of “airport sociality” that engages with the interplay between disparate actors and global and local forces at the airport.1 4 The airport is the border where diverse actors assemble, act, and cross each other: police officers, IOM employees, employees of private airline companies and the (private) management of the airport,2 as well as various other people who dwell and frequent it. How do state, intergovernmental and private sector agents interact, cooperate, compete and contest each other in the return process? What tensions derive from their coexistence? How do the thriving deportation business, the austerity crisis and a cosmopolitan aura cohabit in the Athens airport? Countless trajectories that intersect Massey conceptualizes space as constructed through and constructing the intertwining of diverse trajectories. She describes these chance encounters as a “throwntogetheness” that opens up spaces of negotiation and contestation and forms the relational politics of space (Massey, 2005). In the case of the airport examined here, this throwntogetherness is not limited to the apparent unequal mobilities of the privileged traveler and the unwanted “voluntarily” deported migrant but it includes countless trajectories that intersect: the random visitor to the airport, the airport handlers and the airline companies’ employees, the shop assistants of airport commercial shops, the lottery ticket vendor, the homeless people who arrive at dusk to find refuge during the night, and numerous other trajectories which coexist informing the multiplicity and simultaneity of space. I see these mobilities as embedded within power relations and persistent hierarchies while, at the same time, they challenge and negotiate them even at a locus of surveillance and control par excellence that is the airport (Adey, 2004). The Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport itself was inaugurated in March 2001 and was one of the infrastructural works completed in the broader area in preparation for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.3 In the early 2000s Greece was a country under rapid change and optimism. Along with other infrastructural works, it is 1 Chalfin’s study is an ethnography of the Customs Control department and the reconstruction of Ghana’s aviation sector. The encounters between custom officers and travelers bring to the fore reconfigurations in state sovereignty in neoliberal times (Chalfin 2008). 2 For the first 30 years of its function the airport operates under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) agreement in which the Greek state holds 55% ownership. 3 Along with the inauguration of the new airport, the first part of the privately owned toll motorway “Attiki odos” (the Athens metropolitan area motorway) that leads to the airport was completed at the same period, the new Athens metro rail system was put into service, and the euro replaced the drachma.