Psychosocial Support and the Oriental Other: A Postcolonial (His)Story

Psychosocial Support and the Oriental Other: A Postcolonial (His)Story

Fortress Europe likes to present itself as innocent, ethical, and compassionate. But behind this mask lies a history of violence, empire, and forced displacement; histories that are never confronted, only repackaged.

Ida Danewid, in White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History, shows how loss, grief, and vulnerability have been taken up in contemporary thought. She critiques authors like Judith Butler and Stephen White, who propose grief as a basis for commonality and cosmopolitan ethics, demonstrating how such ethical orientations depoliticise violence by severing it from colonial histories. By turning responsibility, guilt, and restitution into matters of empathy and generosity, Europe can appear "moral" and "good," while avoiding real accountability for its colonial past and leaving both historical and ongoing complicities untouched - like the current genocide in Palestine.

This becomes even clearer when psychology, psychosocial support, and humanitarian aid enter the scene. These systems don't respond to suffering; they actively shield borders and control mechanisms, making them appear ethical, neutral, and benevolent. Care is detached from its imperial context yet simultaneously used to enforce European governance by mobilising, as will be discussed below, the institutional care-governance of psychosocial support. In other words, the "innocent" face of psychology and humanitarian aid continues the logic of empire: it keeps the fortress strong, protects borders, and channels violence into individual vulnerability, trauma, and therapeutic need. The messy histories of empire vanish behind forms, reports, assessments, and interventions.

Interviews with psychologists, social workers, educators, interpreters, and Child Protection Officers in Greek refugee camps, including the hotspot of Moria in Lesvos, show below how deeply this plays out in practice. Refugees' experiences are translated into legal, medical, and psychological records that fit European templates of bureaucracy, recognition, and progress. As Walter Benjamin warned, official histories often serve the winners, erasing the suffering of those who paid the price of "progress." Psychology and psychosocial support thus become tools of governance, a contemporary form of warfare that quietly sustain borders, surveillance, and control, all while hiding behind a mask of care and moral authority.

Connecting stories by disconnecting histories: The role of story

Across interviews with psychologists, social workers, educators, interpreters, and Child Protection Officers, story, as in "having a case," emerged as a central and ambivalent element of psychosocial support. Aid workers consistently described storytelling as necessary to build a case for asylum procedures, vulnerability assessments, referrals, and access to almost every form of support. At the same time, stories were never simply told. They were shaped, edited, translated, and extracted within institutional frameworks that demanded coherence,

credibility, and usefulness. Although "having a case" may sound legitimate for asylum procedures, it is instead a mechanism of control and governance that legitimises borders, bordering procedures, and a psychic apparatus operating around warfare.

Stories are filtered through institutional priorities, with psychology playing a central role in transforming intimate lived and felt experiences into evidence that mediates access to protection, care, and recognition. As one social worker explained, their role is to "build a better image of the case," integrating "their psychological, legal, medical aspects altogether ...". Similarly, a psychologist described how they need to write "headlines" summarising what refugees have gone through before arriving, noting locations, journeys, and experiences. In this process, psychological and psychosocial assessment does the work of shaping, legitimising, and translating personal experience into forms that institutions can recognise and act upon. Refugees must perform their suffering in ways that meet institutional expectations, producing a "composite truth" in which legal, medical, and psychological elements are intertwined. The story becomes a steppingstone in the recognition of a case, gluing together documents and justifying fragments of refugees' histories while leaving broader structures of empire, capital, and violence largely untacked and invisible.

Derek Hook highlights how psychological practices are deeply entangled with political power. He proposes a "psychopolitics" in which the psychological is not only situated within the political, but the political is also approached through the psychological. Psychology, then, is not neutral care but a site where processes of legitimisation, recognition, and exclusion are organised. The right to seek refuge, ostensibly universal, becomes conditional upon narrative legibility. As an interpreter in a Safe Zone noted, " ... you exist when there is a document which recognises you ...". Existence itself is rendered documentary. To "have a case" is to possess a story that circulates within legal and bureaucratic infrastructures. Access to asylum, housing, healthcare, or other forms of support depends on producing stories that are coherent, credible, and legible. Psychological discourse mediates the building of a case, translating lived experience into evidence that produces a political form of existence.

Critical scholarship on migrants' bio-credibility shows how suffering becomes a condition of care, with credibility operating as a casualty of humanitarian governance. Extending this critique to the psyche highlights how refugee subjectivities are organised across legal, medical, and psychological regimes. While this stratification may increase chances of asylum, it also shapes refugee histories into forms that resonate with European institutional expectations, often displacing their political content and erasing histories of colonialism, racialised capitalism, and bordering regimes that operate through policing and surveillance.

Benjamin's distinction between history and remembrance sharpens this tension. History, aligned with progress and victory, neutralises struggle, whereas remembrance interrupts linear time. As he writes, "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it

'the way it really was'. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger". Within asylum and humanitarian settings, however, stories rarely circulate in ways that allow such interruption.

In Moria, Lesvos, refugees often approached psychologists to obtain documents that might assist their asylum process. One psychologist explained, " ... many times, their motivation may be to come to us because they know that they would also benefit by taking a paper which will help them in the asylum service ...". Another added, " ... and for that paper I need to write some headlines, what you have gone through before you come here, where have you been ... before Turkey, before ...". Refugees' stories are organised as facts in memory to mobilise "headlines" that document and support a case. Rather than expressions of lived experience or moments of rupture, stories operate as administrative technologies through which experience is extracted, standardised, and rendered legible to bureaucratic decision-making processes that sustain bordering practices.

This standardisation positions storytelling as a technology of normalisation. Fieldwork in mainland Greece illustrated this governing function of storytelling. Following the arrival of hundreds of refugees, a social worker described the emotional saturation produced by reading repeated accounts of violence: "to sit and read the story of someone, with details how they were tortured, how many times, where... it was too much, as it was back-to-back for two weeks...". Stories became tools of triage, determining vulnerability, prioritisation, and access to services. Eligibility for housing depended on criteria such as "if someone is a single parent... a victim of torture or rapes... or have some diagnosis." Stories thus function not only as documentation but as instruments that rank lives according to degrees of vulnerability, governing access to care and protection.

As one psychologist observed, it enabled refugees to "express their experience outwardly" and "normalise it according to the rest of the population." Yet this expression is never neutral: it requires translating experience into dominant psychological frameworks, aligning memory with established narratives of victimhood. Stories are stabilised within institutional circuits, rendering them legible within regimes of humanitarian reason and bordering. In doing so, the past is mobilised to secure papers and support, while simultaneously reproducing Europe's compassionate self-image.

Refugee narratives are folded into a (his)story of intervention, echoing Stuart Hall's assertion, "They are here because you were there," while raising the feminist question of whose story is being told. Storytelling within psychosocial support performs a double function: it enables survival and access to care while simultaneously producing a mechanism of control, governance, and psychic warfare of border making. Refugees' experiences are disciplined, rendering the past legible to bureaucracies while obscuring the political, social, and colonial histories that created displacement. Ultimately, the very act of telling your story to build a case is already problematic: it legitimises borders and bordering procedures. Psychology plays a central part in this process, shaping and documenting experience in ways that make suffering governable, rankable, and administratively legible.