The Unsettlement of the Greek Property Regime and the Emergence of Vigilant Violence in Thessaloniki’s West End

Sammanfattning: The thesis inquires into the entanglement between the unsettlement of the Greek model of social reproduction that heavily relies on self-regulated property ownership and the emergence of vigilant violence on behalf of local property owners against undocumented migrants in the relegated neighborhood of Ksiladika in Thessaloniki’s West End. It probes the extent to which incidents of vigilant violence can be used as indicators of the structural deficiencies in the Greek housing system and property paradigm. 
 First, the thesis points to the distinct historic trajectory of the Greek housing system and property regime that is carved by a strategy of minimal involvement of state authority since the end of the Greek Civil War (1949). In contrast to the (North) European paradigm, the Greek model of social reproduction is marked by a normalized laissez-faire attitude in the domain of housing and by the hypertrophy of the family institution that emerged as a substitute system of social protection vis- a-vis the atrophy of administration. The thesis then points to a political discourse investing in the figure of the householder, sketched as the ‘normal’ Greek subject par excellence, within which self- government connects up with the imperatives of good government, in times when access to housing has become scarce and social insecurity widespread. 
 I focus my study on the neighborhood of Ksiladika in Thessaloniki, where as of late a vigilant campaign of evictions of undocumented migrant squatters on behalf of local property holders was launched. I suggest that this campaign of vigilance is not an act of ‘pure racism’ but is linked with the unsettlement of the Greek model of social reproduction, the scarcity of outright homeownership as a resource of symbolic and material value and the particularity of Ksiladika, that is at once a stigmatized neighborhood and a land of promise. 
 I rely on data collected through micro-ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with local property holders in Ksiladika. I use the conceptual tools of social space, field of power and symbolic power found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, as heuristic tools to identify the significance of property and home ownership in shaping perceptions of local property holders towards their neighborhood and in defining their actions. I present my empirical findings clarifying the diversity of choices, expectations and actions of different actors, active in this propertied field of power in the studied area. 
 The thesis draws to an end by using the findings from Ksiladika to contribute to a discussion that revolves around Wacquant’s three basic theses on the emergence of advanced urban marginality as an effect of the neoliberal state crafting on a global scale. First, I argue that in regions where the social state was inexistent, the implementation of neoliberal policies did not happen in a way identical to what can be observed in the North and do not entail a reengineering of the state. Then I suggest that Wacquant's schematization of a Janus-like Centaur state that performs liberalism for those at the top of the social scale and punitive paternalism for those at the social bottom immured in precarity does not hold, due to the expanding zone of precarity. Eventually, I suggest that neoliberal governing is not attained merely by the penal apparatus of the neoliberal Leviathan, but via a governing through subjects who internalize the postulates of the entrepreneurial ideology mediated through homeownership in times when the resource is scarce.