W H AT ’ S S O R A D I C A L A B O U T R E F U G E E S Q UAT S? A N E X P L O R AT I O N O F U R B A N C O M M U N I T Y- B A S E D R E S P O N S E S T O M A S S D I S P L AC E M E N T I N AT H E N S Tahir Zaman Introduction Reactions to the movement of migrants and refugees along the so-called Balkan route since the summer of 2015 have ranged from receptive and embracing to hostile and outright violent. The context is complicated further by the fact that those already resident confront and challenge state-imposed austerity measures as the only viable response to economic crisis. In so doing, they produce welfare safety nets anchored outside state institutional structures - in local community relations. This chapter examines supportive encounters with migrant others in urban locations. A central contention of this chapter is that such encounters are mediated simultaneously through understandings of hospitality, philanthropy, humanitarianism, and solidarity; revealing tensions, ambiguities, contradiction, and contestation over what solidarity work looks like. Based on ethnographic fieldwork of refugee-led autonomous housing collectives in Athens carried out over the summer of 2016, this chapter investigates whether alternative solidarity initiatives reproduce power dynamics and representations of refugee others inherent in the existing humanitarian architecture or effectively challenge the host-guest relations 129 TAHIR ZAMAN underpinning hegemonic understandings of refugee protection and assistance. Here, I seek to contribute to the literature on societal responses to displacement and dispossession in addition to understandings of solidarity and migrant struggles. The chapter is organised in three parts. First, we begin with a short discussion on what is understood by the term solidarity and consider how it has been mobilised in migrant struggles and activism in recent years. The second part of the chapter develops this discussion further by introducing the reader to the different histories, trajectories, and understandings of actors located in spaces inhabited by displacement-affected communities. The socalled ‘European refugee crisis’ has drawn attention to hitherto peripheral actors who produce new spaces, socialities, and readings of humanitarianism.1 Amongst the actors found in this milieu are faith-based initiatives (Zaman, 2016; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014); diaspora networks (International Alert, 2014; Svoboda and Pantuliano, 2015; Sezgin, 2016); volunteer efforts (Rozakou, 2012); and refugee-led self-help initiatives (Zaman, 2011; Betts et al.2014; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016). Recently arrived refugees and migrants find themselves at the loci of intersecting social relations that append themselves to an existing infrastructure of hidden forms of welfare outside state-led social support (Rakopoulos, 2015). To better understand these emergent spaces and socialities, I mobilise the example of autonomous refugee housing collectives, or squats, located largely in and around the Exarcheia district of Athens. This case study reveals the potential and limits of migrant solidarity organising - highlighting the competing, conflicting, and at times contradictory discourses and practices of actors involved. The chapter concludes by questioning whether the transience of refugee populations in Athens adds a further layer of complexity to the possibility of enacting egalitarian modes of solidarity. In so doing, I consider how normative readings of hospitality imbue solidarity initiatives with migrants and refugees. The argument presented here is that refugee squats in Athens are embedded in an almost ineliminable hegemonic humanitarian logic and are thus caught between hospitality and abject space. 130 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? Untangling the incoherence of a cohering concept Solidarity in Athens is laid claim to, often exclusively, by a varied range of competing actors including, but not limited to anarchists, international volunteers arriving to support stranded refugees, and faith-based actors assisting co-religionists. Rakopoulos (2016:142) alerts us to the possibility of solidarity being a bridging concept; o ne that captures “diverse modes of practice, forms of sociality and mechanisms of envisioning future prospects for people’s lives [...] an idea inspiring people in contexts of everyday life in crisis”. It has been argued that it is at this confluence of multiple actors arriving with divergent understandings of encountering the other, oscillating between hospitality and solidarity, in times of austerity and economic crisis that a “‘humanitarian face’ of solidarity” is produced (Theodossopoulos, 2016). While there is no single normative understanding of solidarity, a necessary aspect in response to people on the move has been to heed “a call to aid” (Scholz, 2008:56). The pressing and particular needs of people on the move demand as much. However, to limit solidarity solely as such does not fully acknowledge the mutually reciprocal exchanges that potentially locate the horizon of solidarity work over and beyond that of humanitarian modes of “help[ing] to alleviate poverty” (ibid.). The manifest demands of sudden mass displacement prompt the question of how understandings of solidarity can be reconciled with seemingly divergent practices of philanthropy and giving. Katerina Rozakou makes the case that in austerity-ridden Greece, where the capacity of the middle classes has been severely eroded, understandings of solidarity with the refugee other have now become imbued with the gift logic of humanitarianism. Where once solidarity activists eschewed charity in favour of emphasising egalitarian approaches to sociality, the scale of movement across the Aegean at the time of economic crisis has today “transformed [solidarity] under the collapse of the gift taboo” (Rozakou, 2016:196). Austerity in Greece means that gift-giving no longer carries with it the obligation to reciprocate thereby bridging understandings and modalities of aid provision and solidarity (ibid: 197). This seems a reasonable reading of the specific context but one that perhaps lays too much emphasis on the 131 TAHIR ZAMAN notion that people on the move harbour little desire to be incorporated into Greek society - a point conceded by Rozakou (2016:196). Nonetheless, it says little of situations where pressing and palpable material needs persist, and the prospect of onward movement recedes. Arguably, the breaking of the “gift taboo” itself in turn produces a latent “egalitarian tension” wherein a principled solidarity risks being eclipsed and overcome by a gradual descent into dependency and clientism (Rakopoulos, 2016:148). Expressions of solidarity and hospitality have become increasingly blurred. Under the rubric of hospitality, the responsibility of who welcomes into the community is transferred away from the state and centred on societal responses. Many residents of the autonomous housing collectives under consideration in this chapter make no demands from the state other than to allow them to transit freely across into northern and western Europe and await a decision from the state permitting them to do so. During this interim period where refugees and migrants await an opening for onward movement, material support for residents of the autonomous housing collectives or squats is made contingent on practices of philanthropy and hospitality afforded by those already present. Yet, the context as established earlier is of a besieged and disenchanted middle class learning to cooperate with an equally discontented working class in formulating an alternative response to state austerity measures - one anchored in communities of selfreliance rather than a reliance on the state. This point needs closer attention. Far from being dependent and passive recipients