Keeping out by keeping alive: Refugee rentierism,racialized containment and the humanitarian-development nexus in transit states

Abstract

This article explores humanitarian-development responses to displacement as postcolonial modes of security within actually existing racial capitalism. Focusing on Greece's “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” program, it provides insight into “make-live” interventions that temporarily subsidize stranded migrants’ social reproduction at Europe's frontiers. The article argues that development-led refugee-hosting strategies, marketed as win–win solutions for both “hosted” and “hosting” communities, actually serve a twofold function: containing racially subordinate outsiders and compensating so-called transit countries for taking up the task of “keeping out by keeping alive.” By minimally supporting migrants’ social reproductive needs within designated territories, the racial biopolitics of the humanitarian-development nexus brings surplus populations into the fold of local capital accumulation while sustaining the global color line. Analyzing the refugee humanitarian-development nexus as a spatioracial fix that harnesses the vital capacities of surplus populations, the article seeks to: invite discussion on the social reproduction of populations violently cast out of the wage relation; theorize racial capitalism beyond metropolitan centers and their (post)colonial borderlands, highlighting the role of intermediary spaces as crucial nodes of georacial and capitalist stabilization; and demonstrate how the dialectic between humanitarianism and rentier economies embeds new racialized hierarchies between crisis-affected local “hosts” and surplused migrant “guests.”

Introduction

Between 2015 and 2016, over a million people—predominantly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also from Pakistan, Somalia and other countries—crossed the Turkish–Greek border, reaching the peak of what came to be known as the “European refugee crisis.” The subsequent closure of the “Balkan Route” in March 2016 left 42,688 migrants stranded in Greece (IOM, 2017). While arrivals to Greece dropped due to the combined effects of the sealing of the Greek–Macedonian border and the sealing of the Greek–Turkish border through the enactment of the EU–Turkey Statement in March 2016, the number of stranded migrants kept increasing, reaching 62,207 by July 2017 (IOM, 2017). Subsequently, Greek authorities took on the task of dispersing thousands of people who had gathered at the Greek–Macedonian border, while also deterring others from joining to prevent so-called “secondary movements” to Northern Europe. To achieve this, authorities attempted to move people to accommodation facilities, employing persuasion or, when that was unsuccessful, force. The acute shortage of accommodation infrastructure prompted the quick repurposing of warehouses, abandoned factories, and old military barracks into refugee camps across Greece.

Parallel to the camp system, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) committed to collaborating with the Greek Government and the EU to create 20,000 places in apartments for “vulnerable asylum seekers” (UNHCR, 2021: 2). In July 2017, the European Commission announced the expansion of the accommodation scheme, which became the first pillar of the “Emergency Support To Integration and Accommodation” (ESTIA) program. ESTIA, an acronym meaning “home” in Greek aimed to provide urban accommodation and cash assistance to up to 30,000 people (GCR, 2021: 166). The official rationale for the establishment of ESTIA was “restoring normality in people's lives” (UNHCR, 2021: 3), “helping them regain control of their lives” (UNHCR, 2021: 6) and “facilitating their route to self-reliance” (UNHCR, 2021: 7). But this initiative was not merely a humanitarian exercise; it carried with it claims of “advancing cultural exchange” (UNHCR, 2021: 5) and mutually “benefiting the refugee and host communities” (UNHCR, 2021: 7). This ambitious project was framed as a glimpse of hope amidst Greece's financial troubles, asserting that ESTIA could bolster social cohesion and revitalize the local economy. As the analysis will demonstrate, ESTIA merged the urgent need for asylum-seekers’ accommodation with the local economic benefits of hosting, and the global policing of mobility into a new political economy of migration governance at Europe's borders.

The rebordering of Europe following the 2015 “European refugee crisis” has spurred an expanding body of critical literature examining the entanglement of humanitarian actors and logics with the securitization of migration. Scholars have analyzed how practices intended to sustain life are simultaneously used to regulate, filter, and restrict mobility, thereby reinforcing the very borders and exclusions that produce human suffering (e.g. Cuttitta, 2018; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022; Stierl, 2018). Others have delved more deeply into the economic activities and value circuits that have been forged through various humanitarian-security operations (e.g. Achtnich, 2024; Andersson, 2018; Coddington et al., 2020; Martin, 2020). Yet, with some exceptions (e.g. Bird and Schmid, 2021; Çaglar, 2024; Rajaram, 2018), there have been limited attempts to analyze how these processes are embedded within the broader dynamics of uneven development in global capitalism. This article introduces a distinctive perspective to ongoing debates by examining the political economy of humanitarian containment as an integral component of postcolonial global capitalism and its racialized terms of order.

Building on, expanding, and bridging Marxist literature on racial capitalism, surplus populations, and social reproduction with postcolonial approaches to development, migration, and carceral geographies, this work aims to make four key contributions: (a) develop a theoretical framework to understand the role of migration management in racial capitalism beyond its function in producing an illegalized cheap workforce; (b) read the biopolitical governance of migrant life through a social reproduction lens that incorporates questions of political economy and race; (c) examine how refugee rentierism is constructed both from above and below and expand its traditional focus from border externalization in the Middle East and Africa to border internalization in Europe; (d) provide an empirical understanding of how the humanitarian-development nexus precipitates refugee disposability, as seen in the current phase of European migration politics.

This approach emerges from the recognition that focusing narrowly on electoral politics and migration agendas is insufficient for fully grasping how—and, crucially, why—border regimes undergo rapid transformations. To move beyond merely symptomatic analyses toward a deeper diagnosis, our inquiry must extend past traditional migration studies frameworks, which as Rajaram (2018) observes, predominantly view migrants through the lens of citizenship—as foreigners managed either through humanitarian and integration policies or through strategies of organized abandonment and stringent border controls. This binary perspective cannot adequately explain why interventions intended to support migrant life consistently yield outcomes contrary to their stated objectives. Shifting away from approaches that highlight discontinuities between liberal and illiberal forms of migration governance, this article seeks instead to uncover the racial capitalist logic underpinning all migration management practices. By demonstrating how migrants are systematically relegated to a surplus condition—not only during explicit phases of exclusion but also within processes purportedly aimed at “integration”—the article unearths the inherent contradictions within humanitarian-development approaches to displacement that catalyze rapid shifts toward explicitly necropolitical governance regimes. It argues that the humanitarian-development model of migration management temporarily subsidizes the social reproduction of racially subordinate life through housing, clothing, food, and financial allowances, but it does so in ways that reinforce the conditions that render this same life disposable. By examining humanitarian-development operations through the lens of social reproduction of racially subordinate “wageless life” (Denning, 2010), this analysis enriches legal and political conceptions of the biopolitical governance of “human life,” which is often perceived as raceless (Weheliye, 2014). Simultaneously, it advances an understanding of so-called “transit countries” not as empty intermediary spaces between Empire and its borderlands, but rather as critical sites where the postcolonial global order is actively maintained, contested, and continually reconstituted.

