomos and Schuster 2002). Since racism is disavowed in liberal democracies, migration controls are legitimated as necessary for safeguarding the national polity against the perceived threats of migration, and thus reproduces practices of sovereignty and the boundaries of the state (Goldberg 2002; Soguk 1999). Within this logic, violence has been tolerated as a response to the fear and insecurities created by the threatening migrant Other but also fed into strategies of neoliberal governance, which in times of crisis served at maintaining the cohesion of the in-group through targeting marginalized groups such as migrants (Cheliotis 2013). However, overtly tolerating violence by an anti-democratic, anti-establishment party suggest the failure of the state to legitimately exercise violence within the normative confines of