Les violences de Mohammad. Réflexion anthropologique des lieux de confinement dans le contexte migratoire actuel en Europe

Abstract

In the face of a widely mediatized discourse of a global migration crisis, one of desperate populations fleeing massively to the European continent, the new deployment of repressive devices such as camps appears today as the norm for regulating the flows of migrants. The situation of Greece, as a country bordering the Schengen area and one of the main points of entry for migrants,  is relevant to analyze the forms of confinement developed to welcome them and the practices used on a daily basis to keep them away. On the basis of the life story of one migrant that transited through the hotspot on the island of Samos, this anthropological article intends to reflect on the various forms of violence which, on the one hand, underlie the establishment of places of confinement in Europe and, on the other, are produced within them. The challenge here is to highlight forms of violence that are not usually associated, in the collective imagination, with brute force, which, in this sense, makes it possible to legitimize practices that are violent because they are insidious, and felt to be so, under the guise of humanitarian arguments.