To unpack these dynamics, the article asks: What is the position of refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrant groups temporarily or minimally protected under human rights principles—what I call “humanitarianized migrants”—within racial capitalism? How does racial capitalism manifest in transit spaces where these individuals are immobilized, abjected, yet (mostly) kept alive? The article focuses on Greece, which provides a particularly compelling case for exploring such questions. Greece occupies a critical geopolitical position as an external border of the European Union, aligned closely with EU border politics, while simultaneously experiencing the prolonged effects of financial crisis, austerity policies, and labor market contraction. This intersection of border geopolitics, economic precarity, and shifting labor dynamics combined with Greece's untapped frontier of homeownership facilitated the rise of a form of refugee rentierism that relied on monetizing the social reproduction of migrants deemed surplus to capital's demand for labor. The economic relations of the humanitarianian-development nexus established new racialized hierarchies between financially stricken citizens as hosts and asylum seekers as the hosted, while restabilizing the disrupted global divide and revamping the Greek real-estate market. While this analysis foregrounds political economy, it does not imply that other dimensions, such as ideological, discursive, or governmental factors are not significant in examining humanitarian-development approaches to migration management. These domains remain crucial for a comprehensive critique of humanitarianism, yet most critical accounts tend to focus explicitly on these aspects while often overlooking how humanitarianism fortifies the racialized distribution of resources between the Global North and South, as well as among the subjects associated with each.

The article proceeds as follows. In the first section, I bring humanitarized migrants into systemic discussions of racial capitalism, challenging dominant conceptions that frame them exclusively through their utility as “subordinated labor” or as “bare life” that purportedly exists outside the bounds of capitalist relations. I show that while migrants governed as humanitarian subjects often experience the specifically colonial/racial violence of being cast out of the wage relation on a more protracted basis, they are still being implicated in the social reproduction of capitalism through humanitarian-development operations that render their social reproduction an object of action. I attend to the racial, geopolitical, and economic rationalities governing “make live” interventions that seek to sustain segments of the purportedly unproductive humanity, and argue that, in the context of the recent “refugee crisis,” the social reproduction of surplus life operated as a spatio-racial fix that temporarily and partially mitigated capitalism's crisis tendencies. I, therefore, think through the refugee humanitarian-development nexus not as antithetical nor as intertwined with security but rather as a mode of security in actually existing racial capitalism. In the following section, I direct attention to the role of “transit countries” turned “hosts” through humanitarian-development projects that seek to contain racialized surplus life by temporarily supporting its social reproduction in exchange for local benefits. I focus on the endeavor of building Greece's reception system, consisting primarily of accommodation schemes funded by EU donor governments through UNHCR and implemented by (I)NGOs and local authorities with the participation of developmental agencies and private landlords. Through this case study, I show how local benefits took the form of the “rent of whiteness” for native property owners, with municipal, humanitarian, and development actors assuming the role of race relations managers. I proceed by showcasing how “make live” interventions transition to “make die” abandonment in the peripheries of Europe and how the social reproduction of migrant surplus life can operate as a lever for new rounds of capital accumulation. Finally, I conclude by demonstrating how research on humanitarianism can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of social reproduction in racial capitalism.

Methodologically, this work seeks to integrate multiple political-economic scales of analysis—spanning the local, regional, national, and international—while employing a conjunctural approach (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2021; Hall, 1988; Peck, 2024) to unravel how power relations were shaped and transformed within the specific historical and sociopolitical junctures of Greece's financial and refugee “crises.” It follows the ethnographic regime approach which “combines ethnographic research with discourse analyses and an analytical focus on the macro level” (Hess, 2010: 428). More specifically, this study draws on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth semistructured interviews, and critical policy analysis conducted during doctoral and postdoctoral research in Greece between 2016 and 2022. During this time, I conducted more than 70 in-depth semistructured interviews with a diverse range of governmental, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental actors operating within the migration regime in Athens, Thessaloniki, Lesbos, Samos and internationally. This material was supplemented by newspaper articles, data provided by fellow researchers, policy documents and reports issued by international, supranational, national, and local institutions. In this article, I specifically focus on interactions with municipal authorities and workers involved in the rolling out of ESTIA program in Athens and Thessaloniki, and documents issued by UNHCR, the European Commission, the Greek Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, and municipalities. By adopting a mixed-method and longitudinal methodological framework, this research seeks to capture the multidimensional and long-term transformations of migration governance structures in Greece that evade more short-term analyses. Delving deeply into the processes and dynamics driving these shifts, the study also uses this case study to analyze broader global trends in mobility governance amidst nested crises.

Theorizing migrant surplus life in racial capitalism

The term racial capitalism first emerged within the context of the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa (Alexander, 2023; Legassick and Hemson, 1976) and found its most influential articulation in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (Robinson, 2000 [1983]). Contrary to linear developmentalist perspectives which posited that bourgeois societies tend to rationalize and homogenize social relations, Robinson argued that capital accumulation depends on the production and capitalization of social inequality, often essentialized as a natural, “racial” difference. Robinson identifies migrants as foundational to the development of racial capitalism (Danewid, 2023: 86). He asserts, “[t]here has never been a moment in European modern history (or even before) when migratory and/or immigrant labor was not a significant aspect of European economies” (Robinson, 2000 [1983]: 23). The “indispensable immigrant” (Robinson, 2000 [1983]: 24) is portrayed as both central to the construction of the European working class and relegated to the lowest rung of its racial hierarchy.

Contemporary scholars of migration, capitalism, and labor (e.g. De Genova, 2002; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) have elaborated on how this simultaneous indispensability and subordination of migrant workers is mutually constructed through bordering and racialization processes tied to the global nation-state system. While these insights have been central in illuminating the disciplinary implications of racialized border control and the productive dimensions of migrant “illegality” for capitalist exploitation, a large proportion of the migrant population still remains trapped in a position of liminal legality, unable to be absorbed into the labor market even as highly exploitable workforce. In the Global North's externalized borderlands—from Kenya to Turkey and from Libya to Jordan—heightened border enforcement and immobilization have led to the emergence of semipermanent transit spaces where wageless migrants, often legally recognized as asylum seekers, stateless, temporary guests, and subsidiaries of international protection, are sustained primarily through humanitarian aid, familial networks, and limited access to the informal “needs economy” (Sanyal, 2007). This persistent reality compels us to seriously examine the place of humanitarized migrants in contemporary racial capitalism. Such analysis is particularly urgent in the context of recurring crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, which consistently challenge humanitarized migrants’ potential inclusion in the global capitalist economy, even as subordinate labor, and the longer-running transformations of capitalist accumulation processes, which are increasingly characterized by jobless growth (Li, 2013).