of aid as hegemonic modalities of humanitarianism demands, residents of the refugee-led squats are actively re-calibrating their own roles in relation to the material circumstances of so-called hosts to navigate their journey. In the process they negotiate, contest, and re-iterate their rights along with resident “host” others as a set of expectations and entitlements they are due - producing new socialities. Citizenship thus ceases to be viewed solely as a legal category but is given meaning through acts that disrupt the status quo (Isin and Nielsen 2008) and calls out to those who are in place. Peter Nyers (2015) puts into conversation the autonomy of migration literature (Mezzadra, 2004; Mitropoulos, 2006; Papadopoulos, Stephenson & Tsianos, 2008) with 132 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? Engin Isin’s (2008) intervention on “acts of citizenship”. Nyers makes the case that the former does not adequately consider the possibility of performative dimensions of citizenship as a means to further migrant struggles. Instead, citizenship is seen by proponents of the autonomy of migration as an exclusionary bordering practice that seeks to restrict mobility – privileging those who can make claims to rights and effacing others who cannot. This, he argues, is a narrow reading of citizenship; failing to consider the everyday lived experiences of migrants and those who are resident. He concludes: “Migrant citizens, in short, make claims on the state for rights and recognition, and at the same time they are capable of evading legal capture and, indeed, transforming the legal regimes and institutions of state citizenship”. (Nyers, 2015: 25). While some have argued that the ability of those with indeterminate legal statuses to appropriate secondary rights without recourse to the state challenges our understanding of citizenship (Ager and Strang, 2008; Bojadžijev & Karakayali, 2010), I suggest that in the case of Athens at least, to equate this to “transforming the legal regimes and institutions of state citizenship” remains an overly optimistic reading. Barriers to movement set in place by the legal regimes and institutions of the state heighten the visibility of new arrivals in city spaces; triggering a social and cultural contestation over what it means to be a citizen. This is not to say that citizenship practices are not produced in the interim - they are, but they are done so outside and in spite of the legal regimes and institutions of state citizenship. Secondly, we have seen that where the state chooses to, it will readily employ violence to dismantle alternative networks and structures. On 27 July 2016, residents of three squats in Thessaloniki were evicted and arrested along with solidarity activists. Such heavy-handedness on the part of the state elicits questions concerning the long-term viability of squatting as a tactic for laying claim to rights in the city and for readings of citizenship practices beyond that dictated by the state. Rather than a transformation of state citizenship institutions and legal regimes, we find in the spectacle of violence employed by the state a re-affirmation of those very regimes that mark the migrant other as belonging outside the container of the nation-state. 133 TAHIR ZAMAN However, the state is not always quick to do so as a matter of course. The door is left ajar for refugees and migrants to engage with their context and produce new socialities. It is here that the autonomy of migration literature helps challenge the limits of state-centric readings of citizenship. The insight proceeds as follows. Alongside the social space produced through the performance of citizenship of those already resident is the notion of a mobile commons which privileges socio-cultural relations rather than a legal relation. It is in this world that various categories of people on the move exist. In spite of their uncertain legal statuses, people on the move inhabit and construct along with resident others a “world of knowledge, of information, of tricks for survival, of mutual care, of social relations, of services exchange, of solidarity and [a] sociability that can be shared” (Hardt & Negri, 2011:190). In one sense then, citizenship is located beyond the state. Its practices precede recognition by the state. The state may capture citizenship through exclusionary and selective legal regimes, but it does so retrospectively. Practices of citizenship and new socialities have already been produced de facto in the spaces of the mobile commons. The refugee-led squats in Athens, theoretically at least, are the idea of the mobile commons made manifest. What remains unclear are the dynamics underpinning social relations between refugees and resident “hosts” themselves, and a common understanding of a solidarity “that can be shared”. In Arabic, the word tdāmon points more fixedly to the notion of responsibilities reciprocated - for whom and to what are we responsible? This is a line of questioning that much occupied Emmanuel Levinas’ (1991) work on ethics. For Levinas, the self is not only representation and being, but a social self that arises in relation to the Other. It is the proximity of the Other that necessitates a response allowing for the possibilities of an ethical encounter. Thus, it is a response, first and foremost, to the call of the Other - an exchange between the one in place and the one who arrives. In reflecting on solidarity in the context of Athens as mutual responsibility we must ask several questions: What is the call of the Other? Who hears the call? How do they respond? And is there a territorial limit to responsibility? This latter question has been addressed most notably by Doreen Massey who reminds us that territorial readings of place have held sway 134 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? over geographical imaginations pertaining to responsibility. Using the analogy of a matryoshka doll, Massey (2004:9) explains that the hegemonic narrative of the nation-state fosters “a kind of accepted understanding that we care first for, and have our first responsibilities towards, those nearest in”. To shatter this ossification and broaden the discussion over meanings of citizenship, Massey (2004, 2005) advocates a more relational approach to understandings of place and responsibility. Encounters with the other should not only be considered on the basis of proximity but also connectivity – the spaces in-between the matryoshka dolls are thus far from empty but act as corridors for the shuttling of people, information, material, and nonmaterial resources. Ethics borne of a relational understanding of place risk being hemmed in and still-born if we only hold ourselves responsible for strangers among us and not distant unseen strangers. The arrival of refugee others alerts us to responsibilities that are located beyond our immediate lived worlds. Prompted through daily exchanges and encounters with refugee and migrant others in the spaces of the squats, distant unseen strangers are made visible and knowable through the sharing of family photographs and personal (hi)stories with volunteers/activists. An emic reading of solidarity produced by Syrian and Palestinian refugee research interlocutors concurs with the idea of reciprocated responsibilities. Rather than use the term solidarity to describe the networks and spaces of support they had helped produce, they articulated their rapidly changing and dynamic matrix of relationships with volunteers, selflabelled solidarity activists, and other refugees and migrants through the idiom of fictive kin relationships and the village. In the absence of support from the formal humanitarian architecture and the state, refugee residents of squats drew on collective and personal memories of both the village and the hāra - the urban neighbourhood street wherein understandings of conviviality, mutual aid, and neighbourliness are integral to longstanding socio-cultural traditions (Zaman, 2016). This vernacular of solidarity resonated and was made intelligible to local Greek activists who themselves had extrapolated practices of mutual aid found in the village - underscoring a “recontextualisation of village-hood” to locate horizons of solidarity in the city (Rakopoulos, 2016:143). 