Delivered by Ingenta IP : 94.67.166.95 On: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:25:18 Copyright The Policy Press Dimitra-Dora Teloni and Regina Mantanika we have discussed up to this point of our analysis is the basis on which this rejection is manifested and also the framework that legitimises and trivialises it. Racist violence committed by extreme right-wing groups has become a daily occurrence, especially in the central districts of Athens, starting from the closing down of a playground in Agios Panteleimonas Square. In November 2008, after a number of big demonstrations,7 the so-called indignant residents of Agios Panteleimonas closed down the playground and blocked migrants or ‘migrant-looking’ people from accessing the square. Around the same time, these residents formed informal groups to patrol the squares of the district, where they used violence to block foreigners from accessing public spaces. This was the beginning of an era marked by attacks against migrants. Incidents of hate speech, beatings and serious injury became a daily occurrence. Groups linked to neo-Nazi Golden Dawn carried out pogroms and food drives for Greeks only. Strawberry plantation owners in Manolada, a provincial region, shot and wounded migrant workers who were demanding months of backpay. Not related to migration and smaller in scale, homophobic attacks, both verbal and physical, represent another rejection. All these examples, as well as a general climate of impunity, resulted in two racially motivated murders committed by Golden Dawn members and supporters – of Shehzad Luqman, a 27-year-old worker from Pakistan, in January 2013, and Pavlos Fyssas, a Greek leftist musician, in September 2013. Fyssas’ assassination generated considerable publicity and led to the arrest of dozens of Golden Dawn MPs and members, including party leader Nikos Michaloliakos, who are now in custody awaiting trial (see Psarras, 2014). While the issue of racism and xenophobia is not a new nor exclusively a Greek phenomenon, in recent years a special manifestation of these problems has emerged in Greece.8 Research points to a new kind of rejection of immigrants with an explicit geographical reference: the district and, on a larger scale, Athens.9 This is a rejection expressed as a collective manifestation, whose central contention concerns the presence of immigrants in the same residential area or in the same public space as natives. In the narrative of rejection, elements choose to define themselves with the status of resident. This has not happened without the tolerance and assistance of the municipal authorities and the police (Kandylis and Kavoulakos, 2011). The presence of migrants is deemed a factor that devalues their neighbourhood and the properties within it. The narrative of ‘ghettoisation’, adopted by authorities, runs along the same logic. What is useful for our analysis is the way Kandylis and Kavoulakos (2011) show how a central Athens district has become symbolic for this new era of racism and xenophobia. They observe that the rejection narrative: is initiated on a small spatial scale but is generalised on a local and national level. And vice versa: the small scale of the neighbourhood becomes the theatre of action of a much broader rejection. In this specific area, by focusing on issues of housing and public space, the narrative of rejection attempts to find social roots and develop action. (Kavoulakos and Kandylis, 2011: 21) The second interesting observation is that the exercise of sovereignty by a socalled native/indigenous population at the local but also national level has gone 192