14 Lena Karamanidou and Bernd Kasparek documented violations of human rights—the prevention of access to asylum, degrading conditions of reception and detention, and the use of physical and verbal violence against people on the move (AI 2005; 2014; Committee for the Prevention of Torture [CPT] 1999; 2020; Human Rights Watch [HRW] 2008; NOAS et al. 2010; Pro Asyl 2007; 2013). In this article, we focus on pushbacks as a normalized, enduring practice within the Greek and European border regime (Ilcan 2021; Karamanidou et al. 2020). Pushbacks, that is, illegal returns across an international border, have been documented at many European borders, emerging at different points in time since the 2000s (see Aru 2021; Augustová and Sapoch 2020; Caponio and Capiali 2018; Gazzotti 2020). Yet, at the Evros border they date back to the late 1980s, providing a unique case study for exploring the practice as a technology of border control, interrogating its logic within border regimes, and thus contributing to the further theorization of pushback practices. We contextualize Evros as a borderscape, a space shaped by the complex histories of cross-border mobilities, materialities, assemblages of control, border regimes and narratives of the European and Greek borders (Agnese and Amilhat Szary 2015; Brambilla et al. 2015). The lens of the borderscape and its capacity to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics of a border is an antidote to the presentism of the “crisis” frame (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2016; Tazzioli 2020) which has characterized many analyses of Evros as well as of pushbacks in Greece. By exploring the practice of pushbacks, including their under-researched organizational features, within the borderscape of Evros in a time frame of more than three decades we trace its logics, logistics and justifications. We argue that pushbacks and other forms of violence should not be conceived merely as human rights violations and therefore aberrations of the laws and values of Europe and its states, but as normalized technologies of border management (Ilcan 2021; Karamanidou et al. 2020), embedded in the racialized, violent border regimes of liberal states (Isakjee et al. 2020). Through inquiring why pushbacks have been such an enduring and enduringly tolerated practice in the Evros borderscape, we contend that pushbacks are far from an aberration of border management practices but rather that they represent, paradigmatically, the violence which characterizes and defines the Westphalian border, that is, the national borders of the nation states in Europe (Zaiotti 2011). The article draws on research on border management in the European Union and the region of Evros conducted within the EU-funded project RESPOND over a period of three years between 2018 and 2020. During six fieldwork visits, we interviewed police officials, had conversations with local people, and observed and documented the local border assemblages and infrastructures. Yet, while fieldwork offered us significant insights into the area, one unavoidable limitation is the near impossibility to research and document pushbacks in situ. Their key State Crime 11.1 2022