ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the bureaucratic conflation between the NGO sector and the police authorities within the Greek asylum procedure. I explore how the assumed line between the NGO and the state, NGO workers and police, was crucial to how advocates who positioned themselves outside the state defined their work and their associated professional and ethical commitments. Against the overriding ethos of policing in Greece as violent and even lawless, I then examine the powerful influence of encounters with police officers who advocates deemed “good.” I suggest that such “good” police officers signal moves toward the pastoralization (Foucault 1982) of policing power and the transposition of accompanying notions of a particular dominant vision of Northern “European” modernity.