Interrogating the crucial relationship between racialization and labor in the development of postcolonial capitalism brings to the fore the seemingly paradoxical figure of migrant surplus life which exists in both tension and continuity with the indispensable migrant worker. If blackness, with its historical ties to enslavement, serves as both the foundation and the limit figure of all labor, as De Genova (2023) incisively argues, it also delineates its boundary through a systemic denial of labor. Bhattacharyya (2018: 5), describes racial capitalism precisely as “a process by which capitalist formations create the edge populations that serve as the other and limit of the working class.” This process is both historically rooted in precapitalist colonial racialism and transposed as an ongoing and ever-incomplete process in postcolonial racial capitalism. The first encounter between the European colonial system and an unpaid, racialized “exterior” to capital has been transformed over time into the racial global division of labor and the constant production of racialized “excess” populations contained in spaces such as refugee camps and prisons. Rather than withering away, race has been reshaped and integrated into “post-racial” austerity, border and carceral apparatuses which disproportionately impact migrant, black, and brown bodies but target them in the name of putatively “colourblind” values of national sovereignty, crime, terrorism, and welfare system abuse prevention (De Genova, 2018; Gilmore, 2007).

Thus, the condition of migrant wagelessness is not an anomaly but a cornerstone of racial capitalism, existing alongside indispensable migrant labor. In fact, as Chen (2013: 215) observes, “racial disparities have been reproduced as an inherent category of capitalism since its origins, not primarily through the wage, but through its absence.” This “absence” is systematically enforced and naturalized upon humanitarized migrants through intersecting forms of spatial, legal, political, and economic exclusion, compounded by the physical and psychological harm inflicted through war, land grabs, dispossession, displacement, violence, and abandonment rooted in racial capitalism's “right to maim” certain bodies and communities (Puar, 2017). A racial theory of wageless life, therefore, can complement a “racial theory of labor” (De Genova, 2023), offering a critical lens on how capitalism organizes a broader range of experiences of oppression and survival through the racialized indispensability-disposability nexus.

The extraordinary challenges faced by humanitarized migrants in transforming their bodies into valuable labor and securing their social reproduction—understood as “the daily and generational renewal of human life (and thus of human labor power)” (Ferguson, 2017)—necessitate a deeper engagement with Marx's concept of “surplus populations” (Marx, 1990 [1867]). Humanitarianized migrants encompass various segments of what Marx termed “relative surplus population”—those capable of working but rendered superfluous or unemployed by the dynamics of capitalist production at a given time—but also the “sphere of pauperism” (1990 [1867]: 794), which includes individuals unable to work due to injury, disability, or old age. While the term “relative surplus population” is often used interchangeably with the “reserve army of labor,” including in Marx's own writings, I align with scholars such as Bernards and Soederberg (2021), who distinguish between the two to capture the highly variegated, complex, and indirect relationships these populations maintain with capital accumulation, beyond their immediate functions of suppressing wages or enabling the rapid spatial or technological restructuring of capital. Moving beyond theories of capitalist hyperfunctionalism Bhattacharya et al., 2022; Hanieh and Ziadah, 2023)—where even “the last landless peasant … [is] considered to be functional to the reproduction of capitalist exploitation” (Nun, 2000, cited in Bhattacharya et al., 2022: 149)—I suggest that parts of the relative surplus population may even become a-functional to the economic needs of capital. This is particularly relevant given the exponential increase in the global relative surplus population over recent decades (Arn, 1996; Bernards and Soederberg, 2021; Habibi and Juliawan, 2018; Neilson and Stubbs, 2011). In periods and spaces marked by acute accumulation crises and declining profitability, the relative suplus population’s role as a “reserve army” can diminish, accentuating its position as “residual” (Smith, 2011). Rather than occupying a static status, migrants traverse positionalities not only between legal categories—such as undocumented, legal resident, asylum seeker, refugee, or deportable—but also between roles as subordinated cheap labor, members of the reserve army of labor, paupers, and residual populations in different places and at different times. These shifting positions are the social products of the ongoing struggle between the broader dynamics of capitalist production and the diverse forms of resistance migrants enact in response to their surplusing.

The humanitarian-development fix and the reproduction of capitalism

The question that naturally arises is: What is the role of humanitarianism in this struggle? What social forces, as Li (2010) asks, would activate a biopolitics that places the value of life rather than the value of people as workers at its core? In other words, what are the stakes of the social reproduction of surplus populations in racial capitalism? While surplus populations are a necessary product of the capitalist mode of production, they also threaten the capitalist order, sharply exposing, through their mobility, the fundamental contradictions of capitalist development. “For some Third World persons,” Achiume (2019: 1522) notes, migration “may enact a process that enhances individual self-determination within neocolonial empire, irrespective of its implications for the collective self-determination of Third World nation-states.” In that sense, migration constitutes an “act of decolonisation” (Achiume, 2019) in itself—a form of global redistribution from below that destabilizes the geopolitical structures of whiteness, facilitating access to resources and privileges historically built on colonial expropriation and further expanded by uneven capitalist development. Seen under this prism, “make live” interventions aim to minimally mitigate the potentially disruptive effects of excluding surplus populations from vital resources, by offering the bare minimum to encourage “staying put.” Conditional and geographically contained access to means of survival operates as a system of mobility unfreedom containing African and Middle-Eastern bodies away from the postcolonial core. The refugee humanitarian-development nexus can therefore be seen as a “reaction formation” (De Genova, 2016) concerned with the social reproduction of racialized surplus life to the extent it facilitates containing the specter of an unruly global underclass that threatens to become ungovernable.

“Transit countries” emerge here as pivotal actors in maintaining and reinforcing the “power geometries” (Massey, 1999) of the racial capitalist order. They act as buffers, mitigating the political and economic tensions between postcolonial metropoles and their borderlands (Zetter, 2019). As a holding ground for surplus populations, such spaces serve an important political function for capital in maintaining its prevalence in the global social formation (see also Bhattacharya et al., 2022). Hence, they play a key role in implementing what Bird and Schmid (2021) call the “migration fix,” that is, “the system of bordering and encampment by which state and international actors seek to manage the uneven effects of capitalist development and the inner crisis tendencies of capital, most notably by regulating the access of surplus populations to local labour markets” (Bird and Schmid, 2021: 1244). This positionality enables such states to engage in refugee rentier practices, leveraging the presence of forcibly displaced people within their territories to secure economic and political concessions for their continued “hosting.” In the process, they appropriate migrants’ social reproductive activities, turning life itself into a mechanism of accumulation-by-containment.

