Graduate Journal of Social Science, Volume 15, Issue 1
Abstract
In this paper I argue that the refugee crisis, in terms of discourse and sequence of events,
has been deliberately misused by the EU policymakers in order to govern unwanted
human mobility and to impose and legitimize brutal, obscene and violent politics, such as
the EU-Turkey Statement, the Hotspot Approach and the geographical restriction rule.
Based on ethnographic research I conducted on border crossers on Lesvos, I argue here
that these obscene policies produce a Kafkaesque and suffocating context with enormous
and devastating consequences upon border crossers’ lives. For the purposes of this paper,
I will focus on 1) the refugee crisis discourse; 2) the immobilisation of border crossers on
Lesvos, the Prison Island; and 3) the racial profiling and segregation of people into penal
and bureaucratic “categories”: “vulnerable/ non-vulnerable” and “delinquents”.
Keywords: refugee crisis; externalisation; internalisation; Lesvos
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(Unformatted version, page numbers not final)