The “Soft City” of EU Power Elites: Athens from Neoclassical Capital to “Oriental” Margin

Tyler, Imogen (2020). Stigma, The Machinery of Inequality. Zed Books, 368 pages.

“…She investigates the mechanisms by which stigma is produced, by whom, and for what purposes, in line with Parker and Aggleton's (2003) social and political emphasis on how stigma is used by individuals, communities and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality. This may reach the point of governmental "weaponizations of stigma" reproducing imperatives of financial capitalism (Scambler, 2018), especially in times of austerity (Leontidou, 2014(Leontidou, , 2021, or even of geopolitics, in the case of migration. During the global financial crisis since 2008, processes as diverse as welfare retrenchment, labour precarity, eviction, displacement, social cleansing, and gentrification were put in place (p. 19), and are now, 15 years later, amplified with anti-migrant politics and punitive citizenship regimes, the proliferation of internal borders and violent bordering practices (p. 19).…”

“…In the 2010s, not only people were stigmatized as lazy and corrupt, but the whole EU periphery was targeted, as it was sinking into debt: the so-called PIIGS (Leontidou 2014(Leontidou , 2021. The Orientalist narratives about Greeks in particular, and the pressures towards ''Grexit'', basically devalued a whole nation and reproduced uneven development.…”