Refugee Flight : performing transparency, claiming opacity at the Athens International Airport

Drawing on ethnographic research with Yemeni refugees in Greece, this article proposes to think about the airport, not just as a site of securitization and racialized surveillance, but also as a site of possibility and struggle. To do so, it foregrounds refugee flight- attempts by asylum seekers to reach European destinations by air using fraudulent documents. Using the lens of opacity, I sketch how migrants navigate the airport’s regime of visibility, by working with and against its expectations. As they pass through security cracks and fly, I argue, they do not only seize movement, but refuse the otherwise deadly terms of refugee journeys, and take advantage of infrastructure of privileged mobility that is not meant to be theirs.