Ambivalent feelings: ‘filotimo’ in the Greek migration regime

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the ambivalent feelings that police officers demonstrate in their encounters with migrants at migration governance sites in Greece. Police officers are notorious for their anti-migrant and racist attitudes, and migration governance sites are infamous for their poor conditions. However, very often police officers exhibit care towards migrants, providing them with medicine, food and other goods. This care is not a matter of individual exceptions in the dominant xenophobic police feelings, but related to the culturally significant sentiment of ‘filotimo’ (love of honour). This article discusses the cultural conventions that organize this rhetoric in the particular historical moment of the overlapping of the austerity and migration crises in the country. As embodiments of an amoral state, police officers defend their moral self-worth by drawing upon the virtue of ‘filotimo’. This rhetoric of ‘filotimo’, however, also resonates with nativist claims to morality and moral superiority towards migrants.