Contextualizing Anti-Migrant Sentiment: A Comparative Ethnography of Lesvos and Samos, Greece
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article offers a comparative ethnographic analysis of anti-migrant mobilizations on the Greek Aegean islands of Lesvos and Samos between 2018 and 2022. While both islands experienced intensified border securitization, refugee containment, and NGO activity following the EU–Turkey Deal, their local responses diverged markedly. Lesvos became a site of organized and visible vigilante violence, in contrast to Samos, where little comparable turmoil occurred, and where unrest was characterized by informal exclusion and ambient hostility. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study argues that migration pressures alone cannot explain these divergent patterns. Instead, they reflect the interplay of geography, community scale, far-right mobilization, and state complicity. Vigilantism, the paper suggests, should be understood not as a rupture in the rule of law, but as part of a broader moral and spatial infrastructure of border governance, one that operates through both action and silence. By tracing how proximity, reputation, and visibility shape the moral economies of violence and restraint, the article contributes to debates on migration, vigilantism, and the affective politics of European borderlands.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".