2019 – To Archeio

Dismantled spatial fixes in the aftermath of recession: Capital switching and labour underutilization in the Greek capital metropolitan region

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:46 +0000

The article offers a fresh, empirically grounded look at the spatialities of crisis triggered employment forms––a largely overlooked issue in contemporary critical geography literature. Specifically, it discusses the interconnection between investment flows from manufacturing to the built environment (capital switching) and underemployment in urban metropolitan regions to substantiate its impact on emerging spatial fixities. The article, which is based on an empirical analysis informed by a radical political economy, investigates changing fixed capital formations in Greece over an extended period prior to and during the recession, from 1995 to 2012. It traces the evolution of part-time waged work in the capital metropolitan region of Attica (Athens) vis-à-vis the rest of the country’s regional labour markets, focusing on the polarized 2005–2012 period and the demise of the construction industry. The article highlights that ‘disrupted’ capital switching that occurred in Greece, closely associated with recalibrated sectoral priorities and institutional interventions, resulted in the uneven sprawling of underemployment. Our findings offer insight into how the dismantling of spatial fixes within core metropolitan regions of the southern European Union (and beyond) are connected to labour surplus and successive slumps in manufacturing and construction. The article closes by calling for new theorizations of contemporary urban regional unevenness and its spatiotemporal fixities, which account for the role of changes in labour turnover time.

Contested Borderscapes, Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:28 +0000

In 2016, Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” the word of the year. In this Orwellian moment, the movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants across the increasingly militarised borders of Europe have instigated a socio-spatial debate about the limits of human rights, national sovereignties, continental values, precipitating and contributing to the ongoing condition of European crises. Although in the era of globalisation borders constitute porous passages for capital and commodities, at the same time they have hardened and ossified as “new enclosures” seeking to immobilise migrant and refugee populations. Fortress Europe emerges as a complex of new state control mechanisms, freshly erected border fences, newly built detention centres and improvised refugee camps; together, these technologies of migration management aim at the criminalisation, classification, stigmatisation, and biopolitical control of moving populations, fomented by xenophobic politics, and managed by humanitarian subcontractors. In this hostile climate, people on the move contest European border regimes, peripheries, and cityscapes by claiming spatial justice and political visibility while creating a nexus of emerging common spaces. They are joined by activists defending their right to movement, who are engaged in efforts to “welcome refugees” into a shrinking and contested public sphere, into alternative and self-organised social spaces, responding to the humanitarian crises wrought by militarism, violence, and structural adjustment with solidarity, stemming from a larger vision of sharing in each other’s struggles for survival and social transformation.

“Refugee tv” and “Refugees got talent” projects. Affective and decolonial geographies of invisible common spaces

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:27 +0000

Reimagining a transnational right to the city: No Border actions and commoning practices in Thessaloniki

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:26 +0000

Although there is extensive literature on State migration policies and NGO activities, there are few studies on the common struggles between refugees and local activists. This article aims to fill this research gap by focusing on the impact of the transnational No Border camp that took place in Thessaloniki in 2016. The border region of northern Greece, with its capital Thessaloniki, is at the heart of the so-called refugee crisis and it is marked by a large number of solidarity initiatives. After the sealing of the “Balkan corridor”, the Greek State relocated thousands of refugees into isolated and inappropriate camps on the outskirts of Thessaloniki. Numerous local and international initiatives, with the participation of refugees from the camps, self-organized a transnational No Border camp in the city center that challenged State policies. By claiming the right to the city, activists from all over Europe, together with refugees, built direct-democratic assemblies and organized a multitude of direct actions, demonstrations, and squats that marked the city’s social body with spatial disobedience and transnational commoning practices. Here, activism emerges as an important field of research and this article aims to contribute to activists’ literature on migration studies after 2015. The article is based on militant research and inspired by the Lefebvrian right to the city, the autonomy of migration, and common space approaches. The right to the city refers to the rights to freedom, socialization, and habitation, but also to the right to reinvent and change the city. It was recently enhanced by approaches on common spaces and the way these highlight the production of spaces based on solidarity, mutual help, common care, and direct democracy. The main findings of this study point to how the struggle of migrants when crossing physical and social borders inspires local solidarity movements for global networking and opens up new possibilities to reimagine and reinvent transnational common spaces.

Surplus citizens struggle and nationalism in the Greek crisis

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:25 +0000

The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses – from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza’s electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.