Rather than “bare lives” excluded from capitalist relations of production and reproduction, humanitarianized migrants remain deeply embedded in the circuits of social, economic, and geopolitical accumulation that drive and shape global capitalism. This holds true regardless of whether their labor power contributes to the generation of surplus value (Goffe and Luke, 2024). As Gilmore (2022: 474) puts it, “what's extracted from the extracted is the resource of life-time.” Under conditions of containment and immobilization, this extraction takes the form of an active wasting of life-time that “is conscripted in the global economy as a rebound strategy for cutting losses or a form of wartime profiteering” (Tadiar, 2022: 29). Drawing on the above analysis, I conceptualize the “humanitarian-development fix” as the temporary and self-serving dislocation, management, and containment of capitalist crisis through the combined production of space and the social reproduction of surplus life, which is always already racialized. In this regard, the humanitarian-development nexus is inherently both a spatial and a racial fix. While presented as vital infrastructure for the displaced, humanitarian-development interventions use the vital capacities of racialized surplus life as resource flow channels that are, in fact, crucial for the reproduction of capitalism. I use the term “humanitarian-development fix” to highlight the broader role of humanitarian-development interventions in restoring the economic and political conditions necessary for the reproduction of capitalist social relations beyond profit-extraction through migrant regulation, as well as to underscore the inherent potential of the migration fix to be extended to other populations governed through the humanitarian-development nexus.

The humanitarian-development fix entails the extraction of geopolitical rent in exchange for the use of strategically located transit territories for containment purposes. While refugee rentier practices have predominantly been examined in relation to border externalization in contexts such as the Middle East and North Africa (e.g. Freier et al., 2021; Kelberer, 2017; Tsourapas, 2019), this article proposes that the intersecting dynamics of uneven development, capitalist crises, and the global increase in wars and displacement have expanded refugee rentierism inward. Moreover, while much of the existing literature adopts a state-centric perspective on refugee rentierism, this article highlights how such practices are constituted both from above and below, with nonstate actors, from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local governance to development agents and private landlords, playing pivotal roles in implementing and sustaining systems of humanitarian containment. These actors are far from passive participants; instead, they actively engage in these processes, revealing the multiscalar dynamics of refugee containment and the entanglements between local capital accumulation and global migration governance. In the next section, I therefore direct attention to the process of internalizing the EU's externalized borders to withhold the collective force by which a section of the global surplus population claimed its social revaluation through crossing into Europe. Humanitarian-development funds designed for managing “humanitarian disasters” in the “Global South” were rerouted toward EU's borderlands to create Greece's refugee “reception” system literally from scratch. This system which enrolled local property owners facing the consequences of financial austerity operated as a holding ground by promising and temporarily subsidizing migrants’ social reproduction before disposing them once more lucrative economic opportunities arose.

Border internalization and the humanitarian-development boomerang effect

In recent years Greece's retention within the EU hinged on the Greek's state willingness to adopt an IMF-supported stringent economic restructuring program—akin to strategies frequently applied to so-called “Global South” economies. The specter of Grexit, which animated profound geopolitical anxieties over the potential consequences of being cast out from Western privilege and safeguard—precipitated a disputed acceptance of structural adjustment programs which further challenged the social reproduction of both migrants and citizens in Greece. The financing of the humanitarian-development response to the “refugee crisis” that emerged while Greece was still under stringent fiscal monitoring was also routed through a mechanism designed for humanitarian disasters in the “Global South” (Dittmer and Lorenz, 2021).

The introduction of the Emergency Support Instrument (ESI) signifies the first instance where the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO) allocated funds for humanitarian initiatives within Europe. The introduction of ESI represents a pivotal moment in international aid operations, underscoring the challenges of maintaining racialized surplus populations outside Europe's bounds. Humanitarian disasters, as the plight of war, poverty, and uneven development is commonly labeled, had hit home. This, in turn, necessitated what can be described as the “internal externalization of borders” (Barbero and Donadio, 2019) within the EU. From 2016 to 2019, the EU funneled €644.5 million toward the Greek government, the UNHCR, and a spectrum of international NGOs to provide humanitarian-development aid to refugees and support “host communities,” while the EU's internal borderland was being turned into an open-air prison. The implementation of ESI took place precisely between the brief window between the final closure of the Balkan Route (9 March 2016) and the implementation of the EU-Turkey agreement (20 March 2016)—that essentially sealed Greece's transformation from a transit country to a reception/containment hub. The timing leaves little room for misinterpretation. The ESI emerged as a dynamic tool designed to financially underpin this shift while mitigating its turbulent repercussions. It supported the strategic decision to seal the “Balkan Route” and enforce a georacial containment of people on the move.

While Greece was a passage to Northern Europe before 2015 to 2016, its reception system has been notoriously inadequate. The absence of housing policies acted as a deterrent for new arrivals and reinforced Greece's self-presentation as merely a transit country for those who had entered its territory, encouraging onward movement (Kourachanis, 2019). The severe accommodation deficit in Greece was highlighted by the closure of the “Balkan route,” leaving approximately 15,000 stranded at the informal Idomeni settlement, at the Greek–Macedonian border. The settlement was first evicted on 9 December 2015, and cleared in May 2016, 2 months after the Balkan route's closure. During this time, Idomeni became a hotbed of tension, with daily demonstrations, hunger strikes, protests, and confrontations with police over demands to open the borders. Greek authorities and UNHCR played active roles in convincing migrants to abandon border-crossing aspirations by promising essential amenities for those agreeing to “voluntarily” move to accommodations in mainland Greece. Authorities presented migrants with the stark “choice” between risking border violence and expulsion or, accepting a subordinate and temporary inclusion in a “second class” European nation. In April 2016, the Greek authorities distributed a leaflet by the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, exemplifying the pastoral/disciplinary function of “make live” containment operations. The leaflet read:

You are in Greece and you are guests in this country. It is your obligation to follow the rules and instructions of the Greek state. The borders, and this is not a responsibility of the Greek government, are and will remain closed. This settlement does not cover any of your basic everyday needs. It will end its operation. You should move to the camps run by the Greek state, in a fast and coordinated manner, under the responsibility of the Greek authorities. The Greek state gives you the opportunity to stay in the temporary reception facilities (camps, hotels, settlements and other facilities) in various areas in the country. These facilities are open but are guarded and controlled so that you and your families are safe. There you will find food, clothes and personal hygiene items. (LiveTicker, 2016)

In this document, the Greek state projects an image of magnanimity, offering shelter while simultaneously deflecting responsibility for the thwarted aspirations of migrants keen to progress further. Hosting as containment entails the provision of goods and services—such as health, food, water, and shelter—but is reduced to what Redfield (2005) terms “minimalist biopolitics.” Unlike biopolitics which seeks to administer, optimize, and multiply life, while subjecting it to controls and regulations (Foucault, 2008[1979]), minimalist biopolitics refers to practices of monitoring and assisting populations in merely “maintaining their physical existence” (Redfield, 2005: 329). Minimalist biopolitics simultaneously deplete transnational familial networks of existing resources and obstruct alternative and autonomous ways of living (see also Boyce, 2021; Makrygianni, 2017). Dispersed temporary facilities across Greece are here presented as havens providing vital services and safety, a depiction which stands in stark contrast to the actual conditions often discovered by migrants only after they had been moved to mainland facilities—that is when their ability to move forward outside of institutional channels had been already notably hampered. Such interventions, as Pallister-Wilkins (2016) observes, reveal the “blurred line between practices designed to manage mobility and practices designed to manage life.”

The ESTIA accommodation scheme, running concurrently with the camp system, provided shelter through a blend of apartments, hotels, and host families. It was championed as a more “dignified” approach to aiding asylum seekers, setting them on a path to self-sustained living, while also benefiting the local economy. The emphasis on refugee self-reliance and the purported mutual benefits for displaced individuals and their host communities is a hallmark of the widely praised, but also increasingly challenged humanitarian-development approach to aid (e.g. Firoz, 2022; Lie, 2020; Zetter, 2019). Duffield (2007) identifies the connection between development and the self-reliance of surplus populations as a form of culturally coded racism that emerged in the postdecolonization era. In this framework, a “developed life” is privileged with access to extensive welfare systems and social protections, while an “underdeveloped life” is compelled to operate autonomously, relying solely on minimal resources and survival mechanisms. As he poignantly observes, “surplus non-insured life is the subject of development, while the stasis of basic needs and self-reliance is its biopolitical object” (Duffield, 2007: ix).

Self-reliance was a central theme in both the narratives surrounding the ESTIA program and the broader EU policy frameworks of the time. In April 2016, as Greece was transformed into a containment hub and the ESI funding was rolled out, the European Commission articulated its strategic vision of the EU as “an active global player and a leading humanitarian and development donor” (European Commission, 2016). This vision was encapsulated in the policy framework titled Lives in Dignity: From Aid-dependence to Self-reliance. Forced Displacement and Development. The document outlined its primary objective: “To strengthen the resilience and self-reliance of both the displaced and their host communities, working with host governments and local actors to support the gradual socio-economic inclusion of refugees and IDPs” (European Commission, 2016). The policy framework further specified: “The new approach aims to harness the productive capacities of refugees and IDPs by helping them to access education, healthcare, housing, land, livelihood support, and other basic services.” Notably, inclusion in the labor market is omitted here as a key component of “harnessing productive capacities,” whereas processes of “marketized social reproduction” (Rosenman et al., 2024) are explicitly acknowledged as sites of value extraction.

ESTIA was a material example of EU's strategic vision as a global player in humanitarian and development aid. Initially conceptualized solely for relocation candidates and supported by the UNHCR's finances, its scope was soon broadened to encompass vulnerable asylum seekers and cash card support to both camp dwellers and ESTIA housing beneficiaries, with substantial backing from the EU. By the end of 2018, the scheme had opened 27,088 spots, spread across 4554 apartments, and 22 structures in 14 urban centers and on 7 Greek islands (GCR, 2021). The majority of ESTIA residents were from Arab countries (50% Syria, 19% Iraq, and 16% Iran). More than a quarter of ESTIA residents grappled with severe medical conditions, child endangerment, or single parenthood which made labor participation difficult, even in the absence of other significant barriers. A large proportion of accommodated asylum seekers and recognized refugees comprised families, averaging four to five members, with children constituting approximately half of the resident demographic (UNHCR, 2019). By the close of December 2020, a paltry 3% of eligible ESTIA II residents had managed to establish a bank account, underscoring their estrangement from the (formal) labor market. Indeed, for vast segments of the refugee population in Greece, the primary challenge at this historical conjuncture was not labor exploitation, but the stark infeasibility of their labor being exploited. Immobilized migrants were, as Sanyal (2007) would put it paraphrasing Marx, “doubly free”: that is, simultaneously dispossessed through primitive accumulation and war but also not absorbed by capitalist development. The minimalist biopolitics of the camps and urban housing can be understood in this context as a means of managing the unruly mobility and frustrations of stranded migrants following the closure of the Balkan route. At the same time, it can also be seen as a mechanism to co-opt local populations as active allies in the governance of migration through consent.

Multiscalar negotiations of refugee-rentierism as racialized extractivism

UNHCR advanced the ESTIA program by collaborating with NGOs, local governments, and property owners. Local municipalities played a pivotal role in these programs via their Development Management Agencies, and consortiums comprising multiple stakeholders operated under their guidance. A standout example is REACT (Refugee Assistance Collaboration Thessaloniki), a housing initiative spearheaded by the Thessaloniki municipality, Greece's second-largest city following Athens. REACT, being the inaugural housing project helmed by a municipality in Greece, earned commendation as a model practice by UNHCR. The initiative was grounded on three articulated objectives (bold in the source):

The adjustment of the accommodation criteria according to the real estate market characteristics of Thessaloniki (e.g. assist homeowners with their financial difficulties, lowering the demands in terms of apartment square meters).

The carefully planned distribution of the refugee population in city areas that are not overly populated by refugees but are strategically located in areas with easy access to services and facilities.

The introduction of a fast-track alternative application procedure called “Pre-approval Application of Appropriateness” and the support of the pertinent Municipal Department and the “Committee for the Appropriateness of Accommodation” in order to facilitate homeowners’ need to estimate their property's monthly rent value before investing in the renovation of their apartments (i.e. painting, installing air-conditioning, restoring damages, etc.) and in the full application process and costly certificates (REACT, cited in Ozgunes, 2019).

According to the program's own outline, one of its fundamental aspects was aiding property owners and upholding urban and social “cohesion,” a concept deeply intertwined with racial considerations. This was realized by tailoring accommodation standards to the unique characteristics of local housing markets, even at the cost of living standards; distributing racial minorities to alleviate social tensions from their pronounced presence in specific locales; and streamlining processes, enabling property owners to easily assess the profitability of participating in the program. While humanitarian narratives framed the transition of asylum seekers from camps to regular housing as vital for integration, in practice, this shift was touted as a lucrative prospect for the real estate sector and individual homeowners. The translation of the global moral economy of humanitarian interventions to regional economic terms typifies the “development-oriented” aid model, steeped in the liberal sentiment that assisting the “less fortunate” benefits both “them” and “us.” The development model of migrant administration, in particular, works on the assumption that the economy constitutes a force of racial progress and that overcoming racial differences lies in integrating certain groups into capitalist markets, a presumptively inexorable process temporarily interrupted or impeded by episodic instances of racial prejudice and conservative anti-immigration governments (Chen, 2013: 205). What remains hidden is that market-mediated solutions that are presented as mutually beneficial largely maintain the status quo and perpetuate the racialized hierarchies between citizens and migrants.

