The politics of aid: discursive boundary-making and the war of position in Greece’s humanitarian landscape

During 2017 and 2018, Greece hosted roughly 80,000 border crossers who had arrived in the European Union (EU), fleeing mostly conflict, economic and political instability. Different actors working within the humanitarian landscape offered various forms of assistance and solidarity. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork on Lesvos, this paper explores the tensions that emerged between international solidarians and paid aid workers and state actors. It employs Gramsci’s war of position to argue that discursive tactics used by international solidarians to delegitimise the state and state-sanctioned aid challenge cultural hegemony and subvert the border regime. This paper contributes to research that expands upon the role of civil society in displacement. By analysing discursive tactics as potential sites of power and struggle over norms in society, it also points to tactics that disrupt dominant power hierarchies.