“A Total Black Hole”: How COVID-19 Increased Bureaucratic Violence Against Refugees in Greece

Abstract

State responses to COVID-19 were unevenly felt across society. Negative consequences of lockdowns and travel restrictions for the upper classes were largely restricted to not seeing friends or taking holidays. For those with little or no right to have rights (Arendt, 1970), those relegated to society’s margins—such as refugees and asylum claimants—state responses to COVID-19 metamorphosed into Kafkaesque restrictions, surveillance, and control. Informed by participant observations and 10 interviews with civil society actors conducted in Athens in 2021 and 2022 at the height of the pandemic, this paper shows how the Greek state weaponized COVID-19 to further exclude refugees from society, deny asylum procedures, and reduce service provision for those awaiting the outcome of their asylum claims.

Full text

Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees / Refuge : revue canadienne sur les réfugiés
2024, Vol. 39, No. 2, 1–18
https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.41079
“A Total Black Hole”: How COVID-19 Increased Bureaucratic
Violence Against Refugees in Greece
Raluca Bejana
and Tracy Glynnb
HISTORY Published 2024-04-30
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ABSTRACT
State responses to COVID-19 were unevenly felt across society. Negative consequences of lockdowns and travel
restrictions for the upper classes were largely restricted to not seeing friends or taking holidays. For those with
little or no right to have rights (Arendt,1970), those relegated to society’s margins—such as refugees and
asylum claimants—state responses to COVID-19 metamorphosed into Kafkaesque restrictions, surveillance,
and control. Informed by participant observations and 10 interviews with civil society actors conducted in
Athens in 2021 and 2022 at the height of the pandemic, this paper shows how the Greek state weaponized
COVID-19 to further exclude refugees from society, deny asylum procedures, and reduce service provision for
those awaiting the outcome of their asylum claims.
KEYWORDS
asylum seekers; refugees; bureaucratic violence; Athens; Greece; COVID-19
RÉSUMÉ
Les réponses étatiques à la COVID-19 ont été ressenties de manière inégale à travers la société. Pour les classes
supérieures, les conséquences négatives des confinements et des restrictions de voyage se sont limitées à
l’impossibilité de voir des amis ou de partir en vacances. Pour ceux avec peu ou pas de droit d’avoir des droits
(Arendt,1970) et relégués aux marges de la société, comme les réfugiés et demandeurs d’asile, les réponses
de l’État à la COVID-19 se sont métamorphosées en restrictions, en surveillance et en contrôle kafkaïens.
S’appuyant sur des observations participantes et 10 entretiens avec des acteurs de la société civile menés
à Athènes au plus fort de la pandémie en 2021 et en 2022, cet article démontre comment l’État grec a
instrumentalisé la COVID-19 afin d’exclure davantage les réfugiés de la société, refuser les procédures d’asile
et réduire les services offerts aux personnes en attente de l’issue de leur demande d’asile.
INTRODUCTION
COVID-19 has been labelled the “great am-
plifier” of inequalities, likened to an X-ray
revealing pre-existing societal disparities
(Crawley,2021, p. 4). Those wealthy enough
to continue working from home were able to
cocoon in metaphorical glass houses, as they
were hardly impacted by the virus in terms of
CONTACT
a(Corresponding author) Raluca.Bejan@dal.ca, School of Social Work, Cross-appointed Department of European Studies,
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
btglynn@stu.ca, Environment and Society Program, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
infection and mortality rates, or by the con-
sequences of nationwide restrictions. They
might have been unable to see friends and
family or take a vacation, but their livelihoods
were not severely affected by pandemic-
related official responses. COVID-19 state
measures, such as lockdowns and stay-at-
home orders, widened the health disparities
© Bejan, R. & Glynn, T. 2024

2 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
experienced by marginalized groups such as
refugees and asylum seekers,1who prior to
COVID-19 were already living in conditions
of restricted movement, overcrowding, and
unhygienic housing (Crawley,2021), and
were therefore at greater risk of contract-
ing the virus (Brakefield et al.,2023;Caron
& Adegboye,2021;Dalsania et al.,2021;
Franco-Paredes et al.,2020). Yet, not only
were COVID-19 infection rates about to be
higher for the refugees residing in camps or
insecure accommodations, but COVID-19 has
also been used as a pretext to brand refugees
as vectors of disease. Within a context where
the virus has been constructed as the external
enemy against the nation (Poenaru,2021),
asylum seekers and refugees, through their
very feature of “foreignness,” have been
made out to be the ultimate infectious threat
(Alrob & Shields,2022).
People have differential access to the
services of the welfare state according to
their immigration status. Citizens have the
most protections, followed by permanent res-
idents, then those with temporary work per-
mits; migrants with irregular status (i.e., the
undocumented), refugees, and those seeking
asylum are at the bottom of this hierarchy.
These outsiders to the nation (Sharma,2020)
have the least right to claim state protection.
The nation can expel them on any occa-
sion. State measures to contain COVID-19
widened these divisions between citizens—
those with full rights to state protections—
and outsiders—those whose lives are defined
by the wait to gain the right to access fur-
1We use the terms refugees, asylum seekers,people on the
move, and irregular migrants interchangeably to refer to the
subjects of our paper who are seeking asylum and/or refugee
status in Greece. Refugees are those who have secured some
status in the nation, while asylum seekers are those awaiting
a decision regarding their status; both the refugees and the
asylum seekers in our study experienced a similar kind of bu-
reaucratic violence that was different from that experienced
by citizens. In this article we use these categories of migrant
subjects interchangeably to denote lack of permanency in the
nation and citizenship.
ther rights (Arendt,1970)—such as health
care, education, and employment (Bohnet &
Rüegger,2021;Crawley,2021;Topak,2020).
Measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 did
not consider how restrictions on movement
would harm those with insecure migration
status. Similarly, most COVID-19 measures
failed to facilitate access to health care by
irregular migrants if they contracted the virus
(Alawa et al.,2020;Bohnet & Rüegger,2021;
Fouskas,2020;Tsourdi,2020).