135 TAHIR ZAMAN Such recontextualisations have become increasingly visible in neighbourhoods across Athens following the financial collapse of 2008. Sustainable and collective social practices in the form of neighbourhood associations and self-help initiatives characterised by voluntarism and donations have proliferated – and with it, the idea of a shared commons has re-emerged. Commoning as a gerund, Peter Linebaugh (2008: 45) reminds us, denotes activity – one anchored in “human deeds”. It is a “customary activity” rather than a natural resource (ibid: 79). The remedy of austerity prescribed by the EU to the economic crisis in Greece has meant that for many Greeks and resident migrants, access to key welfare provisions such as healthcare has been severely eroded - resulting in the re-emergence of malaria and tuberculosis as commonplace (Kentikelenis et al., 2014). With both market-led and state social insurance redistribution mechanisms for healthcare provision out of reach for many, it is at the level of community localities that relationships between caregivers and care-seekers is recalibrated and transformed. Whereas austerity, and the neoliberal framework underpinning it, produces atomised individuals, commoning and solidarity work reconfigures people in a web of active social relations. Heath Cabot’s work on the burgeoning phenomenon of informal neighbourhood social clinics as a response to crisis wrought by austerity measures in Greece reveals how relational-selves emerge from practices of commoning; underscoring how group participation is contingent on “bilateral, deeply inter-subjective, modes of reciprocal exchange, which have an elevating, and even healing, potential” (Cabot, 2016: 162). However, reciprocity or the notion of mutual responsibility remains at best muted in Athens’ refugee squats. Despite space being physically made for refugees and migrants, the language of crisis favoured by humanitarian actors permeates. While an egalitarian solidarity demands mutual exchange, it is humanitarian logic seeking to govern and control the everyday of refugees and displaced people that predominates. Here, moments of domination are embedded in so-called solidarity exchanges. In the following section, the presuppositions on which the squatter settlements are based are unpacked a little further. 136 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? A taxonomy of collective housing arrangements in the city Let us begin by thinking about the city of Athens as being simultaneously both a site of conflict and segregation, and a site for encounter and interaction. This becomes evident when we examine a little more closely the number of municipalities in Athens wherein alternative accommodation for spontaneously self-settled refugees - squatted or otherwise - are situated. The vast majority are concentrated either side of the Patission thoroughfare that carves its way through the heart of Athens; either in the Exarcheia neighbourhood or in the vicinity of Acharnon street. A third welcoming space is the Prosfygika site housing eight apartment blocks in the Ampelokipoi neighbourhood.2 That is to say, accommodation for self-settled refugees is limited to a very few neighbourhoods of one from 59 municipalities of the city. While these neighbourhoods are conveniently located in the city centre and border onto other neighbourhoods densely populated by migrants, it would be a stretch to suggest that the recently arrived refugees are connected to the city. One resident of the Acharnon School squat told me, “the squat is great, we live like a real community here. My family is here, my friends are here. It’s like a small village”. When pressed further on whether there was much interaction with the neighbours he replied, “there’s nothing to do, we don’t really know anyone out there. We spend most of our time smoking argileh in here”. A shared sociability is clearly circumscribed here. The degree to which encounter and interaction is possible for the residents of the squats is thus heavily contingent on the networks of volunteers and activists choosing to visit and contribute their time and resources at the squats. This can be attributed in part to a lack of connectivity with the economic life of the neighbourhoods where the squats are located. While the squats were arguably conceived as an iteration of the mobile commons, their relational sense of place remains hemmed in rather than being centrifugal and allocentric. Opportunities for residents to reach out to other neighbours are limited and constrained to the physical space of the squat where activists and volunteers arrive to help meet the evident and urgent needs of residents. 137 TAHIR ZAMAN We shall return to the question of shared sociability when we consider how residents of squats challenge humanitarian understandings of refugeehood. I would suggest that a taxonomy of collective housing arrangements is emerging in the city of Athens right now. First, there are those that have entered into agreements with Greek-registered NGOs and civil society actors to help meet the needs of recently arrived refugees and migrants. Favourable leasing arrangements are secured on the open market to repurpose empty buildings for the accommodation of migrants and refugees. Working on principles of volunteerism, the WELCOMMON project has taken a former nine-storey clinic and repurposed it as an integrated accommodation centre for 200 refugees and migrants, while providing paid employment for people from the host community.3 In addition to shelter, the ground floor of the building is used as an information hub for new arrivals, volunteers, and residents as they await news of their asylum applications. Alongside legal advice, residents can avail themselves of the services of social workers, a psychologist, and a health clinic. The unprecedented autonomous movement of people from Turkey into Europe in 2015 and the closure of the Macedonian border has also led to faith-based organisations such as the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) and Caritas expanding their operations in Athens. Both organisations have followed the example of squats and established alternative housing arrangements for refugees in the city. Many of the same principles continue to apply albeit with less emphasis on horizontal power structures. In its place, ideas of accompaniment based on Catholic social justice teachings take precedence. A housing shelter has been established by the JRS off Acharnon Street, housing 41 refugees and migrants. Refugees and migrants again cook for the community of residents and are responsible for cleaning the building. Through a partnership programme which the JRS helped found in Portugal,4 the JRS in Athens is able to draw on the combined resources of 222 civil society organisations that comprise the Plataforma De Apoio Aos Refugiados (PAR) - Refugee Support Platform. The platform is a broad coalition of civil society actors made up of faith-based actors (largely Christian but also some Muslim organisations), universities, antiracism campaigns, and local development actors. The primary intervention 138 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? of the PAR is to support state agencies in hosting refugee families relocated to Portugal under the EU agreement. A secondary function of PAR is to fundraise, collect, and deliver donations in kind, and provide volunteers for the humanitarian activities of JRS and Caritas in their response to the displacement crisis in countries