ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the emergence of the good police officer in the talk of advocates working in the field of asylum in Greece, and asks what several figure signifies regarding the relationship between governance, professional ethics, and the state. Pastoral forces frequently remain symbolically restricted to areas outside the state, while the police are often characterized as arbiters of lawlessness in the governance of the city, with a monopoly on the use of violence that is, in many ways, assumed to be illegitimate. Police power indeed seems to have largely avoided pastoralization in Athenian urban space, becoming closely tied to topographies of the city, marking certain areas as particularly vulnerable to violent police interventions. Proximity between the Non Government Organization, with its explicitly protective mandate and the police, so often associated with violence, made for a troublesome and yet productive confusion in the work of asylum advocacy.