Police officers and the migration regime in Greece

Blog post by Katerina Rozakou, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
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During my research in Greece, which forms the basis of my Identities article, ‘Ambivalent feelings: ‘filotimo’ in the Greek migration regime’, I explored ambivalent feelings that police officers demonstrate in their encounters with migrants in various sites of migration governance. Between autumn 2014 and summer 2016 I did fieldwork with state and non-state actors involved in migration in registration, pre-removal migrant detention, and open reception centres in Athens and Lesvos.

Police officers in Greece are notorious for their anti-migrant and racist attitudes, and migration governance sites are infamous for their poor conditions as numerous reports by human rights organizations illustrate (Amnesty International 2014, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 2017, Greek Ombudsman 2019). At the same time, often police officers exhibit care towards migrants, providing them with medicine, food and other goods. This care is not a matter of individual exceptions in the dominant xenophobic police feelings but related to the culturally significant sentiment of ‘filotimo’ (love of honour) that police officers evoke. The ‘goodness’ and the acts of care that police officers exhibited towards migrants them as more than mere individual exceptions in an overall culture of neglect and dehumanization (though at times this may be the case). As I claim, this care very often coexisted with violence and xenophobia, and it resonated with nativist claims to morality and moral superiority that were contrasted to the demoralization of the state the police officers embodied.

More specifically, I study the shifting meanings of ‘filotimo’ in the historical conjuncture of the Greek austerity and migration reception crisis and its moral and nationalistic resonances. The rhetoric of ‘filotimo’ resembles the one of ‘filoxenia’ (literally love of the stranger; hospitality) which has been a key trope in multiscalar narratives of the generous welcoming of strangers in Greece. Hospitality is a marker of moral self-worth and it is guided by a set of unspoken rules and principles. A hospitable person is a morally valued one.
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‘Filotimo’, meaning ‘love of honour’, is an untranslatable notion and a reified moral category that is associated with generosity and Greekness. I was of course familiar with the concept of ‘filotimo’, its banal and folklorist essence as the term is often related to a transient, essentialised ‘Greekness’ in discourses that range from the tourist industry to national self- presentations like its cognate term, 'filoxenia' (hospitality) (Herzfeld 1980, Papataxiarchis 2006, Rozakou 2012). ‘Filotimo’ resonates the banal stereotyping of ‘Greek character’, as one grounded on generosity and disinterestedness.

What interests me is not to reproduce such approaches, but to de-reify ‘filotimo’ and explore the cultural conventions that organize its rhetoric by police officers. I am thus focused on the underpinnings of the moral positionings of police officers towards migrants. Often, these moral positionings were revealed during usual encounters or emotional circumstances and through affective expressions rather than rational or explicit statements. Ultimately, these remarks created a space where police officers talked about themselves as ethical people. Police officers would often remark that it was only out of ‘filotimo’ that the migrant detention centres, and the state altogether, worked. Even when they did not literally refer to it, they repeatedly stated how they constantly exceeded their formal duties and power to work on behalf of a state that had abandoned them. In their encounters with the anthropologist researcher (myself), activists supporting migrants and foreign visitors (including human rights advocates, EU politicians, foreign journalists and other researchers)   or in other occasions when police officers were accused of keeping migrants in poor conditions, they used their own poor working conditions and feelings of ‘abandonment’ by the state as justification.

In my Identities article, I examined such encounters police officers had with various interlocutors in order to understand the central place that the rhetoric of ‘filotimo’ has in the ways in which they think and talk about their relationship with migrants, and also with the state they serve.

Often during my fieldwork, I encountered the appearance of ‘filotimo’ by police officers as part of a broader discourse adopted by the servants of an amoral state and as a response to the lack of moral legitimacy that the police historically face in Greece. ‘Filotimo’ was evoked in a general moral defence of the police, but it was also used explicitly when it came to migrants. Infused with nationalist resonances of moral worth, ‘filotimo’ gained further significance during the Greek austerity and migration crises, when it emerged as a potent national moral value that came to restore the country’s lost pride. When uttered by the agents of a demoralized and non-existent state, ‘filotimo’ seeks to restore not only the police’s moral legitimacy in the eyes of the public but, more largely, the state’s moral degradation.

With a lack of resources and amid a background of institutional racism, the police officers exhibit ambivalent care towards migrants. This care is not a matter of individual exceptions to the dominant banality of evil. It is related to the culturally significant moral value of ‘filotimo’, a self-referential moral value with nationalist overtones that acquires new significance during the Greek austerity crisis. As such, ‘filotimo’ does not actually challenge the harshness and dehumanization of the migration regime, but it may in fact be in full compliance with it underscoring self-images of cultural and moral superiority. This self-referential essence of ‘filotimo’ is not paradoxical, but rather compatible with the institutional racism and exclusionary logics of the state migration regime.

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Image credit: Photo by Katerina Rozakou, 9 April 2016.

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Read the Identities article:
Rozakou, Katerina. (2023). Ambivalent feelings: ‘filotimo’ in the Greek migration regime. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2023.2170608. ​

Read further in Identities:
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Cosmologies and migration: on worldviews and their influence on mobility and immobility

‘Racism’, intersectionality and migration studies: framing some theoretical reflections

Towards the elsewhere: discourses on migration and mobility practices between Morocco and Italy