neighbouring Syria and, by extension, the so-called refugee crisis in Europe. Second are the squat settlements. One of the most recognised is the City Plaza Refugee Accommodation Centre (henceforth City Plaza). The juxtaposition of thousands of refugees and migrants living homeless in the streets of Athens with an increasing number of abandoned and derelict hotels and office blocks in the heart of the city prompted civil society activists into action. City Plaza was founded by the Solidarity Initiative to Economic and Political Refugees; a broad coalition of refugee, migrants, anti-racist groups, and leftist activists, including some former members of the Syriza movement which is currently in government. The initiative is one of many examples that can be found in Athens of “contagious solidarity” where recognising and acting on “the needs of neighbours and fellow humans, sustain[s] partial alternative worlds within intolerable systems” (Cabot, 2016:163). “Medicine”, Cabot wryly observes, is “composed, in part, of the very illnesses it counteracts” (ibid.). This janus-faced relationship between crisis and response raises implications for our understandings of solidarity when we consider that people on the move are confronted not only with the challenges of austerity, but also the complications of not being in place in accordance with the sedentarist principles of the nation-state. The self-proclaimed “best hotel in Europe” provides shelter and organising space for around 400 refugees and migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Each family is given a room and a cleaning roster is devised for residents of each floor. At City Plaza, residents are given three meals a day and have a share in kitchen duties with volunteers, many of whom are internationals transiting through Athens for the short term. On-site language classes are also provided. Regular assemblies are held on a weekly basis; one each for volunteers and for residents and a third general assembly which is open for all. During these assemblies issues are raised, decisions made, and day-to-day needs addressed. 139 TAHIR ZAMAN The strapline of the initiative is “we live together, we struggle together, solidarity will win!” It is clearly a ground-breaking initiative - the squat was the first of its kind in Athens and is located in a part of town which until recently was dominated by supporters of the fascist Golden Dawn. The media exposure and branding of City Plaza has meant that in comparison to the other squats, it has a regular flow of volunteers supporting their activities and is well resourced.5 City Plaza also makes available several rooms for volunteers to stay in exchange for their efforts. This raises some awkward and uncomfortable questions around solidarity work. Following the closure of Piraeus port in late July, there was a spike in the number of arrivals in Athens city centre. As mentioned earlier, many had been directed to the squats in search of shelter. Given that the squats were at full capacity, families were being turned away. On one occasion, when I had been offering to translate for Arabic and Urdu speakers, a Syrian Kurdish family arrived and were turned away. I intervened asking whether it would be possible for the mother and her two children to stay in the lobby or cafe area of the hotel while I accompanied the father to the other squats to secure at least a night’s rest for the family. The City Plaza management team on that day - made up of Greek volunteers and an English-speaking refugee resident - decided against it, stating it would set a bad precedent, making the squat unmanageable in the future. The mother was told she and her children could wait under the shade of a wall outside the hotel while we went to find alternative accommodation. The troubling aspect of this anecdote is that European and North American volunteers, including myself, had the privileged freedom to come in and out of the hotel, wait in the lobby, and make use of the cafe area. Such moments that reproduce boundaries of inclusion/exclusion sit alongside a mode of humanitarianism where the contributions of refugees as active agents are recognised. Here, the kitchen space, where meals are prepared for the four hundred residents, is prominent. Yet, the number of residents who are given responsibility to partake in such activities remains limited. There are also the squats affiliated to the Syrian Solidarity House Initiative (henceforth SSH) which number seven in total, including a squat solely for single men and a squat solely for households with pregnant women 140 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? or children under the age of one. A conservative estimate of the number of residents at the six squats stands at around 1,200 people. Here, once again, relations vary from squat to squat. Notara 26 has developed more sustained relations with local Greek activists and the Fifth School also has regular contact and working relationships with Mano Aperta - a local Greek initiative which provides a community kitchen over the weekend for the residents of the squats. All the squats make use of the Nosotros community space - particularly the Hotel Oniro squat which was dependent on using the community kitchen at Nosotros during the summer.6 Furthermore, residents of the squats are free to make use of the network of solidarity health services available in the city as and when they are required. However, the level of engagement between local Greek residents and inhabitants of the SSH squats is predominantly channelled through the personal networks of a very small number of local Greek activists. The majority of daily encounters and meaningful interactions that residents of the SSH squats have (aside from with other refugees and migrants) are with British, European, and North American new humanitarians rather than with neighbouring Greek residents.7 Long-term volunteers act as vectors for resources coming in from abroad. One volunteer told me she had received over £80,000 in the past year through community-based organisations and voluntary associations in the UK. Many of the donations were sent to her by people she characterised as being motivated by Islamic belief and practice. Donations are often marked as being for zakāt or sadaqa and have been distributed in the form of cash assistance or to help meet food, clothing, health, and educational needs irrespective of the religious and ethnic belonging of the recipient. Perhaps equally significant to the material resources are the reciprocal exchanges made possible through the repeated visits of long-term volunteers. This marks the work of volunteers as distinct from formal modes of humanitarian work where the emphasis is on relief delivery. The work of long-term volunteers involves much non-material and affective care work that in some cases can be seen as a nurturing of friendships with residents of the squats. As such, the solidarity work of volunteers is transformative in a way that formal modes of humanitarianism are unable to be. However, resources are not evenly distributed across the squats. Buildings occupied 141 TAHIR ZAMAN with a sociable space attached to them are more likely to attract volunteers and therefore resources to their squat. Both the Fifth school squat and the Acharnon school squat have large concrete playgrounds which afford refugees and migrants the opportunity to take on the role of host, and volunteers the role of guest. Here, refugees are able to reciprocate in a limited fashion by giving up their time to be with volunteers. It is also important to acknowledge here that relationships of mutual responsibility and care are being fostered intra squat (see figure 1 below). Surplus donations are distributed to other less well-resourced squats. There have been attempts to better coordinate the distribution of resources between the SSH-affiliated squats but these