Abstract
This chapter focuses on the Refugee Solidarity Initiatives that evolved in Greece throughout 2015–2016, which form what I call the Refugee Solidarity Movement (RSM). It consists of both new and pre-existing organisations, most of them of local character, that form a loose nationwide network. The ‘refugee crisis’ that evolved in this period can also be separated into two phases, divided by the EU–Turkey agreement, which changed the political context tremendously. Each of them had its own characteristics: the government, the movements, and the refugees and migrants had to change their strategies as a result of the changing political context. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on four islands of the North Aegean, Crete, and three main cities of Greece, I argue that the solidarity that the Greek people and the RSM showed with the moving populations was subject to a triple transition (spatial, temporal, thematic) and that it depended heavily on the changing political context.
The author would like to thank Donatella della Porta for her comments and edits on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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- 1.
Solidarity for this chapter is understood in the Freirian sense of ‘entering in the situation of those with whom one is in solidarity … fighting at their side to transform the objective reality’ (Freire 1970, p. 49). For more details on the use of the term, see Karkus Kip’s relevant chapter in Fritsch et al. (2016).
- 2.
In the Greek public discourse the issue is known as prosfygiko, meaning ‘the refugee issue’. In this chapter I also use the term in that sense.
- 3.
In Greece, the term solidarians is used to describe the activists of the RSM, in contrast to the term mikiades which is used for the NGO (MKO in Greek) workers.
- 4.
In July 2015, the SYRIZA–ANEL government organised a referendum regarding the conditions the Troika (European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF) were requiring from Greece in order for a bailout package to be approved. The conditions were rejected by a 61 per cent majority; however the government later on practically ignored the referendum and accepted the bailout conditions.
- 5.
All of the names of my interviewees have been changed.
- 6.
A touristic city in Lesvos.
- 7.
The main city of Samos.
- 8.
According to a law that SYRIZA government (Ministry of the Interior) passed in February, the immigrants and refugees entering Greece can be detained in the hot-spots from three to 25 days, until their registration process is complete.
- 9.
In the Greek alphabet, the acronym NGO is MKO (MiKiO).
- 10.
Later on, under pressure from the RSM, the government passed an exception to the law. People who were helping the refugees/migrants for ‘humanitarian purposes’ were now immune from human trafficking accusations.
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Oikonomakis, L. (2018). Solidarity in Transition: The Case of Greece. In: della Porta, D. (eds) Solidarity Mobilizations in the ‘Refugee Crisis’. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71752-4_3
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