ACADEMIA Letters

Origins, political, economic, and discursive contexts of

Europe’s “refugee crisis,” and the 2020 Moria camp
disaster
Raymond Da-Boi

The refugee phenomenon in Europe is not new. But it has taken on new dimensions and char-
acteristics that have captured local, regional and international attention in recent years. The
refugee situation in Europe again came to the spotlight in local and international news and
became the subject of international humanitarian and academic discourses recently when Eu-
rope’s largest refugee camp – with an estimated population of 13, 000 inhabitants – was set on
fire on September 9, 2020 allegedly by angry, protesting refugees in demand of better condi-
tions and relocation from the camp in the wake of a coronavirus lockdown in the camp and im-
position of increasingly hostile anti-immigration policies by the conservative Greece govern-
ment in recent years (Democracy Now, September 17, 2020). The Moria refugee camp, on the
Greek island of Lesbors, was originally constructed for 3,100 persons. Human Rights Watch
describes the camp as unsanitary and dangerous (Democracy Now, September 17, 2020).
The arrival of “nearly 2 million asylum seekers” – mostly from Syria, Libya, Iraq, Turkey
and Afghanistan – in the EU via Greece and Italy by the summer of 2015 initiated a “nar-
rative of a European refugee crisis” (Ayata, 2020; Rodriguez, 2018, p. 17). However, be-
yond the humanitarian challenges it poses, Europe’s current refugee crisis (along with the
moral/ethical/analytical questions it raises) reflects fundamental political problems within the
EU as well as legal problems within an international context. This crisis is rooted in and
increasingly shaped by larger historical as well as contemporary discourses including colo-
nialism, racism, racial capitalism, etc. and has produced serious controversies and debates
among scholars, media and policy practitioners, and in migration literature in recent years.
Drawing on Encamacion Gutierrez-Rodriguez conception of ‘coloniality of migration’

Academia Letters, February 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Raymond Da-Boi, kdaboi@vols.utk.edu

Citation: Da-Boi, R. (2021). Origins, political, economic, and discursive contexts of Europe’s “refugee crisis,”
and the 2020 Moria camp disaster. Academia Letters, Article 282. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL282.

1
and the notion of “racial capitalism,’ this short essay highlights and explores, among others,
some the complexities, the politics and discursive nature of the current European refugee cri-
sis juxtaposed with some of the disconcerting moral, analytical, and ethical questions it raises,
the contradictions and challenges it poses, and the need to understand this ‘crisis’ from many
different perspectives: political, economic, regional/international, humanitarian, legal, his-
torical. The essay focuses mostly on the economic and political connections between asylum
and migration and the historical and discursive contexts of the European refugee crisis.
The current “refugee crisis” and “refugees’ in Europe can be described as a political for-
mulation strongly rooted in structures and longstanding legacies of colonialism, increasingly
shaped by media and political discourses, economic and other interests and conditions in-
side Europe and across its borders and cannot be analyzed and understood outside the larger
historical and political context and conditions that created and shaped/are shaping them. Ro-
driguez asserts “The refugee crisis reveals the paradoxes in which migration evolves: Mi-
gration within the emergence of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth century in former
European colonies illustrates the divide between the insider and the outsider” (p. 24).
Between August and September 2015, media representation of refugees traversing the
Balkans depicted one of Willkommenskultur (welcome culture). However, this changed dras-
tically this took a three hundred and sixty degree turn around by autumn 2015 “when right-
wing populists and nationalists blamed Merkel’s government for allowing European societies
to be “over-run” by Muslim refugees from “archaic” societies” (Rodriguez, 2018: 17). As
Rodriguez (2018: 17) posits, the “refugee crisis” was constructed as a result of lack of man-
agement by [Germany’s conservative] government with no regard for the burden caused by
uncontrolled migration whilst the “refuges” were constructed as a threat to social cohesion:
“Perception of refugee as a “crisis” in European media and political debates accentuates the
refugee presence as a rupture in everyday life” (p. 18). Further, she notes, the rhetoric in
the production of the “refugee crisis [emerges] within a specific conjuncture of racism in
Europe,” insisting that, “within this conjuncture colonial legacies of construction of racial-
ized Other are reactivated and wrapped in a racist vocabulary, drawing on a racist imaginary
combined with new forms of governing the racialized other through migration control” (p.
18). The “guest work” “programs in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, intended to temporar-
ily recruit workers from Southern Europe, Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco, converted people to
interchangeable items within labour market demands” (Rodriguez, p. 24) is strong example in
demonstrating how migration is racialized and exploited economically. Similarly, Franziska
Grillmeier argues, the crisis is “not a political failure but a political calculation” and an “ex-
ternalization campaign” by the EU to shift the responsibility of the refugees towards border
countries, adding, the camp itself represents an “architected of deterrence,” that the inhuman-

Academia Letters, February 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Raymond Da-Boi, kdaboi@vols.utk.edu

Citation: Da-Boi, R. (2021). Origins, political, economic, and discursive contexts of Europe’s “refugee crisis,”
and the 2020 Moria camp disaster. Academia Letters, Article 282. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL282.