efforts have proceeded slowly and been sporadic. Facilities available at one squat, for instance a doctor’s surgery, is open to residents of other squats within the SSH network. Following the firebombing of the Notara 26 squat on 24 August 2016, suspected to have been perpetrated by fascists, the residents of the nearby Oniro squat arrived quickly on the scene to help extinguish the blaze. In the days that followed, residents from the squats combined efforts along with Greek volunteers to help repair the fire-damaged storeroom. Long-term residents of the squats also help locate and establish new squats to welcome new arrivals to the city. Figure 1. A barber from the squat at Acharnon offers residents free haircuts, shaves, and beard-trims. Source: Tahir Zaman 142 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? A degree of convergence on broader political objectives can also be found between residents of the squatter settlements, solidarity activists, and volunteers. On the specific issue of migration and free mobility of labour, there has been an attempt by migrant rights activists to coalesce the multiple voices of different groups into a unified speech act - the call to open the borders. This was most noticeable during protests where volunteers, local residents, rights activists, migrants, and refugees marched from Exarcheia to Syntagma square to protest the closure of the borders (see figure 2 below). At a weekly general assembly of the SSH, a resident from a camp in Thessaloniki had come to appraise residents of the squats and locally based activists of the dire living conditions in the camps and the slow registration process of refugees for relocation in the EU and for family reunification. A consensus was reached that there was a need to organise a protest in the heart of Athens at the end of August to coincide with a national holiday. Attendees of the meeting were encouraged to draw up a list of agreed demands for the protest. The very first demand was the opening of the border to all refugees. Syrian refugees were keen to record that the relocation programme should be open to all refugees and not just Syrians. One attendee at the meeting remarked: “we have all fled from war, so Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis all should have the right to cross the border”. Figure 2. Banner from Acharnon school squat at a migrant-led protest. Source: Tahir Zaman 143 TAHIR ZAMAN The call from migrants and refugees in Athens is clear and unequivocal - open the borders! It is not only a call against the injustice they have fled from - be that the risk of war or the structural violence of long-term unemployment - but also a protest cry against the regime of care and control they are exposed to as they transit through Greece. This call has been heeded by an array of actors. Ironically, it is the solidaristic principles of the European Union permitting free movement for residents of member states that has allowed for the profusion of new humanitarians to respond to the call of migrants and refugees in Greece. This has brought together an unlikely cohort of activists and humanitarians into near proximity to one another - an observation neatly captured in a conversation with a Catholic Priest who told me: “I sometimes feel I am closer to the anarchists of Exarcheia than I am to the Orthodox Church in this country”. In what follows, I attempt to unpack the complex relations and encounters between actors with vastly different histories and trajectories. To do so, I suggest it is useful to consider contributions from the field of human geography to better understand the spaces, flows, and linkages that help produce conditions of possibility for solidarity. Exarcheia - The solidarity quarter Here, Doreen Massey’s centrifugal approach to understandings of place moves beyond a territorially bounded reading, helping us think more clearly about the spaces and practices of solidarity in Athens. In her seminal sketch of her local high street in Kilburn, Massey (1991:28) observes that: “what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised history, but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving at a particular locus”. Yet, there are particular and powerful histories that emerge over time helping produce “counter spaces” (Yeoh & Huang, 1998:599) and “communities of resistance” (Keith & Pile, 1993:37). Exarcheia, nestled between the Polytechnic, the National Archaeological Museum, and the well-heeled Kolonaki neighbourhood, has been at the hub of counter-publics in Athens since the student revolts against the military Junta in the 1970s. It brings together an eclectic 144 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? mix of autonomists, ecologists, feminists, anarchists, and those generally identifying with the left who locate themselves outside parliamentary politics (Tsagarousianou, 1993; Vatikiotis, 2011). More recently, the December 2008 murder of 15-year-old Alex Grigoropoulos by the police in Exarcheia prompted a series of insurrections, mobilisations, protests, and riots against the police, state buildings, and other symbols of transnational capital. With the crisis of austerity, Exarcheia has become the testing ground for a dense cluster of social enterprises, assembly points, and food and time banks for people whom the state and the market have long neglected and marginalised. Figure 3. Sign outside a cooperatively run store on the periphery of Exarcheia. Source: Tahir Zaman. This infrastructure or ecology of the commons is slowly being extended to people on the move - refugees and migrants. As one local activist at an assembly of a refugee squat succinctly put it: “We Greeks don’t need to 145 TAHIR ZAMAN have sex any more, the state fucks us each and every morning we get up, and then one more time before we go to bed - so we are with you [the refugees and the migrants]”. It is in this “particular constellation of social relations” that migrants and refugees have been afforded space to insert themselves. In so doing, they attract another set of networks and relations which append themselves to the existing infrastructure. Most notable among these relations are those with informal humanitarians.8 While it is perhaps facile to say that sites of resistance such as Exarcheia offer a counterbalance to the hegemonic, I am making the case that there is a pressing need to consider the different trajectories of actors located in sites of resistance. For many of the activists in Exarcheia, inspired by principles of anarchism and autonomism, there has been a conscious political journey which has seen them gravitate towards the district. Activists choose to be there and to be part of an anti-establishment milieu. In so doing, a space of belonging is produced and shared with like-minded others. On the other hand, there are people fleeing from arenas of war and conflict for whom stability is much sought after: people who have little choice other than to be in state-controlled camps which, by and large, have been declared “unsafe and unsanitary” for human habitation (Human Rights Watch, 2016). Often overlooked in discussions on solidarity are the myriad ways in which those who identify as belonging to spaces like Exarcheia engage in practices of “territoriality” to produce social control; delineating what action is permissible and who the legitimate actors are (Sack, 1986; Agnew, 2007). The counter publics in Exarcheia, through their everyday interactions and material practices, impose their rules of the game such to organise spatial practices. In so doing, they generate the production and reproduction of a habitus in accordance with anarchist and autonomist ways of being. The identity of Exarcheia, as with any place, is a social construct made and remade through struggle and contestation. These struggles have long been contested, often violently, with the state. As we have