Summary This report analyses 554 contracts contained in the Border Industry database, involving EU agencies, Greek ministries, and 289 contractors between 2020 to 2022, worth a total of €1.115 billion in framework agreements. This analysis provides granular insight into the state-corporate relationships that sustain border violence. We focus on Lesvos, Greece, an island in the Aegean Sea close to Türkiye, a primary location for people on the move to enter the European Union. For over 25 years, Lesvos has served as a laboratory for carceral, militarised and increasingly deadly border control policies. In 2015, it was made into a key ‘hotspot’ in EU migration control; its migrant camps, including Moria, became notorious for the deprivation of fundamental human rights. In 2020, the Greek government’s EU-backed practice of pushbacks became systematic throughout the Aegean. In parallel, ‘Reception and Identification Centres’ were converted to ‘Closed Controlled Access Centres’. By analysing how EU agencies and Greek ministries procured assistance from the private sector to further these policies, we map the extensive financial relationships and mutually reinforcing incentives between public and private actors, forming a border-industrial complex. Our report shows how services and supplies provided by these private actors are related to border violence in the Aegean region. Through the proliferation of increasingly securitised and militarised camps where migrants are made to live, as well as pushback operations during which migrants are killed and left to die, profit is extracted from the violation of migrants’ rights and lives. We have documented a range of small, medium, and large private actors that profit from—and become invested in—the normalisation and amplification of border violence in the Aegean region. We analysed contracts across EU, national, regional, and local scales. Whilst not exclusively carried out in Lesvos, all of the contracts we analysed are 5

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents