70 Race & Class 56(4) like PIKPA under the umbrella of civil society eventually became possible due to specific local features including the grassroots movement and the marginal position of the island in the Greek national-political geography. Indeed, as a maritime border area, Lesvos has a distinctly marginal position in terms of infrastructure, a result of the lopsided Greek state apparatus that has for several decades disadvantaged the border regions. By and large, the ‘short summer’ of the civil-society administered open reception centre PIKPA indicates that there are other ways to deal with border crossers than detention. At the same time, however, it reveals the limits to alternative action that become evident as soon as activism encounters power rationalities either authoritative or bearing positive features as soon as they are incorporated into humanitarian – but not least hegemonic – regimes. In the case of immigrants and refugees, it is the weakening of the institutional condition for refugee recognition that determines the strategies available to them, imposing the framework and the limits within which they can act. It is the very weakening of the refugee condition that can make imprisonment appear as a right, when the object is not protection, but rather how to find a way to move in the ‘grey zone’; how to gain even the insecurity of a flexible status after having escaped a deadly and dangerous journey, and avoid the humiliating conditions of lengthy detention, deportation and removal. Acknowledgements The core idea of this article was presented at the workshop ‘Governing Mediterranean via Technopolitics’ (Columbia Global Centers I, Paris, 23 May 2014). I want to express my gratitude to the discussants at that workshop and also to Hastings Donnan, Carolin Leutloff-Grandits and Madelein Hurd for comments on an earlier version of this text. References 1 2 Observation by the author (April 2013). See, for example, M. S. Malloch and E. Stanley, ‘The detention of asylum seekers in the UK: representing risk, managing the dangerous’, Punishment & Society (Vol. 7, no. 1, 2005), pp. 53–71; S. Krasmann, ‘The enemy on the border: critique of a programme in favour of a preventive state’, Punishment & Society (Vol. 9, no. 3, 2007), pp. 301–18; K. Franko Aas, ‘Analysing a world in motion: global flows meet “criminology of the other”’, Theoretical Criminology (Vol. 11, no. 2, 2007), pp. 283–303; F. Webber, Borderline Justice: the fight for refugee and migrant rights (London, Pluto Press, 2012); M. Grewcock, ‘Australia’s ongoing border wars’, Race & Class (Vol. 54, no. 3, 2013), pp. 10–32; S. Marks, ‘Comment on a paper by Joseph Raz, “Human Rights in the New world Order”’, International State Crime Initiative (Working Papers Series, no. 2, 2010). 3 M. Bakas, Lesvosnews.net (27 November 2012), available at: http://www.lesvosnews.net/ articles/news-categories/koinonia/anthropoi-skies-se-koini-thea-mytilini-2012. 4 See M. Zimmermann, Rassenutopien und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische Lösung der Zigeunerfrage (Hamburg, Hans Christians Verlag, 1996). 5 Z. Bauman, Collateral Damage: social inequalities in a global age (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2011), p. 5. 6 Z. Bauman, Wasted Lives: modernity and its outcasts (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004). 7 Observation during one of my visits to PIKPA (March 2013). 8 Bauman, Wasted Lives, op. cit., p. 78. Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016