Introduction

Since 2015, the refugee crisis discourse has been widely used to describe the large- scale forced displacement of people, particularly from the Middle East, South East Asia and various African states, to Europe through Lesvos. Although there is no formal definition of the term ‘refugee crisis’, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the term refers to ‘the forced displacement of people crossing at least one recognised international border, creating extraordinary pressures on local resources and exceeding the coping mechanisms of the hosting state’ (SIPRI, 2017: 256).

However, from 2015 onwards, there have been numerous discourses around the term ‘crisis’ in relation to the forced displacement – political, media, academic and, more broadly, public. As a result, the ‘refugee crisis’ is alternatively labelled as a ‘migrant crisis’, ‘humanitarian crisis’, ‘crisis of reception’, ‘crisis of protection’, ‘crisis of the asylum system’, ‘crisis of Europe's borders’, ‘crisis of border control’, ‘crisis of the Schengen zone’ and ‘crisis of European values’ (De Genova and Tazzioli, 2016; Arsenijević et al, 2017; Migreurop, 2019). While all these terms could be accurate, the heart of the issue is that they note the failure of European states at EU, national and local levels to respond effectively to the increased arrivals of border crossers. At the same time, the proliferation of the crisis- discourses ‘have largely served to justify the necessity of new “emergency” policies and the deployment of new means of control’ (De Genova and Tazzioli, 2016: 8).

This chapter questions the mainstream discourses that represent the large- scale forced displacement as a ‘crisis’, that is, as an unforeseen, unpreventable, random event and an ‘accident’.