Search

With the closure of the border with then-Macedonia in early 2016, it was foreseeable that Greece would become the “last station” for a large number of refugees. Flanked by the agreement between Turkey and the European Union of March 2016, Greece underwent a profound transformation from a transit country to a recipient country. Through a new regulation, the Emergency Support Instrument, initially activated by the European Commission 2016–2019, international humanitarian aid operations were supported for the first time in the EU. The article analyzes the resulting frictions on the basis of empirical field research and a broad literature review. While frictions similar to those in other non-European humanitarian operations exist, specific peculiarities due to the operation taking place in an austerity-ridden member state of the EU must also be noted.

The paper presents contributions to the widespread resilience paradigm from a social science perspective. Certain aspects of social systems, especially their symbolic dimension of meaning, need to be taken into account in the endeavor to research coupled social–ecological systems. Due to the symbolic dimension, disasters are defined as the failure of future expectations, and social resilience is defined as the social system property of avoiding or withstanding disasters. In relation to this, three capacities of social systems (adaptive, coping, and participative) that constitute resilience are presented. The adaptive capacity is the property of a system in which structures are modified to prevent future disasters, whereas the coping capacity is the system’s property of coping with calamitous processes that occurred in the past. The participative capacity is a measure of the system’s ability to change its own structures with regard to interventions by other systems, decreasing the system’s resilience. The concept of resilience provides important epistemological and political insights and can help overcome an orientation tied together with the concept of vulnerability that blocks social capacities for the mitigation of disasters.