Waiting for what? Hope and endurance in situations of uncertainty for asylum-seekers in Greece

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss how transformations in the asylum management in Greece in 2019 led to the increased uncertainty about the future among asylum-seekers and refugees, altering their experience and interpretation of waiting amidst the bureaucratic procedures. Those in process of asylum application questioned their commitment to waiting, which culminated in the mobilisation of some groups of refugees and asylum-seekers in an attempted collective walkout. Critiquing the Greek state for its restrictive welfare policies and exclusionary practices of asylum, the participants of mobilisation acted on their own vision and ideas of future – elsewhere. Drawing on a year of ethnographic work in Greek borderlands, I reflect on the state’s capacity to generate social hope versus how hope acts as a resource deployed in the future-making by people seeking asylum. Examining the emergence of the Glitter of Hope, a collective march of asylum-seekers and refugees in Greece in spring 2019, and the following response to it by the Greek state, I contrast hope as a medium for political projects, as opposed to it being a technique instrumentalised and manipulated by the state to create disciplined and inactive subjects, suspended in a state of hopeful waiting.