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In biogeopolitics, the key state stakeholders develop and aim to accomplish their geopolitical goals by (mis)management and biopolitical governance of vulnerable population. In this paper, this population refers to asylum‐related migrants who use or aim to use an asylum request as their entry mechanism to the European Union. This paper explores the emergence of biogeopolitics at the EU borderland between Turkey and Greece during the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020. Statistics about irregular migration from Turkey to Greece, field observations in Lesvos (Greece) as well as media and social media discussions about COVID‐19 in Lesvos are analysed. In the biogeopolitics of COVID‐19, the governance and (mis)management of asylum‐related migrants include policies and practices to let these migrants to live or die, including regulating illegal border‐crossings, everyday living conditions at the reception centres, and actions regarding the pandemic. The COVID‐19 pandemic was used as an additional tool to foster biogeopolitics. [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]

In the aftermath of Europe's 2015 so-called refugee 'crisis', tens of thousands of border crossers remain stuck in Greece aided by an array of humanitarian workers, government employees, and volunteers. Drawing on previous scholarship about street-level bureaucracy, I discuss the work of informal volunteers in Athens and Lesvos, where they continue to aid border crossers attain entitlements and rights. Based on 10 months of ethnographic research conducted from 2017 to 2018, this article explores how volunteers within the humanitarian landscape of Greece sought to enact their ethical principles within governance regimes that categorized border crossers in restrictive and at times harmful ways. I show how the struggle to assist border crossers in effect transformed volunteers into informal street-level bureaucrats, who drew on a range of tactics that simultaneously reproduced and subverted the policy categories of refugee or vulnerable person. This article argues that rather than facilitating administrative care of border crossers, these categories were in fact a political battleground upon which volunteers struggled to pursue their moral rationalities despite an exclusionary governance regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]