DEGREES OF LIQUIDITY ON THE AEGEAN: SHIPS, MIGRANTS, AND CONNECTING WATERS AROUND LESVOS by Aila Spathopoulou Submitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Sabanci University Spring 2015 © Aila Spathopoulou 2015 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT DEGREES OF LIQUIDITY ON THE AEGEAN: SHIPS, MIGRANTS, AND CONNECTING WATERS AROUND LESVOS Aila Spathopoulou Cultural Studies, MA Thesis, 2015 Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayşe Parla Keywords: Aegean Sea, ships, migrants, Turkish tourists, Lesvos This thesis explores the different stories and texts (newspapers, documents, conventions, reports) that produce partially discordant ‘narratives’ and that, consequently, delineate different patterns of mobility on the Aegean border between Turkey and Greece. Darkness, Turkey, Greece, coastguards, ‘Europe’ and refugees, past and present, death and life, are connected on this border and create what I call the ‘liquid’ border of the Aegean to borrow Bauman’s felicitous phrase ‘liquid’. Through an historical and ethnographic gaze along with some of the theoretical tools provided to us by the discipline of cultural studies -particularly Gilroy’s conceptual framework of the ‘ship’ as a micro-political and micro-cultural symbol in motion-, I deconstruct the Aegean border in order to examine what I call the different degrees of proximity to ‘liquidity’ on the Aegean border, that is, the watery flows of ‘privilege’ in relation to the two most recent spaces of movement: the ferry transferring Turkish tourists and the inflatable-rubber boat carrying undocumented-migrants. An study of these two journeys along with what I see as their effectual meanings of liquidity, rather than revealing an ‘open door’ for some and a ‘wall’ for others, what they show us, I i content, is the ‘liquid’ relation between nationalism and racism expanding on the Aegean waters, on the one hand, and a more planetary cosmopolitanism, on the other. In order to conclude, I propose De Genova’s concept of a ‘migration of struggles’ as a theoretical and ethnographical tool to explore emerging alternative ways of interacting with difference on the Aegean. ii ÖZET EGE’DE AKIŞKANLIĞIN DERECELERİ: GEMİLER, GÖÇMENLER VE MİDİLLİ ETRAFINDA SULARI BİRLEŞTİRMEK Aila Spathopoulou Kültürel Çalışmalar, Yüksek Lisans Tezi, 2015 Tez Danışmanı: Doç. Dr. Ayşe Parla Anahtar Sözcükler: Ege Denizi, Gemiler, Göçmenler, Türk Turistler, Midilli Bu tez, birbiri ile kısmen çelişik ‘anlatılar’ ortaya koyan ve bunun bir sonucu olarak Türkiye ve Yunanistan arasındaki Ege sınırında farklı hareketlilik kalıpları çizen hikâyeleri ve metinleri (gazeteler, belgeler, sözleşmeler, raporlar) incelemektedir. Karanlık, Türkiye, Yunanistan, kıyı emniyeti, “Avrupa” ve göçmenler, geçmiş ve günümüz, ölüm ve yaşam; hepsi bu sınır üzerinde birbirleriyle bağlantılılar ve - Bauman’ın isabetli ifadesi ‘sıvı’yı doğrular derecede- Ege’nin ‘akışkan’ sınırı olarak adlandırdığım şeyi oluşturuyorlar. Tarihi ve etnografik bir bakışın yanı sıra kültürel çalışmalar tarafından bize sunulan bazı teorik araçlar –özellikle hareket halindeki bir mikro-politik ve mikro-kültürel sembol olarak Gilroy’un gemi hakkında sunduğu kavramsal çerçeve vasıtasıyla Ege sınırı üzerinde ‘akışkanlığa’ farklı yakınlık seviyeleri dediğim şeyi, yani, en güncel iki hareket yöntemi olan Türk turistleri taşıyan gemiler ile kaçak göçmenleri taşıyan şişme botlarla ilişkili olarak ‘imtiyaz’ ve ‘savunmasızlık’ akışlarını tetkik etmek için Ege sınırının yapıçözümünü yapıyorum. Birine bir ‘açık kapı’, diğerine ise bir ‘duvar’ sunmasından ziyade, bu iki seyahatin geçerli akışkanlık anlamlarıyla beraber bu incelemenin bize gösterdiği şey, bir taraftan iii Ege suları üzerinde milliyetçiliğin ve ırkçılığın arasındaki ilişkinin ‘akışkan’ olmadığı, diğer taraftan ise küresel bir dünya vatandaşlığının varlığı. Sonuç olarak Ege’de farklılıklarla etkileşimde olan alternatif yollar keşfetmek için De Genova’nın ‘mücadele göçleri’ kavramını teorik ve etnografik bir araç olarak öneriyorum. iv To Vassilis v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation for all those who contributed to the researching and writing of this thesis. First, I would like to thank my thesis adviser, Dr. Ayşe Parla for her valuable feedback and support. But more than this, I would like to thank her for accepting me back in 2012 as an auditor in the two courses she was giving on migration, citizenship and anthropology of Europe; it was during these two courses that I was inspired and encouraged to continue with a postgraduate degree in Cultural Studies with a specific focus on migration studies, due to Dr. Parla’s spirit, energy and critical engagement with these topics. I would also like to thank committee members Drs. Ayşe Gül Altinay and Begüm Ozden Fırat for helping me to continue digging deeper to uncover underlying issues and questions, throghout the duration of this project and my graduate studies. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Altinay for referring me to Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the idea of connecting waters which formulated the main conceptual framework of my thesis. This research would not have been possible without the time and effort the locals of Lesvos spared to meet with me, to which I am very grateful. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the participants of the Traces Back camp from the Welcome to Europe network and Youth Without Borders for all the valuable conversations we had, times we spent together on the island and their struggles against the border regime. My special thanks to Aziz whose existence on Lesvos, I appreciated during each of my stay on the island. I would like to give a great thank you to Bulut Kuskonmaz whom I had the luck to meet this year in the SPS 101 and 102 sections. Without our weekly encounters in SPS sections the writing of this thesis would not have been that enjoyable and fruitful. Bulut represented for me the audience that I had in mind when writing my thesis, the audience who kept me going and whose opinions and criticisms matter to me, the audience for whom, I will continue to reach out for when spoken words are insufficient to communicate that which lies deeper within us and that refuses to be thought along fixed and closed categories, such as that of the Turk and the Greek, the citizen and the migrant… I am truly thankful for my weekly meetings and discussions on Turkish politics and life in general with Kerem Citak. Thanks a lot Kerem, also, for the wonderful vi translation of the thesis’s abstract and keywords. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to all the children at Patika kindergarten whose innocence and playful remarks made even the most rainy and cloudy days in Istanbul a pleasure to exist in this city. For the following people words are not enough to express my appreciation and thankfulness: Sedat and Hasan from Mardin who inspired me to move to Turkey, all the children and elders from the Nesin Foundation in Catalca where I had the privilege to live for ten months, Klaus for organizing the weekly meetings in the foundation that helped me to discover Istanbul, the workers at Sabanci University for their company, Anna and Efi for their unique friendship and challenging discussions, Simos for introducing me to the life at the open solidarity camp of Pikpa, Hamin for his smile, Berem Tekdemir for his inspiring personality, Maurice Stierl for his valuable suggestions, advice and support and for introducing me to the Watch The Med platform, Panagiotis, the coastguard, for sharing his thoughts and opinions and above all for contributing to the main idea of my PhD project, Stef Jansen for his time and detailed comments and Nicholas De Genova for his encouragement and inspiring work that introduced me new ways with which to approach my topic. Last but certainly not least, everything I have done but also failed to do in my life until now, I own to my family: my partner Serdar without whom my intellectual but also personal development in Turkey would not have been possible, my brother Vashia who has never stopped believing in me, my sister Thania for her strength and the holiday in Lesvos, my sister Fiona for her fears but who never judges my own, to my mother for being the most supportive and intelligent woman I have ever met, for her patience, openness and profound understanding and my father who first introduced me to the ambivalent and painful history of the Aegean. I am grateful not only for all those people’s existence but for the fact that despite the distance between us, I am not forced to risk my life at some border to reach them… vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: A Journey on the Aegean .....................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Construction and Mapping of the Aegean ................................................................8 1.1. A Brief Discussion on the Production of Sea Spaces .......................................................8 1.1.1. The Legal Marking of the ‘Liquid’ Border Through the UN Convention ................ 12 1.2. The Aegean Dispute ...................................................................................................... 18 1.3. The ‘Liquid’ Spatialities on the Aegean: the Delineation of the Islands ....................... 25 1.4. European Mapping of the Aegean ................................................................................ 32 1.4.1. Frontex Mapping: A Struggle Against the ‘Waves’ ...............................................