It is in this context that this paper explores
how COVID-19 has been weaponized to
exclude the refugee population in Greece,
a country that has been at the height of
media attention for its treatment of irregular
migrants. We argue that the Greek state
instrumentalized the pandemic as a pretext
to implement stricter rules for people on the
move—specifically, to justify violent bureau-
cratic responses that restricted their access
to asylum and other public supports. Our
data, which are based on interviews with
service providers and non-governmental
organization (NGO) personnel, reveals the
difficulties facing refugees in Athens, Greece.
These include a web of bureaucratic en-
tanglements, such as delays with asylum
processes and scarce service provision due
to extended lockdowns, that stripped the
refugee populations from their mobility
rights. In a way, these bureaucratic measures
became bordering practices in themselves
(Alrob & Shields,2022), materializing into a
second border that asylum seekers had now
to get clearance from to secure admission
into the nation. The paper also discusses the
impact of the COVID-19 measures on service
provision and shows how service providers
subverted the implementation of such rules,
shedding light on the creative efforts of civil
society to resist bureaucratic violence.
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3 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
REFUGEES’ EXPERIENCES WITH
BUREAUCRATIC VIOLENCE
Violence is a contested concept. Some argue
that what constitutes violence reflects the
value system of a given society at a given
time (Davies,2022). In other words, what is
considered violent in a liberal democracy is
likely to be different in a dictatorship. Liberal
states pride themselves on humanitarian
values and respect for human rights, yet
liberal bureaucracies routinely exercise a
banal kind of violence on groups possessing
limited rights in society (Eldridge & Reinke,
2018;Heckert,2020). Classist, racialized, and
ethnocentric notions that see some people
as belonging to the nation while relegating
others to exclusion play out in arbitrary
administrative practices that detain migrants,
restrict movement for some while enabling
the movement of others, and designate bod-
ies according to their origin, their nationality,
and their usefulness to national economies
(Adam & Hänsel,2021;Ammaturo,2019;
Morales,2021;Spathopoulou et al.,2020;
Topak,2020).
Within nation-states, bureaucracies de-
limit the territorial sovereignty of the na-
tion and culturally delineate its national
ethos. National television, national bank,
national museums, national hockey team,
national language, national emergency num-
ber, national insurance, national social secu-
rity numbers—all are markers of a collective
appurtenance that is territorially defined and
culturally understood. The idea of a nation
implies an “imagined political community”
with limited boundaries that define it as
separate from other nations (B. Anderson,
1983). This imagination posits a “deep, hor-
izontal comradeship” (B. Anderson,1983,
p. 7) in virtue of which, despite existing
problems and intrinsic domestic inequalities,
the members of the imagined community
become an all-encompassing totality. This is
why it is considered honourable to die for
the Ukrainian nation, for Ukraine’s right to
self-determination in the face of Russian ag-
gression, yet, as Benedict Anderson argued,
it is not as morally honourable to die for the
“Labour Party, the American Medical Associa-
tion or perhaps even Amnesty International”
(1983, p. 144). It is these very same ideological
principles of maintaining the nation that
become bureaucratically materialized in in-
stitutions whose primary scope is to guard
national interests. Bureaucracies contain the
legal apparatus to maintain the national
imagined community, to consolidate the
nation, and to make its sovereignty recog-
nizable to others.
Philosophically speaking, bureaucracies
are not inherently violent. However, since
they function to preserve the nation and to
manage the “relationships of force exercised
by institutions and power apparatuses” (Bal-
ibar,2015, p. 75) between national subjects
and outsiders, bureaucracies become violent:
they guard the entry to the nation and
delineate who has the right to belong to the
nation. Outsiders, then, are selectively chosen
by bureaucracies based on what the nation
needs at particular points in time. COVID-19
has been used as a management tool to re-
strict mobility on national needs. Within this
nation-based hierarchical selection process,
asylum seekers and refugees are among the
last on the ladder that the nation cares about.
The nation does not know from the get-go
how to use these subjects, what roles they
can perform inside the nation, what skills
and what other attributes they can bring
to strengthen the national economy; hence,
state bureaucracies treat them as surplus that
can only be invited in at certain times, that
the host nations have legitimate reasons to
keep out in a state of crisis, such as a public
health crisis.
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4 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
National bureaucracies, then, become in-
directly violent towards outsiders because
their legal apparatuses exist for the benefit
of those who belong to the nation and
not for those relegated to the outside. And
while it might be immoral to bestow fewer
rights on migrants, foreigners, or refugees
as compared with citizens of the nation, it
might not be unethical in terms of the social
functioning of the nation, since the nation
exists primarily for the sake of its citizens
and to protect its citizens. This is why most
Western societies grant citizenship on jus
sanguinis (by blood) principles, meaning
that appurtenance to the nation seem to
be inherited. And when jus soli (by birth)
regimes grant citizenship, subjects still need
some national appurtenance. For instance,
France gives jus soli citizenship at birth only
from the third generation; Germany grants
it from the second generation, if at least one
parent has lived in Germany for a minimum
of eight years, and if the applicant renounces
their former citizenship when acquiring Ger-
man nationality; Britain grants conditional
jus soli at birth if one parent is a citizen
or permanent resident; Netherlands grants
conditional citizenship at 18 years of age
for those with Dutch residency since birth
(Honohan,2010). Territorial birth, as these
examples show, becomes the basic criterion
for granting citizenship, the primary prin-
ciple that demarcates between belonging
to the nation and not belonging. Being
part of the nation also implies a territorial
attachment that stands as the basis of the
nation producing regimes of accessing rights:
“The condition of foreignness is projected
within a political space or national territory
to create an inadmissible alterity” (Balibar,
2015, p. 69).
Walls, barbed-wire fences, border patrols,
and pushbacks are tools employed by na-
tional bureaucracies to exclude those with
less appurtenance to the nation and to keep
those unwanted outside its borders. For
outsiders who enter the national territory
as asylum seekers and refugees—the cate-
gory of noncitizen and non-national subject
par excellence—bureaucratic procedures
tacitly discipline them as threatening sub-
jects (Abdelhady,2020;W. Anderson,2016;
Bohnet & Rüegger,2021) by denying them
access to essential services (Adam & Hänsel,
2021), such as “healthcare, education, police
protection and work, but also the right to
social relations and freedom of movement
in public spaces” (Khosravi,2010, p. 90);
by imposing arbitrary surveillance (Molnar,
2019); and by implementing complicated
procedures to access asylum (Topak,2020).
