Athens Eleftherios Venizelos Airport, Giorgos Frigkas, August 2021 2. An airport ethnography of voluntary deportations 2 This article presents an anthropological study of deportations (Coutin 2015, Peutz 2006) through a phenomenological account of “voluntary” returns and, in particular, the AVR (Assisted Voluntary Return) program implemented by IOM (International Organization of Migration) Greece in collaboration with the Greek police. In line with recent critical studies (e.g., Kalir, 2017), IOM returns are here approached as “soft” or “voluntary” deportations whose allegedly free-will character depoliticizes expulsion and conceals their enforced essence under a mask of benevolence and humanitarianism. During my fieldwork, the airport kept appearing in the scene as more than merely the setting in these procedures and the final stage where illegalized migrants’ expulsion was implemented. The airport is often thought of as a fluid and temporary place or a “non-place”, a term coined by Marc Augé (1995) in contrast to the anthropological place as a territorially and temporally bounded culture (Augé, 1995: 34). Non-places are nonrelational, a-historical and identity-less transit points, such as hotels and refugee camps, holiday resorts and the airport, among other, that proliferate in