FROM EXCEPTION TO EXTRA-LEGAL NORMALITY 15 stage, the expulsion to Turkey across the river, takes place in a military zone, inaccessible to all but a few members of the public—mainly local farmers and fisher (Demetriou 2019). Other stages of pushbacks similarly occur in locations such as border guard stations, or semi-official and unofficial detention centres where access for the public is limited (Karamanidou et al. 2021). Any knowledgeable actors—police officers, border guards, locals—are reluctant to admit the practice, even though during our fieldwork it was evident that pushbacks are common knowledge locally (also Lafazani 2006). We thus draw on secondary sources such as official documents, reports by the media, human rights organizations and NGOS, which offer significant insights into pushback patterns in the Evros area. Conceptualising Pushbacks as Border Violence Although the term “pushbacks” is used by both academics and activists, there is no agreed definition, and it is not a legal term (Keady-Tabbal and Mann 2021; OHCHR 2021). Rather, it emerged from refugee advocacy as a concept describing violations of the principle of non-refoulement, the ban on returning asylum seekers to a country in which they may be in danger of persecution as laid down in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Keady-Tabbal and Mann 2021). Thus, pushbacks are primarily understood in relation to preventing access to asylum and the individual consideration of claims that international and European law dictates (ECCHR 2021; OHCHR 2021). Keady-Tabbal and Mann (2021), drawing on the association of the term with non-refoulement argued that its blanket use risks tacitly agreeing to an objectionable underlying premise: that in order to deserve protection from certain categories of extreme border violence, one must have to be a “refugee” who has suffered persecution, rather than simply a person. While the term may have been utilized in a manner that privileges violations against people with a potential claim to international protection, as Keady-Tabbal and Mann rightly observe, pushbacks may also involve multiple other violations of human rights such as the prohibition of collective expulsion, degrading treatment and endangerment of the right to life. Indeed, pushbacks often involve the use of physical, verbal and sexual violence, deprivation of food and water during detention, confiscation (or theft) and destruction of personal belongings and identity papers, abductions from detention facilities, and practices that endanger human life such as incapacitating boats and forcing people to swim back through open sea and rivers (HRW 2008; Border Violence Monitoring Network [BVMN] 2020). On many occasions, the use of violence has resulted in serious injury or Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/