The bureaucratic violence enacted by the
state has resulted in what some have called
the “politics of exhaustion,” in which depor-
tations, substandard living conditions, and
the continuous threat of violence embody
the way in which “exhaustion is employed as
a tool of governance and control” (Welander
& De Vries,2016, p. 2).
Even in wealthier democracies such as
the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany,
and Sweden, which are more financially
equipped to respond to large influxes of
people, refugees continue to be seen as a
threat in need of special governance despite
these countries’ rhetoric of being welcom-
ing to foreigners (Abdelhady et al.,2020;
Afouxenidis et al.,2017;Canning,2020). In
Greece, the post-2008 recessionary climate
and poverty have been fuelling restrictive
policies for asylum seekers. Greece’s austerity
measures have coincided with the country
closing its border with Turkey in 2011 (Afoux-
enidis et al.,2017;Cabot,2019). In 2012,
Greece launched “Xenios Zeus,” a police
operation supported by the European Union
(EU) External Borders Fund, which involved
house searches and mass arrests in places
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5 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
in Athens known to host irregular migrants
(Afouxenidis et al.,2017).
The 2016 EU–Turkey agreement (Euro-
pean Council,2016) is another example of
bureaucratic violence. This agreement, which
sends irregular arrivals to the Greek islands
back to Turkey and declare all applications
for asylum inadmissible, has led Greece to
implement a “hotspot” system (i.e., first-entry
reception centres) on the Aegean islands. In
theory, the hotspots were intended as recep-
tion facilities to fast-track asylum procedures
(Bousiou,2020). In practice, however, they
have become open-air prisons with people
waiting to be deported. Most operate as
detention centres, with barbed-wire fences
and police presence, and are located outside
urban centres, restricting the movement of
refugees but also keeping them at distance
from the public (Bird et al.,2021).
More than 40,000 refugees are currently in
hotspots in Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros, and
Kos. Many also live in tents and ad hoc struc-
tures around the overcrowded camps (Ayata
& Fyssa,2020). Various forms of violence
overlap in these hotspots: the coercive vio-
lence of confinement, the symbolic violence
of waiting and surveillance, and the physical
violence manifested in inadequate food and
lack of essential facilities (W. Anderson,2016;
Ayata & Fyssa,2020;Gordon & Larsen,2016).
Topak (2020) likens the waiting at the Moria
camp on Lesvos to a form of bio-political
violence, with asylum seekers lacking control
over their own time and any power to change
the asylum procedures affecting them. When
one is forced to wait, powerlessness increases
and subordination is normalized (Abdelhady
et al.,2020). Refugees at Moria were of-
ten targets of unwanted police surveillance,
yet they were never considered worthy of
the kind of surveillance that would protect
them (Adam & Hänsel,2021;Topak,2020).
Many also had to cope with the trauma
of violence they had experienced in their
home countries and along their migration
routes as the camps are also sites of sexual
violence, self-harm, and suicide (Adam &
Hänsel,2021;Ausubel,2019;Belanteri et al.,
2020;Bohnet & Rüegger,2021;Bousiou,
2020;Topak,2020).
In mainland Greece, Athens in particular,
for a couple of years after 2015, asylum
seekers could, to some degree, escape the vio-
lence inflicted on those residing in the camps.
Entire neighbourhoods in Athens, such as
Victoria Square, Acharnon, and Exarcheia,
have for years been friendly to refugees
(Bejan,2022). In Exarcheia alone, several
refugee squats were set up in 2015 in Gare,
Spirou Trikoupi 17, Rosa de Fok, and Clandes-
tina (Bejan & Souvlis,2019). Greek anarcho-
communist activists occupied the famous
City Plaza Hotel and ran it as an egalitarian
co-op to house refugees (Lafazani,2018).
NGO actors operating near these areas pro-
vided much-needed support to refugees
that the state had failed to offer, including
education programs, Greek- and English-
language classes, shelter, escort to medical
appointments, and assistance in accessing
the labour market and filing asylum claims
(Bejan,2022).
During the left-wing Syriza coalition gov-
ernment, police regularly raided these refu-
gee squats in Athens, but when the right-
wing New Democracy party won the elec-
tions in 2019, the new government took a
much stricter law-and-order approach (Be-
jan & Souvlis,2019;Boukala,2021). New
Democracy promoted a rhetoric grounded
in fear of the other and directly targeted
refugee communities (Bejan & Souvlis,2019;
Karlin,2022). The 2019 and 2020 raids on the
refugee squats in Exarcheia need to also be
understood in terms of the market-friendly
ideological orientation of New Democracy,
which aimed to gentrify the neighbourhood
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6 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
and transform it into a tourist and foreign
investment enclave (Bejan & Souvlis,2019;
Pettas et al.,2021). The presence of refu-
gees did not fit with the ambitions of pri-
vate entrepreneurship. In this context, Prime
Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s aim to have
a “refugee-free capital by 2023” (Green-
wood,2022) was expected to magically lift
Greece out of poverty. Throughout 2022,
police forcibly removed hundreds of people
camped around Victoria Square and Omonia.
Simultaneously, the Greek state initiated
a phased closure of most camp accommo-
dations around Athens (Greenwood,2022).
Irregular migrants had to evacuate, but they
had nowhere to go. Some NGO workers saw
the violence against asylum seekers in the
Greek islands in 2016 as now being replicated
in Athens (Greenwood,2022).
The New Democracy government has also
forced international humanitarian actors op-
erating in Greece to register as Greek NGOs
(Refugees Support Aegean,2021). Grassroots
organizations that refused registration faced
criminalization (Micinski,2019;Schack &
Witcher,2021). Frontex and the Greek Coast
Guard also declared that they would penalize
humanitarian teams rescuing refugees at sea;
however, since the Greek Coast Guard could
not handle the number of arrivals, penalizing
humanitarian rescue teams ended up being a
death sentence for refugees at sea (Bousiou,
2020).