In Greece, the “mutual advantage” only emerged against the backdrop of an economic downturn that severely impacted the real estate market, and Greece's abundant housing stock that, in combination, galvanized a “resource stampede” (Morris, 2024). According to the 2011 census, the percentage of vacant homes was strikingly high with a large concentration in urban areas—31% in the Municipality of Athens, 28% in the Municipality of Piraeus, and 28.2% in Thessaloniki (Eteron, 2022). The number of vacant flats in the Municipality of Athens alone was at least 132,000, highlighting the compounded effects of the economic crisis, declining population trends and outward migration from Greece. Besides being the European country with the highest percentage of vacant homes, Greece also demonstrated a high rate of homeownership (75%) and a significant proportion of secondary homes (Dimitris, 2015). In 2015, the homeownership ratio between managers/professionals and manual workers stood at 1.15, one of the lowest in Europe, indicating that homeownership was a relatively cross-class phenomenon (Dimitris, 2015). However, the rise in property taxes during this period fundamentally altered the role of homeownership, transforming it from a familial resource into a potential financial burden (Balampanidis et al., 2021: 228). This shift hastened its commodification, embedding it more deeply within what Birch and Ward (2024) term the new “asset geographies” that capture the increasingly interconnected spatioeconomic processes of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization.

According to interviewees involved in managing the implementation of ESTIA, refugee accommodation emerged as a silver lining for financially struggling Greek homeowners. This perspective was echoed by the mayor of Athens, who underscored the program's financial significance for property owners “at a time when the real estate market is stagnant” (Avgi Newsroom, 2017), while also commending Athenian homeowners for their hospitality. As unemployment soared and incomes dwindled, many Greeks turned to their private properties—an asset broadly accessible across socioeconomic classes—as a crucial source of income but also as a marker of moral virtue, a form of rent of whiteness. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Roediger (1991) conceptualized “the wages of whiteness” as the material and symbolic benefits that sustained white working- and middle-class privileges, ideologically tethering white labor to national and Western hegemony while undermining class solidarity. In this context, the rent of whiteness can be seen as a compensatory strategy that seeks to “re-supply the wages of whiteness in the absence of wages” (Narayan, 2017 quoted in Schmid and Bird, 2024: 3), offering temporary economic relief in light of the ongoing devaluation of (white) labor. At the same time, it reinforces the racial identity of the ethical host, sustaining white innocence by obscuring both imperial histories and present-day complicities—thus binding devalued Europeans to the ideological project of Western liberalism (see also Danewid, 2017).

Still, the success of this project relied on overcoming various challenges, including what a member of local governance described in an interview as “the special relationship Greeks have with their property.” Beyond issues of attachment and familial inheritance, this vague suggestion also alludes to an undercurrent of racism deeply embedded in the Greek housing market. Historically, migrants had faced extreme difficulties securing private housing due to widespread suspicions and racial prejudices held by Greek landlords. In this climate, NGOs and municipal authorities stepped in to leverage the “racial regimes of property” (Ranganathan and Bonds, 2022; see also Bhandar, 2018), connecting small property owners’ interests with the need to house trapped racialized outsiders. As Bhagat (2020) notes, neoliberal and market-oriented forms of aid capture refugees’ struggle to survive vis-à-vis citizenship, housing and employment barriers that are built on racial lines.

Interviewees referred to the various incentives offered to private landlords as “baits,” underscoring the level of enticement needed to encourage participation. As a manager of the REACT program explained to me, “on top of giving rent at the market rate, we offer a security you can’t find elsewhere in the real estate world.” This included a contract with the Municipality of Thessaloniki, direct payment of bills, and property repairs, described as “a relief for owners” who would not have to engage with tenants directly. By acting as intermediaries, the aid industry and local authorities reassured hesitant landlords, ensuring the protection of their properties and the steady flow of funds. In doing so, they came to operate as race relations managers: that is, they mediated the concessionary and uneven incorporation of humanitarized migrants into national systems of segregation and exploitation, masking the racialized disposability of these same subjects once they cease to be of any economic and geopolitical value.

Beyond merely acting as intermediaries between landlords and tenants, municipalities and humanitarian organizations also served as negotiators between local societies and migrants at large. Their role was to maintain societal peace and urban order, particularly by preserving the existing national and racial composition of neighborhoods. Indicative of this was the frustration expressed by the mayor of Athens over the “disproportionate burden of hosting” Athens experienced. The mayor complained that Athens was “paying the bride” (a Greek expression meaning bearing the consequences) and called for a more equitable distribution of accommodation across Greece (Avgi Newsroom, 2017). A local governance representative echoed this sentiment in an interview, noting that in some areas, migrants comprised up to 35% of the population, prompting residents to feel that “their neighborhoods are taking a hit because of it.” In response, he noted, efforts were made to “push UNHCR to spread out the housing a bit more,” reflecting the ongoing tensions between the humanitarian management of migration and the racial politics of urban governance.

In addition to offering shelter, the UNHCR, in collaboration with assorted NGOs, provided cash card aid to both official camp occupants and ESTIA beneficiaries. All beneficiaries were allotted a standardized monthly stipend on their cards, ranging from 90 euros for lone adults in catered dwellings to 550 euros for a family unit of 7 in self-sustenance settings (UNHCR, 2019). These cards permitted withdrawals from Greek ATM facilities and enabled purchases in retail outlets. As propounded by the UNHCR, the ethos behind cash assistance programs orbits again around social cohesion—such initiatives were presented as both supporting the dignity of asylum seekers which is conceptualized only in terms of their financial agency as consumers, but also as invigorating the host community's economy via the influx of service and goods expenditure (UNHCR, 2021). This in turn was seen as diminishing the potential portrayal of refugees as a fiscal strain on the welfare system (Dunlop et al., 2018: xii). Embedded within this symbiotic framework, we discern another manifestation of the development-humanitarian model, connecting migrant acceptance with the ensuing economic dividends for host nations. At its core, Cash-Based Interventions (CBIs) were perceived as fortifying the “integration” of refugees into the local society through the monthly infusion of an estimated €6 million into the regional financial landscape (Dunlop et al., 2018: viii). In essence, integration is equated with the process of buying out the consent of devalued European peripheries for tolerating the presence of humanitarized migrants, taking inspiration from similar externalization projects in Turkey and North Africa.

