Introduction: Challenging Mobilities, Greece and the EU in Times of Crises

Abstract

AbstractWith a broader view of ‘crisis’ not only as temporal interruption, but also as opportunity and constraint, the volume offers a multidisciplinary perspective on challenging mobilities arising during the 2009–2021 period in Greece, the epicentre of the Eurozone crisis, EU’s main gate in the ‘refugee crisis’ and a country experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic. Its contributors from social sciences and humanities, mathematics, health and legal sciences, document how crises interact with migration processes at the individual, organisational and macro levels on critical junctures of economic, humanitarian and governance emergencies. Its fresh empirical and theoretical insights on an ‘exceptional’ South European periphery case contribute to the existing migration literature, especially in reference to the third wave of emigrants, crises-affected host attitudes, solidarity and claims-making, mobility reception transitions and perennial integration challenges. Illuminating the dynamic interactions between crises and migration processes involving supra-state, state and non-state actors as well as citizens and migrants/displaced people, the volume offers new knowledge and insights on the challenges and complexities of crisis-related mobilities. These centre on the ways in which crisis-related opportunities and threats affect transnationalism, collective action, migrants’ political agency, governance and reception practices, as well as secondary migration.