Quelle: Greek Left Review

On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece

Heath Cabot
On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2014, xii + pp
ISBN 978-0-8122-4615-5

Rita Theodorou

Inspector, Head of the Anti-Trafficking Unit, Cyprus Police Member, Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings

Heath Cabot’s book draws on a rich ethnographic study that explores the asylum system in Greece during a period of crisis in which the legal entitlements of both Greek citizens and asylum seekers undergo challenges. Based on her own original research, Cabot sets out an extremely valuable exploration of past and current practices related to asylum in Greece.

The author closely examines how asylum seekers, aid providers, and bureaucrats interact in order to cope with and adhere to the legal procedures required by the framework of the European and Greek discourses of governance. In particular, an attempt is made to analyze and bring to light various aspects of governance, human rights discourse, and other humanitarian practices that might otherwise remain unexposed. An NGO, Athens Refugee Service (ARS) specialized in asylum advocacy, appears to be a central element in the book and much of the author’s fieldwork was conducted there. Furthermore, the author illustrates how NGO workers, and the asylum seekers they encounter, deal with a broken system, why they do it, and what the possibilities and limits of asylum advocacy, aid, and rights-based-protection are. The dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and sociability are tackled. The author, inspired by the Classical Greek Tragedy, highlights the dramatic components of the ethnographic practice, the transformative potential, and the violence of law as they are manifested in the Greek context, characterized by cultural diversity and rapid urbanization.

The book is about both the legal and extra-legal dimensions of asylum law; that is, the encounters, and social interactions, formulations of knowledge, and ethical implications that are connected to legal postulations, but are not reducible to them.

e most violent encounters, but here in the realm of the political.