The contradictions of captive humanitarianism and the counterrevolution of borders

The actuality of ESTIA sharply contrasted with its portrayal as a dignified path toward self-sufficiency. Given that apartments were leased to implementing organizations rather than directly to “beneficiaries,” asylum seekers were unable to liaise directly with landlords regarding maintenance issues. Rodent infestation, defective plumbing, and insufficient heating were often reported by asylum seekers in ESTIA housing but responses to complaints were slow, as NGOs and municipal authorities were overwhelmed by the scale of projects. ESTIA's strategy prioritized numerical accommodation targets and cost minimization over the specific needs of its residents, often favoring larger apartments that could house multiple occupants rather than tailoring solutions to individual households. The representative of the REACT program acknowledged that “the humanitarian aspirations of the program sometimes conflict with its operational demands.” She further revealed the pressure from UNHCR, stating, “UNHCR is driving us crazy with capacity utilization ….  We were told, ‘If you don’t find a way to merge families in each place, we will impose it.’” This pressure was pervasive in the refugee aid industry, where the drive to demonstrate “impact”—primarily quantified through efficiency and numerical reach—often took precedence over addressing the actual needs of those receiving aid. By conflating “social impact” with cost-effectiveness, organizations could frame their interventions as successful, enhancing their prospects for continued funding. ESTIA operated as yet another commodity within the aid project marketplace, increasingly defined by the “exchange of funding for project documentation” (Freeman and Schuller, 2020). The imperative to meet performance metrics and maintain visibility ultimately informed every stage of the aid projects’ process—reshaping design, implementation, and evaluation in favor of bureaucratic success over substantive outcomes.

In addition to the above challenges, residents under the ESTIA program had to vacate their accommodations immediately upon rejection of their asylum claim or within 6 months of its approval. However, even recognized refugees often struggled to transition to independent housing and faced the persistent threat of homelessness. Despite Greece's historical surplus of residential and other real estate properties, there is no social housing stock nor mechanisms for its production (Eteron, 2022). Many ESTIA beneficiaries, particularly those who had been eligible for ESTIA due to heightened vulnerabilities like medical conditions or disabilities, also lacked the requisite financial and social means for the transition to the private housing market. Notably, the Multipurpose Homeless Center of Athens—established by municipal authorities in collaboration with other organizations to address increased housing needs during the COVID-19 pandemic—required a passport or residency permit for admission, effectively excluding asylum seekers and recognized refugees without a passport. The ESTIA program operated in isolation, without integration into a broader network of social services that could facilitate access to other aspects of Greek society. This disconnect often resulted in a paradoxical situation where, in many respects, being an asylum seeker in Greece was preferable to obtaining refugee status. Recognized refugees frequently found themselves in the same precarious conditions as impoverished locals but without the accompanying racial privileges, language proficiency, native social ties, or, in some cases, equal formal rights. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, rather than paving the way to self-reliance, ESTIA was paving the way to social marginalization.

This resulted in a “growing imbalance between the influx of ESTIA beneficiaries and the number of socially integrated individuals” (Kourachanis, 2019: 106). By 2020, a quiet strategy of granting informal residence extensions to ESTIA beneficiaries began to wane, leading to increased eviction rates (Bierbach, 2020). The overcrowded conditions at hotspots and the escalating local discontent regarding their presence served to rationalize these evictions under the banner of “island decongestion” and the need to house vulnerable asylum seekers who were stuck in the islands. Recognized refugees became the scapegoats of inadequate social policies and insufficient housing structures that forced most migrants to live in hotspots and camps (Kourachanis, 2019). Those who were once considered eligible for accommodation precisely due to their vulnerability were suddenly considered self-sufficient individuals, ready to leap over language, mobility, and employability barriers as well as a labor market and a welfare state ravaged by austerity.

Despite the laudatory endorsements of ESTIA as a successful example of a development-led response to refugee displacement by various actors, the program was short lived. By October 2021, its mantle was assumed by the Greek Ministry for Migration and Asylum. The program, now redubbed ESTIA II, witnessed a stark budget reduction of 30% (InfoMigrants, 2022). In February 2022, the final blow came with the announcement of its complete termination. This decision resulted in the eviction of thousands of asylum seekers and recognized refugees (European Parliament, 2022), added to the numerous previous evictions from ESTIA accommodations and state-operated camps during the COVID-19 pandemic. These waves of evictions led to widespread homelessness and were linked to at least one fatality (MSF, 2020). The downscaling and eventual termination of the ESTIA program has been criticized as a backtracking to overt models of spatial segregation and social exclusion by human rights organizations and scholars (RSA, 2022). Several critics have attributed the shift to the 2019 electoral success of the conservative Nea Dimokratia party pivoting toward deterrence policies representative of a broader EU trend (e.g. Schauseil, 2022). Yet, the preceding analysis suggests that such an interpretation would be too narrow.

Analyzing the humanitarian-development nexus as a “fix” provides clarity against simplistic readings of immigration policies as mere products of governmental shifts or profit-driven industries. While national policies and predatory capital play a crucial role in managing surplus life—whether through incarceration, deterrence, or marketized processes of social reproduction—the global proliferation of refugee camps and detention centers cannot be reduced to individual decisions and motives of political or corporate actors. Instead, these actors operate within capitalism's inherent contradictions that mobilize diverse strategies and tactics to temporarily address its crisis tendencies. The oscillation between “humane” and “inhumane” models of life governance therefore underscores a deeper tension between capital's expanded reproduction via primitive accumulation and dispossession and the survival imperatives of large segments of the surplus population (Bhattacharya et al., 2022). Welfarist interventions are tolerated at times when they help prevent broader destabilization and political upheaval but are curtailed when they clash with aggressive capitalist expansion, particularly in counter-insurgent times. As Schmid and Bird (2024) suggest, “fixes” are inherently precarious and mutable, shaped by contestation and shifting political, cultural, and economic conditions, while simultaneously generating new problems and tensions that necessitate further regulation.

In the case of Greece, while the humanitarian-development fix played a pivotal role in provisionally resolving the most pressing local symptoms of the nested capitalist-cum-border crises, the re-routing of destitution proves insufficient and the inner contradictions of capitalism eventually resurface. Although international stakeholders introduced short-term incentives to encourage the settlement of refugees in Greece, the Greek state simultaneously encouraged refugee reliance on these international bodies, underpinning the temporariness of their displacement and thus minimizing the potential for actual “integration.” The resulting fragmentary services operated as a sticky material which, while not achieving settlement, decelerated onward movement and reinforced the marginal position of migrants within the Greek society. The perception of migrants as a strain on local communities resurfaced, a sentiment exacerbated by the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which also cast them in the light of potential health risks (Avgeri, 2025). In the meantime, Greece had started transitioning away from the Memorandum regulations, re-establishing itself as a touristic destination and a fertile ground for foreign investments. Refugee accommodation was no longer a worthy investment, even though it had been an absolutely crucial transitional stop-gap. As we read at Immigrant Invest “The real estate market is booming again” (Ruda, 2024)—only this time, fueled by a more desired category of foreigners.

