Power, Agency and ‘Crisis Maintenance’: the safeguarding experiences of refugees in the Aegean

• In Event: Criminology of Mobility. Panel 5. Narratives and lived experiences of refugees, asylum seekers & migrants

Abstract

What can asylum seekers themselves contribute towards the dialogue on safeguarding the inhabitants of Europe’s refugee camps? As core geopolitical entry points to the European Union, the Aegean Islands were selected as the research sites for the exploration of this question. Based on consultations with asylum seekers living in the Aegean island refugee camps, as well as the islands’ NGOs, legal representatives, and local citizens, this paper offers new ways of conceptualising and addressing the root causes of abuse and exploitation in the contested political space of the refugee camp.

By diversifying the dialogue to include those with lived experience, this presentation offers vital new perspectives on statelessness, power and sovereignty in relation to refugees in contemporary Europe. These new perspectives challenge and extend those proposed in canonical research literature. This data demonstrates that the rhetorical, legal and affective division of refugees into binary categories not only influences but also perpetuates numerous, interrelated cycles of abuse, exploitation and suffering in the zone of the camp. Such binaries include the division of: adult and child; male and female; threat and victim; vulnerability and agency; deserving and undeserving; and citizen and non-citizen.

An appraisal of empirical evidence on the functional implications of these binaries will demonstrate how they serve to entrench particular cycles of behaviour and thereupon opportunities for abuse and exploitation – both between camp inhabitants and committed against them. Promoting a combination of interdisciplinary solutions to the deconstruction of these embedded practices, this paper offers a series of updates to the academic dialogue, legal policy and humanitarian practice. Informed by the knowledge of those with lived experience, the results of this study hold the capacity to edify camp safeguarding outcomes and the realisation of asylum seekers’ human rights globally, both in theory and in practice.

Author

• Charlotte Victoria Russell, The University of Hull