seen, Exarcheia is a site for political mobilisation. Exarcheia evokes certain emotions, dispositions, and values concerning what the appropriate way of being ought to be: “This is an anarchist place!” “NGOs not welcome!” “Fuck the 146 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? Police!” “ACAB!” “This is the devil’s place!” “Wild resistance to industrial taming!” and “No State, No Capitalism!” These are just some of the refrains I have seen and heard in Exarcheia. Refugees and migrants arriving from Moria camp in Lesvos are familiar with some of these sentiments (see figure 4). Syrian refugees I spoke to complained about the prison-like conditions they had to endure in the camp during their stay there in April and May 2016. Others are visibly bewildered on coming across the strangeness of Exarcheia for the first time. Figure 4. Graffiti on the walls of an outbuilding at Moria Camp, Lesvos. Source: Tahir Zaman The conundrum of Massey’s intervention on privileging the intersection of social relations over and above the very real emotive histories of a place can, to a certain degree, be resolved by Ash Amin’s idea of a “politics of propinquity” where places are identified as “sites of heterogeneity juxtaposed within close spatial proximity, and as sites of multiple geographies of affiliation, linkage and flow” (Amin, 2004:38). Histories are not only fixed in a place but are carried and embodied by those who arrive, stay, or move through sites such as Exarchia. When we consider these sites in the context of a competitive humanitarian field, relations of power and moments of domination are never far from the surface. 147 TAHIR ZAMAN For many refugees arriving in Athens, their journey was in part prompted by the impasse wrought by the formal humanitarian system in their country of first asylum. This first-hand experience of the functioning of the humanitarian system allowed several refugee interlocutors to formulate a nuanced critique of humanitarianism, seeing it as embedded in broader market dynamics (Carbonnier, 2015; Krause 2014). They were keenly aware of how the humanitarian marketplace conceives the displaced person as an invisibilised yet integral component of humanitarian projects that prospective donors finance. Exarcheia thus presented an opportunity for some to formulate their own rudimentary mshārī’ (projects) - to build relationships with international volunteers arriving with material resources and become producers of projects in the humanitarian marketplace themselves. This created tensions with other local Greek and international volunteers more committed to egalitarian understandings of solidarity and wary of any attempt to formalise their commitment to supporting refugees and migrants in the form of a project. Some refugees distinguished little between the manifold actors attracted to the loci of the autonomous housing collectives; viewing them equally as self-interested rational actors. H, a young man from Aleppo, had already failed several times in his attempts to reach Austria where he had an uncle. When I asked him why he kept returning to use the services of smugglers he told me: “Houn bi Atina bass al-mharrib ibn halal [Here in Athens, only the smuggler is legit]”. For H, an encounter with a smuggler is straightforward and transactional - pay him once he has successfully facilitated the onward journey. Put plainly, there are competing and often antagonistic agendas here, as actors jockey for position in the emerging humanitarian field (Zaman, 2016). Conflicting positions are perhaps more explicitly articulated as the field is not subject to state power. That is to say, in the face of austerityafflicted Athens, displaced people have extricated themselves from the rules of the humanitarian game set by the state. Alongside this official game an alternative rulebook for humanitarian action is being formulated; widening the number of participants and reconfiguring the basis underpinning humanitarian action. Contested understandings of what solidarity means 148 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? and looks like rise to the fore as participants in the new game bring to bear their own personal histories and trajectories to differentiate their work from the official humanitarian field. As Brown and Yaffe (2013:8) observe, “solidarity actions can face in more than one direction and seek to intervene at more than one scale simultaneously”. How the politics of propinquity is managed is integral to any project of solidarity. The prioritisation of some activists’ agendas over and above the concerns of migrants and refugees echoes paternalistic attitudes of humanitarians who are adamant in knowing what is best. The same attitude is prevalent in some of the squats where any discussion of NGO involvement is ruled out by some activists as a matter of principle. This was captured in an exchange between a self-identified anarchist and the director of a small NGO9 who had offered to provide mattresses for residents in one of the squats, and was told: “they can sleep on the floor - they don’t need mattresses”. Absent in this exchange were the residents of the squat themselves. Given the complex web of relations between local activists, international volunteers, and refugees, the following section interrogates the notion of host-guest relationships. It considers the degree to which hospitality presents an obstacle in encountering the migrant and refugee other through modalities of egalitarian solidarity. Humanitarian subjects or refugee solidarians? As described above, the discussion on solidarity in the context of the autonomous housing collectives in the Exarcheia neighbourhood has fallen short of the mutual care and responsibility that is needed to establish a “mobile commons” that can effectively challenge the hegemony of the nation state. To be clear, there have been acts and everyday practices of mutual care and responsibility amongst and between refugee groups. However, in considering relations between international volunteers, local Greek activists, and refugees, it becomes clear that the overwhelming majority of actors in this scene continue to be framed within the lens of hospitality. For the most part, refugees continue to play the role of guest - the same logic under which humanitarian action operates (Zaman, 2016a; Brun 2010). 149 TAHIR ZAMAN While there is a recognition that forced migrants are “attributed the power and agency that they typically lack in other contexts” (Rozakou, 2012:574), many people I spoke to said life in the squats was immeasurably better than in camps - that agency remains constrained. The squats are largely serviced by others who maintain control over resources arriving. In one of the squats, certain groups of volunteers have been described by refugee residents as being “monopolists” of care regimes for refugees. The lead activist - a mid-twenties white male from north-west Europe, explained to me how he and other activists were “teaching horizontal organising and democratic decision-making to the residents”. The fact that activists rather than residents were leading assemblies and decision-making processes seemed lost on him. It also served as a stringent reminder of how the crisis of displacement since 2015 has been made intelligible and recalibrated through the histories of privileged white Europeans - in this case the pedagogy of European anarchism. It purposefully hides and makes invisible the histories and trajectories of others who have had experiences of organising and transparent decision-making that lies outside of European ways of doing. In other squats, there was pushback from refugees who asserted greater control over resource distribution. Where unchecked, the caregiving role can be wholly appropriated by volunteers. At the Acharnon school squat, some parents lamented how they were no longer good parents. The lack of a disciplined