Paper details
| Paper authors | Polly Pallister-Wilkins |
| In panel on | The World in Humanitarian Objects: Power, Change, Care and Control |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
This paper looks at the variety of haphazard, improvised and poor quality refugee shelter in the Moria ‘Hotspot’ and asks what we can learn about EU approaches to the governance of refugees. It argues that the variety of accidental and improvised shelter on offer in Moria speaks to more than just the diversity of refugee shelter itself or how various materials, objects and technologies become repurposed to address needs in a humanitarian crisis. This variety speaks to the wider response of the Greek government, European Union, and international humanitarian community to the ‘refugee-crisis’ when it arrived in Europe proper in 2015 and up until the present. Moria is only one accidental and improvised place of shelter across Greece and Europe. Once a place of transit it has now come to be called ‘home’ by those stuck on Lesvos. Moria therefore speaks to both the spatially disaggregated nature of the response to the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, its changing dynamics and the agency and mobility of refugees themselves. But more than this, the accidental and improvised nature of Moria is illustrative of and produced by one or all of the following: the privileging of state security over human security and a failure to address the needs of refugees effectively; a callous disregard for the well being of those seeking shelter in its broadest definition; or a purposeful policy of neglect intended to act as deterrent within a wider system of exclusionary border practices.
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