COVID-19 arrived in Greece when the
state was already working to dispose of the
refugee population in Athens. Infection rates
among asylum seekers hosted in Greek recep-
tion facilities were up to three times higher
than in the general population (Hargreaves
et al.,2021). These higher figures were gen-
erally attributed to large numbers of asylum
seekers residing in cramped and unsanitary
accommodations with no access to medical
treatment on site (Baker,2021). Yet despite
high levels of COVID-19 infections in the
Greek camps, no policy responses were for-
mulated to reduce transmission and protect
the health of asylum seekers (Hargreaves
et al.,2021). Instead, COVID-19 restrictions
became a “pretextual cover” to restrict the
rights of asylum seekers (Damon-Feng,2022),
with the Greek bureaucracy, as this paper
will show, restricting the mobility of refugee
subjects on claims of curbing infection rates
in the country.
Border closures have left displaced pop-
ulations in limbo everywhere on the globe,
with many states, including the United States,
forcibly returning asylum seekers to unsafe
countries (Damon-Feng,2022). COVID-19 has
become a “crisis of mobility,” with border
restrictions acting like a much more solidified
wall denying entry into the nation. What
mattered was not only to protect the na-
tion from security threats, as was the case
pre-pandemic, but also to protect it from
outsider asylum seekers seen as carrying
the virus. Perfectly sealed borders showed
that national bureaucracies saw the refugee
groups as “subjects who cannot be protected
from the pandemic if allowed inside [the
nation] and, at once, as potential vehicles
of contagion—‘Corona spreaders’—and thus
as dangers on a bacterial-hygienic level”
(Tazzioli & Stierl,2021, p. 539).
As little consideration was given by state
bureaucracies to respecting human rights
during a pandemic, it is from within such
context that this paper adds an empirical
backdrop to the little scholarly literature
on how COVID-19 was instrumentalized to
restrict the rights of refugee populations
while also focusing on how the Greek civil
society resisted such nationalistic efforts.
METHODOLOGY
The findings of this paper are informed by
10 one-on-one interviews (8 in 2021 and 2
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7 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
in 2022) with Athens-based service providers,
complemented by participant observations
and desk research encompassing reviews
of both academic and grey literature. Our
intention is not to generate universal claims
about refugee service delivery in Greece; we
merely aim to offer a snapshot of what some
service providers in Athens dealt with at the
height of the pandemic.
The interviews were conducted in English,
which was not the first language of most
participants. They started with some demo-
graphic questions about participants’ age,
gender, ethnicity, nationality, and how long
they had been in Greece. Questions focused
on participants’ professional background,
training and education, NGO history, and
organization’s relationship with the Greek
state. Other questions asked about service de-
livery, in particular, eligibility for services, the
target populations served, and coordination
of service delivery among civil society actors.
Participants were then asked to provide an
overview of what they knew about refugees
in Greece: estimated numbers, demographic
composition, and integration into Greek
society as regards access to education, health
care, housing, language programs, labour
market, social integration, and/or citizenship
acquisition. Lastly, participants were asked
about how the COVID-19 pandemic had
impacted service provision.
Service providers in our sample were rep-
resentatives of local and international NGOs
registered in in Greece. Some were based
close to Victoria Square and Acharnon, two
Athens neighbourhoods known for their
refugee presence. Others were in the core of
the city at Syntagma or Exarcheia. Some were
providing education support, while others
were working on housing, family assistance,
legal aid, and resettlement support for those
wanting to move to western Europe. Others
were providing skills training for refugees,
including computer literacy and vocational
training such as cooking. Some were giv-
ing Greek-, English-, and French-language
classes. Some were catering to women or
pregnant women needing maternity services,
accompanying them to hospitals for medical
appointments. And some were providing a
range of arts-based and self-care activities
such as acupuncture, yoga classes, drama
therapy, crafts, and visual arts.
Interview data were anonymized during
transcription. Transcripts were imported into
NVivo software and coded for common the-
mes and subthemes in relation to the study’s
objective of exploring the challenges to
service provision during the height of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Several participants had experience in
the field of forced migration, having vol-
unteered in other parts of the world, such
as Myanmar, Vietnam, and Burma, before
relocating to Greece when the refugee crisis
started in 2015. Most were working for
small, direct-service grassroots organizations,
including a group set up as a squat. We
also interviewed two people from a large,
well-established network dedicated to ser-
vice provision for migrants.
All participants identified as female and
were between the ages of 30 and 70. All
had undergraduate university education,
with three holding graduate degrees. Most
participants were foreign nationals, from
North America, Latin America, the UK, and
western Europe. Their nationalities included
Albanian, American, Argentinian, British,
Chilean, Canadian, Greek, Spanish, and Fil-
ipino. Three participants mentioned that
they had not intended to stay long in the
country, but once they started working, they
saw a need for their services and extended
their stay.
Through participant observations, we took
detailed notes on the interview locations,
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8 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
including descriptions of the surrounding
area, the building, and the office, as well as
on gestures and communications observed
between various service providers within the
same organization. To get a better sense of
each organization and the area in which
it operated, we walked to each interview
location in Athens.
FINDINGS: COVID-19 AS A WEAPON
OF EXCLUSION
Suspension and Delays in the Asylum
Process
Once COVID-19 hit, the asylum process sto-
pped for several weeks during the first lock-
down in 2020 and during the subsequent
lockdowns in 2021. Service providers found
themselves not knowing how to advise peo-
ple about what they should do. One provider
called the entire period “a total black hole.”
During the first lockdown, from mid-March
to mid-May 2020, the Greek asylum office
reviewed a limited number of applications
without processing any interviews or registra-
tions. As one participant observed, the only
interviews conducted were those the asylum
office deemed arbitrarily essential. Discre-
tionary decision-making translates into a bor-
dering practice that excludes undesirables,
those who are outsiders to the nation (Alrob
& Shields,2022).The use of discretionary mea-
sures to establish who is deemed essential to
be interviewed brings attention to the fact
that the national community functions like
a “club to which one can be either admitted
or refused access” (Balibar,2015, p.75) based
on what the nation considers its priorities in a
specific period of time. Within the context of
the COVID-19 pandemic, processing asylum
seekers—hence, deciding whom to allocate
the right to access further rights—was not a
priority, as the state’s priority was primarily
the well-being of its citizens. The pandemic
measures became then, a pretext to manoeu-
vre access in society for those in limbo, those
waiting to hear about their right to further
access state services.
