Graduate Journal of Social Science, Volume 15, Issue 1
couple of months but still nothing. I do not know what will happen. I am
already one year here.
Yusuf was currently living in another refugee camp on Lesvos, but the day we met, he had
an appointment with an NGO employee in Moria camp, in order to be medically examined.
As we were speaking, he opened his plastic bag, and he showed me his papers. He
unfolded one of them and pointed at a small box at the end of the document, telling me
with a strangled voice, “Do you see this? This is not good, not good at all. It says “NO”.
This “NO” in this box is not good.” As I looked more carefully at his paper, I realised that
he was pointing at a medical assessment. The box on the bottom of his document was
referring to the “vulnerability issue”. According to the doctors of the NGO, Yusuf was not
vulnerable enough, and they assessed him as “non-vulnerable”. “This is not good, not
good at all”, Yusuf kept on saying, as ‘vulnerability’ would have helped him to be
recognised as a refugee. Vulnerability would be his “passport”, which would allow him to
travel to the mainland by breaking free from the Prison Island. After Yusuf left and our
roads split, the echo of his strangled voice saying “This is not good, not good at all” was
stuck my head.
Delinquency and vulnerability are two of the bureaucratic classifications implemented
under the fast-track border procedures (Greek Council for Refugees, 2016). Especially after
the implementation of the “geographical restriction”, where all border crossers were
indefinitely immobilised in Lesvos, the two classifications were introduced for the
bureaucratic and deportation apparatus to operate “efficiently” by prioritising and
“protecting” the vulnerable and expelling all others. Both are very problematic as
concepts per se, but also as policies implemented within the bureaucratic and asylum
procedures. As Ann Murphy observes, “there is something about the theme of
vulnerability that raises troubling issues” (Murphy in Gilson, 2016). Administrative
vulnerability is not just a problematic concept but also a tool of segregation and
segmentation. It acknowledges that some people are more vulnerable than others, whose
needs must be protected and safeguarded by a paternalistic state (Butler, Gambetti, &
Sabsay, 2016). At the same time, the paternalistic state has the power to define who
counts as vulnerable or not, to control the ways of protection and at the same time to
victimise.
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