64 Race & Class 56(4) dependent on the juridical recognition of asylum seekers, ultimately according to the principle of who deserves to be granted asylum.13 In the current period in which the rhetoric and politics of human rights are more widespread than ever, humanitarian initiatives can effectively act as a conduit for disseminating the political arguments and rationalisations inherent to state power into the wider society, mobilising non-state agencies, and producing consensus. Such techniques of ‘governing at a distance’14 promote the semblance of autonomy among non-state actors in civil society – but the limits of such autonomy soon become clear when they come up against the parameters set by state power. In the case of Lesvos, the activists embraced the administrative language so that the term ‘refugees’ was increasingly replaced by designations such as ‘humans’, ‘immigrants’, ‘individuals’. Moreover, the terms ‘new and old arrivals’, ‘with or without papers’, ‘detained or not yet detained’ were becoming normalised among the activists who were concerned with doing all the administrative work, regardless of whether they were politically persuaded to accept the status of ‘administrative detention’ or not. But for all the common vocabulary, the dissent that arose among activists lay elsewhere: a major controversial point was whether refugees and immigrants should assert their rights to asylum and humanitarian protection while in a position of ‘confinement’. The rising dissent brought to the surface the diversity of attitudes within the solidarity network. While the core and driving force of the network acted from a political conviction against social injustice, many seemed to be mobilised mostly by humanistic and philanthropic feelings. The diversity in motivation is typical for activism generally, as Sonja Pieck argues: ‘What brings many activists into a coalition are emotions (anger at injustice or exclusion, feelings of solidarity, or hope for change).’15 And, taking Pieck’s assertion a step further, what can divide them are shifts in interests. Indeed, the controversy that broke out within the solidarity network on Lesvos, with respect to both the status of PIKPA as an administrative detention centre and the establishment of the screening centre, reveals shifts in action and interests that typically occur as soon as professional aspirations arise from within solidarity networks, or as soon as resources come into play. The persistent influx of immigrants and refugees into a particular region renders border crossings a potential resource to be utilised or managed in the pursuit of professional ends. Once it becomes a profession, social activism operates at the interface of voluntary, grassroots commitment and professional engagement, characterised by a ‘more “rationalized” way of doing politics, according to formal by-laws, standardized rules of conduct or explicit norms of behaviour’.16 Activists act then as ‘organizational professionals’ who are ‘subject to both bureaucratic and professional control’.17 As ‘organizational professionals’, their relationship to outside stakeholders is crucial to pursuing professional ends. What was certainly true was that the motivations of those activists who approved the establishment of a screening centre on Lesvos were not uniform. While some of them anticipated the creation of a place in which immigrants and Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016