Participants shared that after the first
lockdown, the volume of claims the asy-
lum service processed remained below pre-
pandemic levels. People continued to wait
in line for days, often starting to queue
at 4:30 a.m. only to be told to come back
the next day. Service providers witnessed
people waiting for hours in the street for an
appointment: “You see a lot of families with
babies sleeping in the streets because maybe
you have one appointment at 10:00 a.m. [the
next day] for the asylum office.” That the
outsiders to the nation must wait in line for
hours and days only to be allowed a more
secure waiting status inside the nation is,
in itself, a form of symbolic violence (Topak,
2020). It is well documented in the literature
that waiting has long-term effects on refu-
gees’ emotional and physical health. Forcing
refugees to wait for an asylum appointment
on behalf of protecting the health of the
citizens institutes bureaucratic procedures
that lead to poorer health outcomes for
these very same refugees, hence symbolically
communicating that only the national popu-
lation’s health is important.
Throughout 2021, asylum appointments in
Athens continued to be delayed. Interviews
were conducted over Skype and people had
to book appointments online, which were
difficult to secure. Providers said asylum
seekers tried repeatedly to call the asylum
office in Athens (colloquially referred to as
Katehaki because it is close to the Katehaki
metro station) but were unable to schedule
a consultation. Many lost their reserved time
slots because they had no guidelines or sup-
port in how to navigate the online platform
and could not access their appointments.
Successful appointments were those with
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9 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
forms completed online by lawyers. This
had the effect of asylum claimants having
to pay lawyers from their own pockets, a
challenge for those with little money. Ser-
vice providers stated that generally, asylum
seekers were paying €100–300 for legal
aid to complete their online applications.
Lack of money has always been a barrier
to accessing services in society for asylum
seekers (Chatty,2021). That the state pushes
them to use fee-based lawyer services merely
to submit applications that they have the
legal right to submit shows how the Greek
state has been imposing violent measures on
the refugee population, hence exacerbating
already existent vulnerabilities.
Participants also reported issues related
to their asylum cards expiring. Without an
active asylum ID, claimants had difficulty
securing jobs and accessing public services,
including health care, as they would be
considered undocumented in the country.
One service provider detailed:
Due to COVID, asylum cards have been extended
because people didn’t have the possibility to
physically go to the asylum service to renew. At
the end of June 30 [2021], no new extension was
given by the ministry. And there has been an
announcement saying that every asylum seeker
would take an appointment to renew [their]
card. But the platform [for making appointments]
doesn’t work properly or has many criteria that
are unknown to us. As a result, the majority are
[un]able to have their renewed card. This means
that [you] don’t have legal documentation in
Greece. This means that in a police check, you will
be detained because you don’t have documents.
This means that for the persons who have a job
contract, they cannot continue with their jobs,
which means that for [those] who have a contract
[for] a house, this might create some issues, and
the most important thing is that without this card,
they don’t have access to health care.
For many, expiration of their asylum cards
triggered a cascade of consequences, such as
the inability to obtain a social security num-
ber (known as an AMKA), which makes it pos-
sible to access the Greek state’s social services,
including health care and other social ben-
efits. Others were in danger of losing their
housing because they could not renew their
asylum documentation. One participant de-
scribed:
For the past six months Katehaki was closed. So
now, they don’t have AMKA. I have a student …
he was removed from a shelter because he became
18. He’s now living in a house in the municipality,
but he received asylum last month. And once you
have asylum, you have 30 days, and then you don’t
have housing and you don’t have cash cards. So,
he [might] lose his house at any moment. But he
doesn’t have any papers because his papers are
expired since Katehaki only opened this month
[August 2021]. He has an appointment [now] for
next week. Hopefully, he can renew his papers,
but he’s been working illegally for the past month,
because what can he do? Working under the table,
doing all kinds of little jobs, even though he has
asylum here, he has AFIMI [Greek tax number], but
because his ID card expired and his AMKA expired,
he can’t apply for a proper job.
For those whose card expirations forced
them to work illegally, the rate of pay was
minimal and generally would not cover basic
living expenses. In the above-mentioned case,
the young man had to accept a wage of €15
a day for up to 12 hours of work per day. This
works out to be around €1.25 per hour, or
close to €300 a month, significantly lower
than the Greek minimum wage, which in
the summer of 2022 was set at just over
€750 per month (Eurostat,2022).
These examples show that the expiration
of asylum cards suspended the very processes
of inclusion in society for asylum seekers.
Regardless of how the state classifies cat-
egories of migrants and how it endows
them with differentiated set of rights, the
state has the responsibility to include, at
least minimally, everyone that resides within
its territorial confinements. For those in
the standard (though imperfect) refugee-
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10 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
determination process, although they do
not have the entitlements of permanent
residents, they at least have the right to
access state-supported integration programs,
such as language classes or labour market
assistance. What the expiration of asylum
cards triggered was the withholding of the
“handholding” assistance typically provided
under the refugee-determination process.
This withdrawal measure was not directly
violent in its design, since there was no direct
policy geared to strip integration rights, but
certainly it was a measure that carried violent
bureaucratic effects as, indirectly, it halted
the right to inclusion for asylum seekers in
Athens.
Harmful and Extended Lockdowns
COVID-19 lockdowns were forcefully imple-
mented in Greece. Participants discussed
how all residents had to send a text mes-
sage to a centralized system prior to leaving
their residence, stating the reason for going
out. Those unable to text had to sign a
self-declaration form stating the purpose
of their errand. If police stopped someone
lacking such documentation, they would
issue a fine. Such measures were enforced dif-
ferently for citizens compared with migrants;
police violently discriminated against refu-
gees and issued fines solely for being outside
their camps. COVID-19 guidelines were more
relaxed for the general population but more
strictly enforced for irregular migrants. As
one participant commented: “Nobody [was]
permitted to go outside. In Eleonas [refugee
camp in Athens], if the people went outside
of the camp, and they were arriving in the
city centre, a police patrol [would] probably
give them a fine.”