We owe ourselves to debt: Classical Greece, Athens in crisis, and the body as battlefield

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:18 +0000

Since 2009, Greece has been hit by a severe economic recession followed by harsh austerity policies, gradual impoverishment, and ultimately social collapse. This article investigates the cultural landscape of the so-called ‘Greek crisis’, focusing on Athens,the nation’s capital, and the ways the crisis discourse employs biopolitical technologiesof dispossession and displacement in order to generate an intensified breed of body-politics. The article’s main case study is documenta 14, a blockbuster exhibition ofcontemporary art organized in Athens in 2017, seemingly elaborating on the ideasof debt – classical and modern – though in fact promoting neoliberal approaches topublic economy and life. The idea of ‘classical debt’, the article concludes, continuously reiterated by both Greece’s defenders as well as its most unforgiving critics, rather than acting as an emancipatory force, ends up producing a public consisting of silent bodies, trapped in highly romanticized discourses of the past and ultimately unable to defend themselves. This tension, however, also provokes narratives and gestures made of contradictions and ambiguity, difficult to map and monitor according to established research protocols.

Beyond hope: prospects for the commons in austerity-stricken Greece

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:17 +0000

From 2009 on, Greece has become a laboratory of implementation of neoliberal austerity policies but has also seen fierce resistance and a surge of creative alternatives. In the ensuing years of strife, “hope” has been the notion around which political movements attempted to rally their supporters against the neoliberal restructuring. “Hope” in the blochean sense of evoking the “not-yet” existing through prefigurative politics (apud Dinerstein 2014:59) but also “hope” as an empty signifier (Laclau 2000: 56, 84) a catch-all term to unify all different aspirations for overcoming the crisis under the common hegemonic project of Syriza (Katsambekis 2015:158). This article aims to outline the central political imaginaries of overcoming austerity that arose in this period –Plan A of reform and redistribution, Plan B of national economic reconstruction outside the Eurozone and Plan C of a bottom-up reorganisation of politics and economy around the commons– and the interplay between the three in the context of anti-austerity politics. It especially focuses on the abandonment of Plan A by the political forces that expressed it and the challenges faced by adherents of the third imaginary (“Plan C”) in subverting the capitalist market and in addressing the question of power and the state.

Discursive uses of ‘abnormality’ in the Greek crisis

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:08 +0000

In crisis-ridden Greece, a strict austerity program has been applied, from 2010 onwards—when the global and mainly European economic crisis hit the shores of the Aegean—under the supervision of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (the so-called troika). In order to provide an adequate framing and legitimization to this program, the crisis was discursively constructed not only as an economic one but also as a moral and a cultural crisis. Within this framework, the implementation of the austerity program became increasingly associated with discourses about ‘normality.’

Populism, anti-populism and post-truth in crisis-ridden Greece

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:06 +0000

The debate around ‘post-truth’ dominated the public space following the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory. Since then one continuously encounters references that connect ‘post-truth’ or ‘fake news’ with populism and present both phenomena as mutually reinforcing pathologies of a supposed political normality. Mainstream politicians and prominent members of the media and the academic establishment seem to claim an epistemic superiority based on the possession of a (single) truth and on incarnating a supreme rationality. The introduction of obsolete debates around truth in the confrontation between political discourses in the public sphere has led to a distinction between populism and post-truth politics, on the one hand, and politics based on facts, rationality, expert knowledge and technocracy, on the other. In Greece the dominant anti-populist discourse proceeded quickly to employ this polemical notion of ‘post-truth’. This paper aims to examine how post-truth politics were conceptualized in Greece, how they became part of the political conflict and how the rubric of post-truth was incorporated into the dominant populism/anti-populism cleavage that marks Greek politics. The Greek case is certainly under-researched as far as the ‘post-truth’ dimension is concerned. Finally, the paper attempts to highlight, through this examination of Greek politics, the political claims related to the polemical use of the concept of ‘post-truth’ in political discourses more generally, i.e. the political implications that can be produced by the inter-connection between populism and posttruth. Last but not least, the paper deals with the status of truth itself in politics. What if every truth is a post-truth? What would this mean for the political conflicts marking our era?

Chronotopic dilemmas: Space–time in consumer movements of the Greek crisis

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:03 +0000

This paper explores the spatio-temporal dimensions of consumer activism during the Greek crisis. Existing work has provided valuable insights into the figure of the political consumer and the socio-spatial contexts in which consumer activism is enacted. The paper presents original six-year ethnographic work that extends current knowledge through exploring how the spatial and temporal dimensions of consumer activism are unsettled and reconfigured during an acute economic crisis. It builds on the concept of chronotopic dilemmas to illustrate the ideological tensions and contradictions between old and new spatio-temporal logics and practices. In doing so, the current study complements prior research focused on how distinct cultural and institutional settings mediate discourses and actions of consumer activism, by highlighting their inherently spatio-temporal (chronotopic) nature.