2
ity of the camp including its prison-like structure is a backlash to deter migrants from coming
into Greece (Democracy Now, September 17, 2020).
Additionally, the EU efforts to curtail [illegal] migration (“unauthorized arrivals”) in its
borders outside the law have resulted in extreme, nonconventional, extralegal measures of
migration control by the European Commission including its “Hotspot Approach” that have
produced “systematic violations of human rights” (e.g. right to mobility, safety etc.), as well
as the neglect of its obligations to protect refuges (Ayata, 2020) under the 1951 Geneva Con-
vention. Patterns of the “Hotspots Approach” – e.g. fingerprinting for asylum application
eligibility based on nationality, response to the current “refugee crisis” and other EU migra-
tion control policies and programs illustrate the “coloniality of migration” and “racial cap-
italism:” The refugee crisis is symptomatic of a nexus between asylum and migration, and
“operates within the logic of coloniality of migration, situated at the juncture of colonial-
ity and racial capitalism” (Rodriguez, p. 18). Prolonged encampment and denial of official
refugee status or protracted “processing” of the refugees at the Moria camp is another useful
illustration of “coloniality” - preference by Europe for refugees from certain countries while
discriminating against those from other countries/region. (Ayata, 2020). Ayata describes the
“prison-like” Moria refugee camp as deplorable, overcrowded with lack of physical protec-
tion, security/safety and privacy. Importantly, Rodriguez points out, “The categorization of
refugees into different statuses attached to the process of application and recognition of asy-
lum produces a hierarchical order, a nomenclature reminiscent of orientalist and racialized
practices of European colonialism and imperialism” (p. 20).
Lastly, as stated previously, the current European refugee crisis has both a historical
and political context and cannot be understood from an ahistorical and apolitical context.
Rodriguez (2018) underscores the important link between racial capitalism and coloniality
for migration policies in [western] Europe,” noting, “For example, migration policies in the
United Kingdom for Commonwealth citizens have operated within a range of restrictions, lim-
iting or preventing the entry of these citizens to Britain by treating former colonial subjects of
the British Empire as exterior to the British nation” (p 24). “Here,” she argues, “coloniality
is played out by racializing this population and creating individuals with partial rights to no
rights to entry and settlement in the United Kingdom” (p. 24). Also, the media has been a
powerful instrument in shaping the crisis, and thus the analysis of media discourses is also im-
portant as Rodriguez (2018) highlights, media representation of refugees in Europe as “crisis”
is “not neutral but is imbedded in historical genealogies of representation fueled by a range
of convergent and divergent financial, economic and political and interests” (pp. 17-18).
The confluence of political and economic factors is central element of the crisis and can-
not be ignored in finding alternative solutions to address the crisis, as Rodriguez suggests:

Academia Letters, February 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Raymond Da-Boi, kdaboi@vols.utk.edu

Citation: Da-Boi, R. (2021). Origins, political, economic, and discursive contexts of Europe’s “refugee crisis,”
and the 2020 Moria camp disaster. Academia Letters, Article 282. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL282.

3
“Asylum [in the EU] is ruled by the governance of migration based on a range of economic
interests and cultural dynamics rooted in the history of the production of the racialized Other”
(p. 20), which makes the “link between . “Thus,” she concludes, “the dichotomy between cit-
izens and migrants is embedded in a racializing logic produced within social relations shaped
by the enduring effects of colonial epitomic power” (p. 25).

References
Ayata, Bilgin. (2020). Miniseries of COVID-19: ‘Refugees in the Pandemic.’ Infrastructure
Space and the Future of Migration Management: The Case of the EU Hotspots in the
Mediterranean Borderscape.’

Goodman, A., and Shaikh, N. (2020, September 17). “After Fire Destroys Moria Refugee
Camp in Greece, Demands Grow for Relocation, Not Another Camp.” https://www.democracynow.org/
2020/g/17//greece_moria_refugee_camp_fire.

Gutierrez-Rodriguez, Encamacion. (2018). The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee

Crisis” On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-
Migration and Racial Capitalism. Refugee, 34(1): 15-25.

Academia Letters, February 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Raymond Da-Boi, kdaboi@vols.utk.edu

Citation: Da-Boi, R. (2021). Origins, political, economic, and discursive contexts of Europe’s “refugee crisis,”
and the 2020 Moria camp disaster. Academia Letters, Article 282. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL282.