Participants speculated that the Greek
state appeared to have kept the camps closed,
on both the islands and the mainland, un-
der the guise of protecting public health,
allegedly to shield refugees from COVID-19,
but the actual motive seemed to have been
to curtail the free movement of refugees
by tacitly branding mobile populations as
vectors of disease. The state and media have
long described people on the move as threats
to public health (Wagner-Egger et al.,2011);
recent media representations of Syrian refu-
gees in Turkey, for example, have treated
refugees as carriers of disease (Yücel,2021).
Unsurprisingly, then, deportations were at
some of the highest levels ever during COVID-
19 (Alrob & Shields,2022)—despite forced re-
movals from a nation-state involving higher
public health risks, as deportations rely on
the physical interaction of several actors,
including border agents and airport trans-
fers (Alrob & Shields,2022). In line with
such violent bureaucratic procedures, service
providers offering residential services also
felt targeted by the police under the guise
of respecting physical distancing rules. One
participant described how police visits were
frequent in Athens during the lockdowns,
on the presumption of sharing overcrowded
spaces:
Police came to the building because we are a lot of
people together in the same area, in the kitchen
or on the deck. But this is our house. We tried to
explain that, yeah, we are more than 10 people
here, but we are 100 people living here, so what
can we do? We are in our house, we are eating, we
are cooking, this is our house.
Service providers also mentioned that
the lockdown was particularly challenging
for children in the refugee camps. Children
struggled to understand the concept of a
lockdown, and they found it difficult to
adapt to the provision of education through
online classes, which were mainly conducted
via Facebook and WhatsApp groups. One
education provider in the Eleonas camp
in Athens shared that although they were
conducting online lessons, children were
continually asking, “Why are we not doing
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11 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
any lessons?” They asked this question be-
cause they were not going to school, and
they were only seeing their teachers online.
Online instruction proved most difficult for
children not fluent in Greek, particularly
because mastery of language is what makes
a student pedagogically engaged in content
delivery.
Participants shared that most refugee
children fell behind in schoolwork during
the lockdowns, as the pandemic hindered
their ability to take part in formal educa-
tion. Online classes disrupted traditional
curriculum delivery. As well, students were
restricted from taking part in regular school
activities (e.g., arts programs), which gener-
ally help second-language vocabulary learn-
ing (Olioumtsevits et al.,2022); they also
lost their familiarization with nonverbal
practices common in formal school settings,
which also tend to promote rapid language
acquisition (Simopoulos & Magos,2020).
Research has found that the in-person formal
learning experiences of refugee children
in Greece were among their happiest mo-
ments since arriving in the country. A study
interviewing 21 refugee teenagers from
Syria and Afghanistan found, for instance,
that participants expressed positive views
about their education in Greece, especially in
relation to feeling accepted and maintaining
relations with their peers (Palaiologou &
Prekate,2023). Some have argued that the
inclusion of refugee children in formal class-
rooms is a predictor of school completion,
while periods of separation from peers (as
happened during COVID-19) lead to poor
school attendance and increase the likeli-
hood of dropping out (Mavromara et al.,
2023). Formal schooling has also been found
to be a “protective factor for mental health,
alleviating the symptoms of past trauma,
providing opportunities for socialization
with local peers, offering a wider range of
enriching daily activities outside the camp,
and fulfilling children’s expectations about
their new country of residence” (Palaiologou
& Prekate,2023, p. 9).
Participants noted that the extended lock-
downs also resulted in many refugees losing
their jobs or having their wages slashed.
Other refugees working as live-in caregivers
were forced to spend all their time in the
company of their employers.
The bureaucracy of the Greek state once
again halted inclusion of those waiting for
their right to reside and make a living inside
the nation. Welcoming of refugees is not
simply defined through the act of opening
borders. Welcoming also means facilitating
participation in the labour market and the
social sphere, enabling access to civic rights,
and cultivating a sense of belonging (Spencer
& Charsley,2016). Suspending the right to
access the labour market is a violent con-
sequence of the COVID-19 lockdowns that
again disproportionally affected asylum seek-
ers compared with the general population.
Lockdowns also impeded access to med-
ical care. When appointments had to be
conducted by phone, many struggled to
communicate with the doctor, especially
without interpretation services. One par-
ticipant explained that from 2015 to just
before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Greek
state funded cultural mediators to assist with
interpretation for asylum seekers when ac-
cessing medical care. The system soon broke
down and refugees had to rely on assistance
provided by NGOs. When COVID-19 hit, NGO
personnel were left scrambling to provide
these services.
Lockdowns also had gendered effects,
disproportionately burdening women. The
COVID-19 lockdowns were associated with
high levels of gender violence across all
segments of society. Yet the impact was
greater for refugee women experiencing
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12 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
domestic abuse, as the lockdowns prevented
them from accessing support and recourse
to safety (Piquero et al.,2021). Moreover,
refugee women could not access medical
care because they had no place to leave
their children when the schools closed. By
contrast, local women, permanent residents
and citizens, could tap into a web of in-
formal childcare arrangements by virtue
of having access to established personal
networks of support, considering they had
been part of the national fabric for longer.
Some refugee women also could not provide
for their children, as they were afraid to leave
their houses to go to their jobs:
Poverty increased a lot. Many women had informal
accommodations, and so came abuse from the
owner. In the middle of the lockdown, we sup-
ported and found safe accommodations for single
mothers. There were times that we called the
ambulance in the middle of the night to provide
the necessary supports to the mother and the
children. There were, for example, undocumented
women that couldn’t work because they were
working in the black market, so they couldn’t even
provide food for themselves, or they were scared
to go out because they were going to be stopped.
The gendered impacts of the COVID-19 bu-
reaucratic measures meant that, working in
the informal economy or in domestic care, in
other people’s homes, women often had to
make a choice between risking infection by
going to work or staying put at their place of
employment and losing their right to mobil-
ity.
