An interview with Maria Nikolakaki regarding the 2016 “Crossing Borders” conference in Lesvos, Greece

The journey from Athens to the port of Mytilene, capital of Lesvos, takes about nine hours by boat. Formerly a highly visited tourist spot, packed with small cafés and local Greek stores, Lesvos has recently attracted international attention due to the high influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa arriving on the island’s shores. Alongside the Greek coastlines of Chios, Leros, and Samos, and Italy’s ports of Augusta, Lampedusa, Porte Empedocle, Pozzalo, Taranto, and Trapan, Lesvos nowadays constitutes a “hot” arrival “spot,” labeled as such by the European Commission to denote the high(er) inflow of refugees and asylum seekers. In light of the European refugee crisis, an international conference was organized in Lesvos in the summer of 2016 to address issues related to citizenship, displaced migration, borders and identity, refugee and asylum law, as well as the larger socio-political phenomena of imperialism, colonialism, globalization, and capitalism, which are also grounding the refugee crisis as such. The Crossing Borders conference took place between 7–10 July 2016. It was the first event organized by the Cooperative Institute for Transnational Studies (CITS), in collaboration with the Sociology Department of the University of Aegean. The conference was sponsored by the Stop the War Coalition (UK), Peoples’ Assembly Against Austerity, Real News Network, Stopimperialism.org, and the National Greek Television. Featured speakers included Tariq Ali, Andrej Grubačić, Feyzi Ismail, Dimitris Lascaris, Zoe Konstantopoulou, Vicki Macris, Maria Nikolakaki, John Rees, and Kenneth Surin. CITS was founded earlier in 2016 as an independent institution of higher learning, ideologically steered by radical politics and operating as a bottom-up educational system under the guiding principles of participation, collaboration, solidarity, democracy, and cooperativism, hence intended to work as a commons, with a general assembly bargained by all members, including teaching scholars and students. CITS also struck up an Advisory Board, comprising the well-known names of Tariq Ali, Étienne Balibar, Werner Bonefeld, Raquel Gutiérrez, John Holloway, Peter McLaren, Moishe Postone, Jacques Rancière, and Helena Sheehan. The conference opened with an art exhibit on the refugee topic, encompassing paintings, photos, sketches, and a combination of video art installations. Bilingual conference panels, in Greek and English, were conducted for two days. Sessions incorporated roundtables as well as special events, such as the screening of Janus’ Legacy: Refugee Passage to Europe, a documentary film directed by Dimitris Papageorgiou and Alexandros Spathis, which was