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Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 296 pp. Although affect has recently aroused anthropological interest, it still remains ethnographically underexplored. [...]

This article explores postsocialist change in a non-postsocialist context. It is concerned with discourses on sex and cultural change as articulated by members of the Turkish minority group living in the northern Greek town of Komotini, in an area of northern Greece where, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, immigration from eastern Europe has risen noticeably. The impact of this migration is explored with reference to capkinlik and kilibiklik, two concepts guiding notions of masculine failure. By analyzing the relations of these to other concepts used to articulate social change (e.g., 'tradition' and 'modernity'), the article exemplifies how the effects of political change on the global level can be subsumed under localized power structures. The article argues that the inconsistencies between informants' physical encounters with eastern European immigrants and their discourses on 'Russian women' show that it is their marginal location within local Greek society that is central to their identity conceptualizations. This, in turn, leads to the argument that such discourses can shed considerable light on our understanding of internal and external relations with reference to particular politicized groups, primarily because they offer an understanding of power relations, that foregrounds not one domain of difference over another, but the interplay of gender, ethnic, and economic differentiations. Key Words: sex economy, Greece minorities, exploitation, gender discourse

This article shows how Greek government policies have affected group relations within the minority in western Thrace and how identification within the minority has changed over the last five decades, particularly as regards the concept of Pomak-ness. According to the official Greek terminology, the minority is 'a (singular) Muslim minority made up of Gypsies, Pomaks and people of Turkish origin', while official Turkish rhetoric maintains that the minority (again in the singular) is wholly Turkish. As will be shown in the article, most of the minority members living in the Rhodoppe area of Thrace prefer to classify themselves as Turkish, although minority urbanites insist on differentiating themselves from 'others' in a number of ways, including the use of such labels as 'Pomak' and 'Gypsy'. I here try to examine the content of the former, in order to illuminate the content of 'Turkish urban Komotinian' identity. Keywords: Pomaks; Greek minority policy; education; border surveillance; politics of identity.

Recognition rates measure how far states afford rights to refugees. Recent developments of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) have supplemented this measure with factors such as population and wealth. Concurrently, laws have developed nationally and Europe-wide regulating 'complementary protection' for those not qualifying as 'refugees' under the 1951 Convention. These two parallel developments in migration governmentality, I argue, are part of a process that increasingly complicates the field of knowledge around refugeehood, raising the level of expertise needed to access protection. This article focuses on the use of complementary protection in Europe since 1999 to explore (i) the legal process of proliferation of protection categories and (ii) the political process of calculating rates. The paper employs a methodological mix of ethnographic observation and critical readings of law and statistics to map various ways of counting recognition rates. This highlights the importance of statistics in feeding a narrative of liberal, Western, European society that protects refugees. Yet it is evident that both protection and its denial are constitutive of a CEAS governmentality that is best described as 'ordered fragmentation'. One of its basic assumptions is the denial of refugee agency, rendering states the subjects of the protection regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KENNA, MARGARET E. The social organisation of exile: Greek political detainees in the 1930s. x, 123 pp., plates, bibliogr. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2001. £35.00 (cloth) A black-and-white photograph of [...]