Impact on Service Provision
The work of service providers was also im-
pacted by the COVID-19 state responses.
During the first lockdown, service provision
stopped altogether. NGO workers could no
longer work face to face with refugees, so
they adjusted their services in a very short
time to support refugees remotely through
digital applications, phone, or online mes-
saging. Workers described feelings of hope-
lessness about not being able to assist refu-
gees, especially those who had come to
Athens from the islands, who were often
in desperate situations. Others witnessed
outright discrimination against the people
they served. Physical distancing regulations
were often used as an exclusionary pretext,
especially for limiting access to medical care.
One participant stated:
Someone [from the NGO] went with one of the
pregnant women to the hospital. They had to wait
outside because of the coronavirus. Okay, waiting
for the appointment … she needed to go to the
toilet and the people at the door said, “No, you go
to the street.” A pregnant woman is going to pee
in the street, and I said, “What?!”
Those providing educational services were
forced, through lockdown, to move their
classes online through Facebook or Whats-
App. For those providing educational services
in camps, activity provision proved ever more
laborious, as NGO staff would have to physi-
cally drop off lesson packages with the fami-
lies: “We were going container by container.
We were giving the homework package. We
were taking the previous one, we were giving
guidelines. We [also] had small conversations
to encourage the children. It was not a typical
relation.”
The impact on service provision is a violent
consequence of the COVID-19 bureaucratic
measures in Greece, particularly within a
context where refugees and asylum seek-
ers face difficulties when arriving in a new
country and they tend to rely on civil soci-
ety and NGO actors to help them navigate
the new context: from helping them with
basic information on how to access services
such as health care, welfare benefits, and
employment; attending to their basic needs
through providing safe shelter and access
to food; to helping them coordinate social
gatherings to create social support networks
and overall assisting them in levelling their
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13 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
transition towards inclusion in the host so-
ciety. Without NGOs’ help, asylum seekers
in Greece found themselves prey to bureau-
cratic processes that had the consequence
of what some have called “internal border-
ing” (Alrob & Shields,2022;Ratzmann &
Sahraoui,2021). Within the literature on
bureaucratic violence, this involves going
beyond controls at the border to rationing
access to social services based on migration
status; it necessitates a transfer of certain
notions usually applied to the state–migrant
relationship at the border, such as the role of
street-level bureaucracy, to migrants’ experi-
ences vis-à-vis access to social services once in
the country (Ratzmann & Sahraoui,2021).
Diminishment of NGO services for asylum
seekers throughout COVID-19 is an example
of the bureaucratic violence of the Greek
state, which is directedly manifested through
the difference-making between citizens and
foreigners, and through different access
to welfare state protections for groups of
people endowed with differentiated rights
based on their connection to the nation.
Creative Responses to Subverting
Bureaucratic Violence
Despite its harmful impact, COVID-19 not
only triggered experiences of despair but
gave rise to creativity among civil society ac-
tors, who found avenues to defend the rights
of people on the move. In creative response
to lockdowns, service providers redesigned
their projects. For instance, money initially
allocated for activities involving face-to-face
interaction was redirected to other needs,
such as food provision or financial assistance
for digital technology. However, shuffling
these funds and deciding what to provide
next created a great deal of stress for service
providers. As one interviewee said: “We had
to now prove that there was a need for our
existence.”
COVID-19 state responses also led service
providers to be creatively proactive. Some
hired Farsi- or Arabic-speaking medical staff
to provide information and referrals for
those infected with COVID-19. Others re-
ported having to lie to or deceive public
authorities when accompanying people to
health services. One NGO worker explained
the importance of their organization in ac-
companying pregnant women about to give
birth. At the height of the pandemic, hospi-
tals did not allow unrelated people to accom-
pany the person with the appointment, so
many NGO workers would lie and say their
clients needed interpretation services so that
they could join them. Lying was thus used as
a creative way to subvert the bureaucratic
violence imposed by the state on irregular
migrants.
An unintended advantage of the lock-
down was increased collaboration among
various NGOs. Technology and the forma-
tion of digital online groups via Facebook
and WhatsApp enabled service workers to
coordinate referrals and form subgroups
for harmonizing services. For others, the
pandemic worked as a catalyst to opening
shared spaces after the lockdowns, which
served as social hubs where refugees could
come together, share their life stories, and
learn about opportunities to build their skills
in their new society.
Larger and better-funded organizations
provided their service users with laptops or
smartphones, and thus appeared to be bet-
ter equipped to transition to online service
delivery. A representative of a large migrant
network told us that her organization’s data
collection system facilitated the transition
to online service delivery but that “nobody
was prepared.” Her organization created
WhatsApp groups to allow for direct com-
munication with the women served. Com-
munication with other organizations also
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14 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
increased during the lockdowns, and so NGO
workers were able to better map the needs
of the populations served and to better
facilitate the use of funds for “digital data
and devices [smartphones and laptops].”
It was in response to the state weaponiza-
tion of the pandemic that service providers
and refugee support groups found ways to
defend the rights of people on the move and
resist bureaucratic ways of inflicting violence.
In a distorted way, the pandemic served as a
catalyst for integrated service provision and
for the mobilization of NGO workers towards
increased communication and coordination
of service provision.
DISCUSSION: HOW COVID-19
INCREASED BUREAUCRATIC
VIOLENCE AGAINST REFUGEES IN
GREECE
State bureaucracies operate through a com-
plex system of institutional rules, practical
considerations, and moral values that shape
who they deem deserving of welfare provi-
sion (Ratzmann & Sahraoui,2021). The Greek
state used COVID-19 as a weapon to exclude
asylum seekers from accessing welfare in
society, using the pandemic as a pretext for
implementing the extraordinary measure
of suspending the asylum process. People
entering the country during the pandemic
remained in limbo for extended time periods;
forced to wait undetermined lengths of time
for an asylum appointment, they could not
attain employment in the formal economy
and were prevented from accessing health
care, education, and other essential services.
The state neglected to prioritize asylum
when it should have addressed the special
needs of this vulnerable population.