routine for children means that parents struggle to cope in a fast-changing context where different groups of volunteers arrive to fill the gaps in informal education programmes. One long-term volunteer described the situation as “the theft of parenting skills”, echoing findings in other contexts where young men felt emasculated as the role of breadwinner was usurped by NGOs and humanitarian agencies (Turner, 1999; Jaji, 2008). She explained further: As soon as parents try to put down some rules and boundaries for the children, volunteers come along and take over. They smother - all with good intentions. Mothers begin to feel demotivated and frustrated. The volunteers fix a routine which is geared around meal times for adults. Children are 150 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? not stupid, they see this. They see that volunteers come in and provide the security they need. It is not uncommon to see young children affectionately hugging volunteers. The volunteers end up becoming the parents. The regular arrival of well-resourced international volunteers has meant there has been little in the way of building economic self-reliance for the residents of the squats, with the preferred model being aid in kind. The areas where residents have a measure of greater agency are the cooking of meals and the distribution of goods kept in on-site storage rooms. To date, little attention has been paid to questions of work outside of the spaces of the squats. Aside from employment laws preventing new arrivals from participating freely in the labour market, this can be attributed to the fact that many residents consider themselves as only transiting through Athens and therefore guests. One resident told me: “You can’t expect people to put their hands and minds to work when they are thinking about their future being elsewhere. I’m not going to spend time learning the language if I don’t expect to stay here. You can’t make plans for the unknown”. One exception has been the networked humanitarianism undertaken by a team of refugee volunteers supported by the Jafra Foundation. The refugee volunteers are a group of 35 former residents of the Lagadikia camp in Thessaloniki who moved to Athens to hasten their claims for relocation or family reunification. In self-identifying as volunteers, the Jafra group challenge the perception that all refugees are vulnerable and in need. They not only stake a claim as active producers in the humanitarian field, but also reconfigure the underlying principle driving their understanding of humanitarianism to be neighbourliness. The lead coordinator of the team, J, explained: We have cities and streets back home just like what you see here in Athens. We have skills and capacities that need to be tapped into. We don’t just want to sit around waiting until we are given relocation. We have teachers, engineers, doctors among us. We don’t need volunteers coming from Europe to come and 151 TAHIR ZAMAN hug our children - we can do that ourselves. We can make the children happy. We can show Europe another face of what it means to be a refugee - one which isn’t asking and in need but one that is giving and sharing with their new neighbours. This is what we did in Lagadikia - we grew vegetables and made knafeh which we shared with the people from the local villages. We want to do the same here in Athens to show that we can give something back. Here, refugees are creating space for a shared sociability. It is not enough to produce for themselves alone but refugees from the Jafra team are actively searching out opportunities to reciprocate for the hospitality that has been afforded them. In so doing, they seek to move beyond the imposed role of guest that has been consigned to them. Instead, they designate themselves as neighbours; present, visible, and resident. Acts such as these are explicitly political in that they seek to transform the discourse and narrative of what it means to be a refugee. A lead volunteer, M, described the volunteer team as: “refugees working for other refugees. We were in the camps in Greece like everyone else. Jafra is a symbol for us - we work under its umbrella. It shows that we can work and change our own conditions”. There is limited financial support for the volunteer team from the Jafra foundation based in Lebanon and Syria, but it is linked to that organisation through past experiences of the volunteers (some of whom worked for the organisation in Lebanon and Syria) and through knowledge-sharing. To compensate for this lack of financial support, the team meets the cost of its activities through donations collected on their behalf by other activists in the Diaspora. Material resources, including both food and non-food items, are attained through a network of relations with other new humanitarians who operate distribution centres in the north of Greece. Through such relationships, the volunteer team from the Jafra foundation serves as a reminder that there are no hard and fast binaries of refugee and volunteer humanitarianisms. The former is dependent on the latter for knowledge of and access to the mobile commons. 152 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? Aside from the efforts of the refugees, there has been little in the way of attempts to integrate the refugees into the wider social and solidarity economy that has emerged in Athens in response to austerity. There have been two notable exceptions. The first was a theatre performance put together by residents of the Acharnon School Squat. Here, they made use of the Nosotros community space in Exarcheia for rehearsal purposes every afternoon over a period of six weeks and performed a play on two occasions at a newly established community day centre for refugees and migrants. The second was a promotional event organised by the residents of Oniro squat with the assistance of a Greek activist and international volunteers. Here, they raised money from a group of Spanish volunteers to prepare knafeh, a popular Levantine dessert, which they distributed to passers-by at Exarcheia Square along with details of the location of the squat. They also set up a sound system and introduced the local neighbourhood to the joys of dabkeh. The event was successful in attracting the attention and resources of local activists and international volunteers. Between hospitality and abject space The paradox of hospitality as rightly identified by Derrida (2000:14) is that it is only by “surmounting” itself can it be realised. In ceding “the mastery of the house” (ibid.) to the guest, the host-guest binary is effaced. I believe there was an opportunity to do so in Exarcheia, but one which was not fully grasped. Had the squats been alternative accommodation for both Greeks battling against the ravages of austerity and refugees on the move, then the possibility for encounter and interaction would arguably have been greater and more meaningful. Under such an arrangement, neither local Greeks nor refugees would have been configured as guests but rather as neighbours. Instead, the squats form what can be described as an archipelago in a sea of intra-Greek solidarity. Their engagement with Greek local activists has largely been limited thus far to being recipients of aid and as fellow participants on demonstrations. The one location where local Greeks and refugees share a space for accommodation is the Prosfygika site. Here, refugees have indeed been transformed from guests to neighbours, but the numbers remain small. 