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The island of Lesvos serves as a symbol of migration in the Mediterranean. From 2015 onwards, a steady stream of volunteer tourists began working on the island. Between 2019 and 2022 various 'crises' such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the fire at the Moria camp, and the rise of the far right in Greece significantly altered living conditions for both refugees and volunteer workers on the island. The authors employ a comparative patchwork autoethnography to rethink participant observation to fit the pandemic era. Through a situated, relational, and more-than-representational analysis of autoethnographic material and the confrontation between the authors' experiences, the aim of this paper is to investigate how migrant support volunteer tourism interacts with various simultaneous 'crises' ongoing on Lesvos. This led to a reimagining of the way we understand volunteer tourism over its 'pro vulnerable' approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how bordered reality is being imposed and resisted in the context of where we are placed right now, 'Greece'. Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot. We approach this process methodologically from the situated angle of the embodiment of resistance in the concrete experiences of people (including the researchers ourselves), whose narratives reveal the distracted spatial coordinates of the 'hotspot regime', which becomes a traveling control device. Rather than approaching the hotspots on the five Greek border islands as geographically fixed entities we introduce the concept of the mobile hotspot to show how the logic of the hotspot suffuses the uneven geographies of a bordered reality. We use the ferry as an illustrative tool with which to critically explore the density, tensions, and conflict-ridden nature of movements within, around, and against the hotspots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in recent debates on humanitarianism and security in migration by introducing the notion of 'pop-up governance'. It reflects on our two year-long fieldwork on Lesbos, Greece at the peak of Europe's migrant reception crisis (2015–2017). We present recent developments in border and migration management in the EU and we position these within recent migration debates. We then present the two main facets guiding migrant reception and governance in Lesbos, namely humanitarianism and security. Through our interviews with humanitarian and security actors we show how top-level government decisions followed and resembled the flexibility and adaptability of humanitarian and security operations. We define this turn as 'pop-up governance', which comprises a practice-based, abruptly introduced and retractable set of governance mechanisms responding to the situation at hand. We argue that the seemingly disorganised management of migration actually bore hallmarks of a new, flexible and adaptable mode of governance. Finally, we show how 'pop-up governance' can help move beyond present understanding of governance based either on the rule or its exception. This has important implications for our comprehension of migration, humanitarianism, security and the governance of vulnerable populations and contemporary socio-political crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society actors aiding border crossers in Europe have been subject to systematic criminalization through prosecutions and attempted prosecutions, extensive police harassment, public scapegoating, and the imposition of bureaucratic barriers. We seek to explain why this is occurring through the analysis of field research data, collected in Greece between 2017 and 2019, through the lens of Derrida's concept of "hostile hospitality". We develop a theoretical framework with three key features: first, the demarcation between insider and outsider which lies at the core of notions of hospitality; second, the constitutive relationship between hostility and hospitality which is closely related to notions of sovereignty; and third, the primacy of state definitions of hospitality, which subordinate private and collective hospitality practices. This explanatory framework guides the analysis of two case studies from our fieldwork: the criminalization of solidarity initiatives providing accommodation in squats in Athens and Pikpa camp on Lesvos, and the criminalization of boat-spotting and search and rescue activities on Lesvos. We conclude that civil society actors aiding border crossers in Greece are criminalized because they challenge and interfere with state policies and practices of hostile hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]