COVID-19 made travel unsafe for everyone.
For a brief time, however, the pandemic pre-
vented even the privileged classes from cross-
ing borders, which is why some protested the
restrictions on their freedom of movement.
Asylum seekers, however, experienced the
sealing of national borders more violently
than before. Accessing refuge became more
difficult for people on the move in Athens
during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020
and 2021, when asylum procedures were
suspended for several weeks and appoint-
ments had to be booked online and required
legal help to navigate. Asylum cards became
unobtainable, and many claimants’ cards
expired, making it impossible for them to ac-
quire the social security numbers needed to
access state social services, including health
care. Some also faced the danger of losing
their housing, since they could not renew the
needed documentation. Others with expired
cards were forced to work illegally, hence
without worker protections and for com-
pensation below the Greek minimum wage.
Pushing people who have the legal right to
settle in a new country into a situation of
illegality, forcing them to survive without
documentation, thus stripping them of their
minimum right to have rights, as in the cases
of people having to work illegally for less
than two euros per hour, are all examples
that show that the refugee subject is never
a fully rights-bearing subject in national
bureaucracies; rather, the refugee is a sub-
ject whose agency is heavily conditioned by
procedural decisions, whose entire livelihood
can change as a result of administrative
decisions. The fact that many claimants had
to appeal to third-party entities, paying
lawyers to secure their online appointments
for asylum—appointments they had the legal
right to reserve at no cost—also shows the
multiple effects that state bureaucracies
have on people’s lives. At the same time,
this bureaucratic web benefits an entire
secondary industry of private legal aid, a sec-
tor that appears to capitalize on claimants’
inability to navigate asylum processes.
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15 REFUGE : REVUE CANADIENNE SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS A Total Black Hole
The state inflicted violence on asylum
claimants by imposing a one-size-fits-all ap-
proach that may have met the needs of the
general population but created further harm
to refugees. All participants observed that
the refugee population in Athens was much
more affected by the pandemic compared
with the general population, who, as citizens,
had the right to live in Greece, access to
laptops and the internet, more networking
capital, and access to medical personnel.
For example, accessing services online is
different for refugees than it is for national
citizens, who are most likely participants in
the national labour market, remunerated
accordingly, and afforded regular and reli-
able access to the internet. The very same
services are more difficult to access for those
who have been institutionally relegated
to the fringes of society, with little to no
access to the labour market, and who are
seen as invasive others, threats and pests
in the national community of valued citizen
subjects (B. Anderson,2017). But accounting
for such differences was never part of the
Greek bureaucratic blueprint in applying
COVID-19 regulations. It is this erasure in the
bureaucratic design of state responses that
metamorphosed into violent after-effects for
refugees in Athens, Greece.
Instead of implementing special rules rec-
ognizing the unique realities of asylum seek-
ers and ensuring their protection and safety,
the Greek national bureaucracy made life
more difficult for people on the move. Treated
as vectors of disease, refugees in Athens
had their movement restricted; they were
prohibited from leaving their residence and
as a result became targets for police fines
when they did leave. The differential ef-
fects of the lockdowns on refugees versus
the general population clearly exemplifies
how bureaucracies function differently for
various groups, bestowing more rights to
citizens while restricting the rights of those
the nation deems undesirable.
At face value, the state might appear to
have protected its citizens from COVID-19
by closing public spaces and enforcing physi-
cal distancing. However, such public health
directives had the bureaucratic effect of
stripping groups of people with fewer rights
of the sole vehicle that provided them with
access to public health (e.g., renewal of their
asylum cards). It is a matter of interpretation
whether the state simply ignored the poten-
tial effects of such resultant complications
when implementing COVID-19 regulations
in asylum matters or whether it made use of
the unintended consequences of COVID-19
regulations to further deter refugees from
settling in Greece and push them out of the
nation.
Bureaucratic decisions may not be de-
signed with violence in mind, but ultimately,
they produce violent outcomes. The fact
that the lockdowns disrupted refugee chil-
dren’s education, which has both immedi-
ate and long-term effects, is an example
of indirect state violence. Gaps in educa-
tion consequently deny development and
language acquisition to children while also
affecting future rates of participation in
society and the labour market (Tzoraki,2019).
The assumption that online classes would be
equally accessible to refugee children and
the general population also disregarded the
fact that language acquisition is key in the
success of any class conducted via WhatsApp
or Facebook. Young refugees who were not
yet fluent in Greek might not have found
online classes as intelligible as they were for
local children who were already fluent in the
national language.
Bureaucratic violence was also manifested
indirectly in the impact of pandemic restric-
tions on the work of refugee service providers.
Our participants mentioned that at the be-
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16 REFUGE: CANADA’S JOURNAL ON REFUGEES A Total Black Hole
ginning of the pandemic, during the lock-
downs, the termination of their services
posed an existential threat to their oper-
ations and to their organizations as civil
society entities. Suddenly, they could no
longer fulfill their mandates, as they were
unable to help people in need of protection.
This forced many to find innovative ways for
their organizations to survive by changing
their programming and by shuffling money
to needs that had newly arisen because of
COVID-19. This creativity shows the commit-
ment to refugee integration on the part
of civil society, especially in areas where
the Greek state fails to provide adequate
services: from Greek- and English-language
classes, to housing, to accompaniments for
medical appointments or vaccination clinics,
to assistance with asylum claims, and finally,
to better integration of service provision
across the civil society.
While COVID-19 intensified pre-existing
social inequalities, it could have provided an
opportunity to rewrite policies that promote
the integration of refugees, including the
democratization of health care by making it
free and safe for irregular migrants who fear
contact with authorities and deportation
(Mallet-Garcia & Delvino,2021). It is our hope
that by exploring how civil society actors
interacted with, mitigated, and ultimately
subverted various forms of bureaucratic vi-
olence inflicted on refugees, we have shed
light on the issue and informed migrant
advocates on how to best support those
claiming asylum and how to contest violent
state policies that exclude people on the
move from national belonging.
ORCID
Raluca Bejan
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2601-3964
Tracy Glynn
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9759-2273
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