The humanitarian border as a violence-producing environment: revisiting aid and anti-migration protests on Lesvos, Greece

Abstract

Violent clashes erupted on the Greek island of Lesvos in early 2020, during which aid groups, volunteers, and activists were threatened and attacked. Aid actors and media sources attributed these events to far-right, nationalist, and xenophobic mobilisation; however, this risks ignoring more structural factors and local perspectives on asylum policies and practices. This paper suggests that a more critical approach is necessary to understand why people mobilised against aid on Lesvos, and it explores how this antagonism can be seen as intrinsic to the ‘humanitarian border’ as it materialised on the island. Aid groups, volunteers, and activists became integral to this, spawning stories of how they were sustaining the migration dynamic. How these stories coincided with far-right mobilisation is not straightforward, and nuancing how local concern and protest and far-right anti-immigration sympathies relate is imperative to comprehending hostility to aid groups and may contribute to fostering better relations with communities in refugee-hosting areas.