Parsing the Aegean affective borderscape

• The land- and sea-scape stretching across the Greek-Turkish borders in the Aegean Sea had diachronically been a space where cultures, authorities and mobilities have interlocked and reciprocally reshaped. The advent of the European crisis of refugee reception and asylum since 2015, however, has turned the southeastern Mediterranean into a securitized zone lacerated by disquiet and death, irreversibly affecting the local topography and recasting the sociality and mobility of permanent and itinerant communities in the region. Seeking to contribute to the theoretical and analytical understanding of borders and their effects on the sociospatial landscapes they cut across, this essay offers a narrative analysis of the Aegean borderscape. This is done through the detailed parsing of a photograph depicting an inconspicuous moment of bordering, supplemented with the author’s own experiences at the frontline of refugee rescue operations in Lesvos. The unravelling of the manifold storylines interlocked within the still image that is the focal point of this essay reveals the borderscape’s materialities, its local and historical specificities, its affective intensities and the uneven power dynamics at play between a variety of actors encountering each other at the border.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Internationell migration och etniska relationer (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- International Migration and Ethnic Relations (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Borderscape

borders

Aegean Sea

Lesvos

affect

refugee ‘crisis’

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)