Bye bye Moria: escape commons vs policies of military campization

Over the period from 2013 to 2020, the Moria camp in the island of Lesvos became synonymous with the exclusionary border control policies of the Greek state and the European Union. During the summer of 2020, most Covid-19 travel restrictions were lifted and Lesvos opened to tourists, while the Moria camp remained in lockdown. On the night of 8 September, the camp was set on fire and its residents escaped in a nearby area where they self-organized a makeshift settlement. The escape was followed by days of riots with police forces, and ended with the violent enclosure of the people in a new camp. The paper builds on critical migration scholarship and proposes the concepts of escape commons and military campization in order to conceptualize the commoning practices in moments of escape and the way they are susceptible to state migration policies which increasingly take the form of military management.