Evolving Moral Economies of Vulnerability in the Aegean Borderscape

Abstract:The Aegean Sea and its landscape stretching across the Greek-Turkish border has since the establishment of the Greek state always been a space of inter-locking politics and discourses surrounding the figure of the refugee. Since the so-called refugee crisis, processes of construction of refugee deservingness have increasingly centered around the category of vulnerability. Ethnographic work conducted on the island of Lesbos and in Athens between 2017 and 2019 permits an examination of the ways in which contemporary asylum and reception services construct layers of human worthiness and spaces of worth extraction. Denial of urgency, prioritization, and normalization are key strategies of the spatial governance of the displaced in the Aegean borderscape. Juxtaposing the 1923 Population Exchange with the more recent displacement suggests some continuities, similarities, and differences that can lead to a deeper understanding of the geographical, social, and political factors that continue to shape the meaning of the refugee in contemporary Greece.