The geopolitics of fear: Pro-refugee resistance to Europe's racial security

Abstract

This article explores pro-migrant resistance in the most vulnerable, yet understudied, spot of anti-immigrant regimes, the border city on major refugee routes. This piece is part of my multi-sited ethnography tracing gateway cities of Europe's Southern borders with the Middle East. Against the background of existing scholarship on the shrinking spaces of pro-migrant resistance, my findings expose an everyday urbanity that is inclusive and protective of refugees in the frontier city. However, rather than displaying festive snapshots of sanctuaries, the evidence shows that the pro-refugee resistance dwells in a highly contested and politicized urban space. Having received the main refugee flow from outside of Europe, the European Union tightened external borders following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. As the Mediterranean Sea gradually turned into a graveyard, Athens, the main gateway city in Eastern Mediterranean, was deeply affected. The in-depth analysis of a defiant neighborhood of Athens, Exarchia, uncovers the leverage of the border city to resist the taken-for-granted “global fear” of the Muslim refugee – a legacy of post-September 11 war on terror. Revealing intense emotions shaped by the geography of violent borders, my research points to the widely shared aversion to government-led fear. The article analyzes the dialectics between top-down securitization sustained by fear and bottom-up resistance empowered by feelings of trust, safety, and belonging. While civic disobedience is routinely attacked and repressed by the security regime, I document how the geopolitics of emotion persist in everyday sociability and empower locals with differing political agendas in their pro-refugee resistance. Accordingly, my main argument is that the geopolitics of emotion are integral in forming, transforming, contesting, interrupting, and even evading securitization of migration in the least expected geographies, Europe's racial borders with the Middle East.