153 TAHIR ZAMAN Isin and Rygiel (2007:182) have helpfully introduced a three-fold taxonomy of “abject spaces” comprised of “various frontiers controlled by state authorities, zones where special rules or laws apply, and camps where laws are suspended”. They are designated as abject because the existence of those located in such spaces “is rendered invisible and inaudible” (ibid:184) and “this is nothing less than a rendering of these people as inexistent” (ibid:189, emphasis original.) It is their understanding of zones that demands further treatment here. “Zones”, they tell us, “are spaces where abjects live under suspended rules of freedom as spaces of inexistence [...] zones are spaces nestled within state and city territories. These include zones within cities to which various subjects are dispersed but then live under some form of conditional freedom and surveillance” (ibid:193). For the squats in Athens, the state renders them invisible and inaudible by not formally recognising their existence. In so doing, the state not only seeks to foreclose their ability to access rights through virtue of being in the city, but also effectively filters out the squat population from the care and protection regimes afforded by recognised NGOs and humanitarian agencies - exposing residents of squats to further vulnerabilities and insecurities. This approach complements the fear and loathing of NGOs and agencies on the part of the autonomists and anarchists in Exarcheia. Some refugees are left wondering why there is no support for the squats from the larger humanitarian actors. One resident told me: “God Bless K, he does a lot for all us refugees here, but it’s not like it was in Kara Tepe. The camp manager was a good man - he made sure we got everything we needed”. Squats may also be conceived of as “zones” in that they are waiting rooms for people who are in transit. Here, claimants may be transitioning across legal statuses, that is, awaiting approval of their asylum application in Greece, or they may have made a claim either for relocation for asylum in another EU state, or relocation under family reunification regulations. During these temporal blockages and while awaiting news of their asylum claims, refugees are provided a range of basic needs and services by a willing corps of international volunteers and local activists. Until the emphasis is shifted from aid and towards self-reliance, the squats, rather than being 154 WHAT’S SO RADICAL ABOUT REFUGEE SQUATS? fully spaces of solidarity, arguably follow more in the tradition of the camp. That is to say, they are spaces for filtering, segregating, and administering care - albeit spaces where the retreat of the state and the limited presence of humanitarian agencies and international NGOs has made way for a diverse group of non-institutional actors to engage. I would suggest that the squats are not fully abject spaces for three reasons. In the first instance, the state has not corralled refugees and migrants into such spaces - but it is through their own initiative along with support from local activists that they have opened the squats.10 Secondly, the state, despite its attempts to render the squats invisible and inaudible, has not been fully able to curtail their access to rights and social networks. Lastly, the squats have emerged from space provided by civil society actors. The squats have been established on the basis of filoxenia or hospitality. This is most marked in the guises of the City Plaza and the Oniro squats that have been transformed from spaces of market framed hospitality (hotels) into a community welcome where “guests” do not pay. Figure 5. A banner at the entrance of one of the SSH squats reads: “Ministry of Refugee Hospitality”. Source: Tahir Zaman 155 TAHIR ZAMAN Conclusion Exarcheia offers an interesting window into the contradictions, ambiguities, and opportunities of migrant activism and solidarity organising. This paper has attempted to make sense of solidarity work in a humanitarian context. It asks whether solidarity is at all possible where people are living under conditions of liminality. Migrants and refugees are temporally oriented towards a future elsewhere, making it difficult for them to reciprocate. This absence of mutual responsibility and care often subsumes solidarity efforts under the logic of humanitarianism. This, I have argued, is epitomised by the host-guest binary that continues to shape relationships between local residents and refugees. The autonomous housing collectives for spontaneously self-settled refugees or squats demonstrate in practicable terms the way in which a community-based model of humanitarianism can operate independent of the larger humanitarian architecture. Here, refugee-to-refugee solidarity is alive and well, typified by acts of mutual care and responsibility. However, there remains the hierarchical relation between host and guest that characterises interactions between refugees and resident civil society actors in Exarcheia. This, I have argued, preempts reciprocity between those who are in place and those who are on the move. Furthermore, it diminishes the possibility of realising a politics of propinquity. It is at the intersection of migrants and refugees, international volunteers, and local civil society actors who meet and weave at the locus of Exarcheia that helps produce a dynamic and autonomous response to questions of mass displacement in an urban context. The squats, I have argued, are akin to an archipelago in a sea of intra-Greek solidarity. The community of Exarcheia provides the ecology for a mobile commons into which these refugee housing collectives can connect. 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Notes 1 Here I take sociality to be “a dynamic and interactive relational matrix through which human beings come to know the world they live in and find their purpose and meaning within it” (Long & Moore 2013:2). 2 The Prosfygika of Alexandros Avenue carries immense resonance for refugee solidarity in Athens. The site was constructed by the Greek state for refugees following the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Today it is comprised of several squatted communities comprised largely of anarchists and Maoists. It is also home to several Afghan and Syrian refugee families who make up a quarter of the total number of inhabitants. 3 WELCOMMON: A Model Center for Housing and Social Inclusion”, http://anemosananeosis.gr/en/aboutwelcommon/ available [online], accessed 3 March 2019 4 Among the 29 founding members of the Platform are the Islamic Community of Lisbon, National Confederation of Solidarity Initiatives, and the European Anti-Poverty Network (Portugal). See http://www. refugiados.pt/sobre/#membros available [online], accessed 7 January 2017. 5 City Plaza promotional video available [online]: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=DKuHLSJuNGI (accessed 4 November 2016). 6 The arrival of the winter season meant that the roof terrace bar closed and moved into the space formerly used by refugees. 7 A small number of individual refugees with a modicum of English have developed friendships with local Greeks. 8 I choose the label informal humanitarian to describe those who are outside the formalised humanitarian system. This includes. amongst others. people 161 TAHIR ZAMAN affiliated to religious congregations or faith-inspired groups that have not formalised their work as an NGO, volunteers belonging to community associations, and professionals from the fields of education, healthcare, and social work in their country of origin who have volunteered their time and expertise to support refugees and migrants. 9 The NGO in question was the Humanitarian Support Agency which had formalised itself as an NGO in the past year. The organisation had begun as a volunteer-led effort in response to the unprecedented number of people crossing the Aegean in the summer of 2015. 10 In July, the closure of the Piraeus port camp saw a number of the refugees transferred to camps across Greece. Some refugees opted not to go to the camps and headed for the town centre. Refugees I spoke to claimed that state officials had signposted them to the squats. Refugees and migrants would arrive at overstretched squats who were unable to accommodate the new arrivals. 162