In central Athens, Airbnb listings surged from 2000 in 2015 to 11,000 in 2020 (Balampanidis and Papatzani, 2022). Vacant dwellings entered the short-term rental market, offering greater profitability and flexibility. Over time, the involvement of large investors transformed short-term rentals from a small-scale entrepreneurial activity by individual landlords into a large-scale, strategically managed real estate operation. In the first half of 2024, foreign direct investment inflows into Greece reached €2.1 billion, with 54.2%—equivalent to €1.14 billion—allocated to real estate purchases, particularly residential properties (FDI Insider, 2024). This surge was largely driven by property acquisitions under Greece's Golden Visa program, which grants residency rights and visa-free access to the Schengen Area in exchange for real estate investments of at least €250,000. These developments have triggered significant sociospatial transformations, particularly in central Athenian neighborhoods where ESTIA apartments once operated. The introduction of new land uses and commercial activities tailored to wealthier short-term residents has reshaped urban centers, which are now experiencing a dramatic rise in tourist inflows and gentrification. Athens has evolved from a 1-day summer stopover into a year-round city-break destination, with international tourist arrivals increasing from 2.5 million in 2012 to 5.7 million in the first 10 months of 2019 (Ekathimerini, 2019). These changes have not only legitimized the displacement of asylum seekers but have also contributed to rising long-term rental prices, leading to the uneven yet parallel displacement of working-class locals.

Alongside asylum seeker evictions, illegal pushbacks, shipwrecks, and the overarching securitization of migration, acute labor shortages—exacerbated by COVID-19 regulations, particularly affecting seasonal agricultural workers, and the revival of industries such as tourism—have significantly increased the demand for labor in certain sectors. In response, measures were implemented, including a regularization program aimed at granting 3-year residency permits to approximately 30,000 undocumented workers and the advancement of bilateral agreements with various countries, such as Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam to facilitate the legal migration of about 40,000 workers (Papantoniou, 2024). Simultaneously, asylum seekers dispersed in refugee camps across Greece are increasingly being informally employed in nearby farms, logistics centers, and the hospitality sector, a process that Schmid and Bird (2024) call “workerization.” While the illegalization of migrant workers has historically produced a cheap and precarious labor force through the disciplinary functions of omnipresent detainability and deportability (De Genova, 2002), the “workerization” of humanitarianized migrants introduces another dimension to the state-capital allyship on migration management. Here, the state's provision of bare minimum housing and humanitarian aid effectively subsidizes the rate of exploitation by literally devaluing the labor power of these workers. This development highlights a distinct yet complementary dimension to the widely discussed concept of “precarious labor” as it relates to migrant work in Global North labor markets. It also points to emergent articulations of social reproduction and capital accumulation that warrant further exploration.

Rethinking social reproduction, racial capitalism, and the governance of surplus life

As this article has attempted to illustrate, the creation of an accommodation industry from scratch in Greece was an emergency-based containment strategy which utilized the social reproductive needs of people on the move to curb their unruly mobility. Relief operations after the closure of the Balkan route shifted in the direction of a development approach to humanitarianism in order to compensate devalued Europeripheries racialized as white facing the prospect of becoming once again Europe's frontline immigration-detention camp. The temporal conjunction between the economic backlash in Greece and the need to keep both out and alive a large number of racially subordinate populations opened up novel spaces of financial and real-estate market experimentation. European and international agencies intervened to set a new paradigm of transactional relations between locals and migrants, which differ significantly from traditional forms of profiteering through the exploitation of migrant living labor. Consequently, the rapidly augmenting humanitarian-development industry took on a dual role: it provided trapped migrants with the bare essentials for survival in exchange for curbing their aspiration to relocate, while also moderating local discontent by enabling locals to profit from their sustenance.

This crucial link between the social reproduction of racialized surplus life and the social reproduction of relative white privilege in service of the social reproduction of global racial capitalism underscores Katz’s (2001: 718) assertion that “social reproduction is vexed because, again almost by definition, it is focused on reproducing the very social relations and material forms that are so problematic.” As the preceding analysis shows, even among populations rendered surplus, such as unemployed persons and pensioners impacted by the Greek economic crisis and migrants who have been immobilized en route to Europe, humanitarian logics of governance in racial capitalism reproduce a hierarchy of life. Interventions that merely keep one population alive help to stabilize property rights and stimulate local economic activity that may keep the other afloat. In this way, humanitarian-development logics facilitate a sanitized perpetuation of racist and colonial expropriation, marked by the extraction of resources from the global poor to enhance white wealth. This “confiscation-cum-conscription-into-accumulation” (Fraser, 2018: 35) can sometimes manifest in overt forms, such as the outright stealing of migrant belongings as reported at various borders (Brito, 2023; Malichudis and Murenza, 2023), but it can also be indirect and mediated through narratives of inclusion, as in the case of ESTIA. Often concealed under the guise of “make-live interventions,” it incorporates captive forms of social reproduction into value-expanding and crisis-management mechanisms. It effectively confiscates racialized lifetimes, repackages them as commodities and offers them back as benevolent acts of white care. In this context, the refugee humanitarian-development nexus also manifests as the international welfare state of disaster capitalism (Avgeri, 2024). Future research should thus further explore humanitarian spaces as paradigmatic sites for examining the intersection of racial capitalism and social reproduction as delineated by the “relationship between the processes of producing life and those of producing value” (Ferguson, 2017).

Research on humanitarian-development interventions also affords an entrée to develop an engagement with the concept of social reproduction as a field of analysis complementary to biopolitics. While both biopolitics and social reproduction concern processes of making and remaking of life, with a few exceptions (e.g. Boyce, 2021; Rigo, 2023; Tazzioli, 2022; Vishmidt and Sutherland, 2020), they have rarely been considered together. Reading biopolitics through a social reproduction lens orients us toward questions that are political-economic in character and enables accounting for the role of race that has been somewhat overlooked in analyses of humanitarianism as a biopolitical technology. Simultaneously, considering social reproduction in the context of biopolitical management of surplus populations provides an opportunity to enrich the concept of social reproduction itself; firstly, by showing the connection between the sustenance of life and the management of mobility, and by extension, the link between social reproduction and matters of governance; secondly, by broadening the ideal-type subject within social reproduction theories. Whereas social reproduction traditionally focuses on the making and remaking of the worker on an everyday and generational basis, turning our gaze toward the social reproduction of populations that have been rendered superfluous to the immediate demands of capital as labor, necessitates a shift to the more expansive reproduction of life under racial capitalism. Without forgetting that relative surplus populations play a central role in reproducing life—essentially carrying out the “global housework of capitalism” (Mezzadri, 2022: 1231)—this expansion allows us to explore strategies of accumulation and political-economic intervention that follow pathways distinct from the accumulation of surplus value at the site of production and extend beyond the realm of unpaid, feminized labor at the site of reproduction. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding of how life is sustained, governed, and integrated into the circuits of global capital. More importantly, it brings to the fore the struggles of surplus populations not only to secure their social reproduction but also to reclaim it from biopolitical governance, which inherently gestures toward a horizon beyond racial capitalism.