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As conflict and climate chaos deepen, a new wave of human displacement approaches Europe. Greece once again stands at the threshold, where humanitarian duty, geopolitical strategy, and shared European responsibility collide

Analysis | by
Marios Kaleas
Marios Kaleas
Two women pictured in Mosul, Iraq. Still from the film “Human Flow” directed by Ai Weiwei
Amazon Studios
Two women pictured in Mosul, Iraq. Still from the film “Human Flow” directed by Ai Weiwei
Home » Storm on the horizon: Greece and Europe’s coming displacement crisis

Storm on the horizon: Greece and Europe’s coming displacement crisis

As disaster and war swept across Gaza, the Sahel, Sudan, and Ukraine, the world watches—but Europe braces. For Greece, a border state, each geopolitical earthquake elsewhere is a warning of the impending humanitarian wave. The coincidence of war, displacement, and despair is no longer a future risk; it is an ongoing reality. And again, Greece, at the EU’s southeastern border, will be the first to receive the initial shock.

This is not an unfamiliar territory. From the Balkans wars of the 1990s to the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, Greece has always been both gateway and gatekeeper to Europe. Greece has stood for decades on the fault line between local turmoil and European security. Its reception capacity and social fabric have often been stretched far beyond capacity—and the warning signs are flashing red once more. As asylum systems are tested, and political will in Brussels falters, we must ask ourselves: is Greece ready for what is coming its way—and is Europe ready to assist?

This article examines how today’s interconnected global crises will produce new waves of displacement—and why Greece, yet again, finds itself in the path of history. Drawing on the current geopolitics and past migration patterns, it argues that the EU must move quickly to prop up Greece’s preparedness and distribute responsibility more equally. The next refugee wave is coming. Whether we receive it with crisis or coordination depends on our political will.

The storm raging around the world

Conflicts today spread across multiple continents, each with their own sophisticated, fatal logic—and each with the capacity to cause displacement on a vast scale. While each different in cause and context, these crises share one common element: people on the move, running from unsafety by whichever route is available, often to Europe as a final destination.

At the time of writing this article, a new spark has been lit in the vast powder keg of the Middle East withIsrael’s “surgical” intervention against Iran’s nuclear program facilities and the Islamic regime’s response by launching missiles at Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Whether this is yet another isolated episode in the long-running series of conflicts between these two sworn enemies or the cause of a generalized conflict that will drag the rest of the states in the region with or without the intervention of the European or transatlantic factor is still premature and uncertain to judge. However, it is clear that in such a case (second scenario) the size of the parties involved in terms of the type of arsenal they possess is frightening, creating strong concerns about what could theoretically cause a wider flare-up in terms of casualties and displaced people who will attempt to find shelter escaping the crossfire.

However, because the development of this particular conflict is a product of speculation and theories based on a series of uncertain geopolitical factors, I will limit myself only to those parts of the planet where there is a lasting situation with established ramifications regarding the displacement of people that allow me, based on the present data, to predict possible consequences in relation to the fluctuation of illegal arrivals in Greece.

In Gaza, for example, the human crisis has turned into disaster. Ongoing Israeli military activity since the October 2023 escalation has leveled enormous areas of civilian infrastructure, internally displacing over 1.7 million Palestinians—nearly 75% of the population [UN OCHA, 2024]. The strip is widespreadly short of food, medicine, and clean water, while the health system is on the verge of collapse. With Egypt closely patrolling the Rafah border and Israel restricting exit routes, few Palestinians can imagine any genuine escape. Desperation growing, there is a rising concern among European agencies that secondary movement—through North Africa and onto the Mediterranean—may evolve as a last resort for those seeking survival.

Sudan has plunged into one of the world’s most underreported humanitarian crises. Since April 2023, clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have devastated Khartoum and renewed ethnic cleansing in Darfur. According to UNHCR, over 8.5 million individuals have been displaced, of whom over 1.8 million have crossed borders to Chad, Egypt, and South Sudan [UNHCR, 2024]. Humanitarian corridors remain vastly restricted, and access to basic services is declining. With neighboring states under pressure, and northern routes into Libya and the Mediterranean increasingly busy, Sudanese displacement will probably reverberate into European migration flows over the next few months.

The Sahel is today a melting pot of conflict, climate pressure, and state collapse. Across Mali to Niger and Burkina Faso, the Sahel has experienced successive military coups that have eroded institutions of state. Jihadist militia groups—some of which are affiliated to al-Qaeda and ISIS—control extensive expanses of territory and assault civilians and humanitarian staff with impunity. In parallel, worsening droughts and resource shortages are displacing rural communities. More than 4 million individuals have been internally displaced in central Sahel, according to UN’s IOM estimates in early 2024 [IOM, 2024]. They are mostly using historical routes of smuggling through Libya, Algeria, and Tunisia—with the ultimate goal of reaching south Europe. This displacement is not just a security threat, but a long-term geopolitical problem for the EU.

Not at the forefront of recent headlines, though, Ukraine’s conflict has not ceased—it has only changed. Frontlines have solidified, but shelling and destruction take place every day in the east and south. Human rights abuses persist in occupied areas and infrastructure remains in ruins. While more than 5.9 million Ukrainian refugees remain outside of Ukraine—having primarily found temporary protection in EU countries—fresh Russian attacks or internal collapse may initiate another wave of displacement [UNHCR, 2024]. Aided to this is the fatigue and cost imposed on host nations that can lower the reception capacity and cause secondary movement—especially to less populated corridors in the periphery of the EU, like Greece.

Greece’s historical burden

Greece has long been the epicenter of regional instability, not just through geography, but as a physical and symbolic gateway into the European Union. During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the country received hundreds of thousands of refugees and economic migrants fleeing civil strife in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Albania. Although exact numbers are hard to categorize due to mixed movements, it’s estimated that over 500,000 Albanians alone entered Greece in the 1990s, many of whom remained permanently there [Triandafyllidou & Maroukis, 2012]. This flow occurred during a period of economic transition in Greece, with idle asylum infrastructure lying around—making integration and status determination difficult, if not ad hoc.

In the early 2000s, Iraqis fleeing the anarchy that followed American invasion found Greece as a transit and destination country, followed by Afghans and Syrians fleeing the international “War on Terror” and the subsequent avalanche of instability that followed the Arab Spring. While flows were initially contained, the 2015 refugee crisis marked a turning point in history. It began with the Syrian conflict but also drew people from Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, and more than 1 million people made it to Greece in a few months’ time—the vast majority by dangerous sea routes from Türkiye to Aegean islands [UNHCR, 2016]. Lesvos, Samos, and Chios of the Greek islands quickly became overwhelmed, with such makeshift camps as Moria becoming worldwide symbols of European failure in managing migrants.

The 2016 EU–Türkiye Joint Statement, whose basic aim was to deter crossings in exchange for financial support and resettlement quotas, did reduce arrivals. But while the headline numbers dropped, structural weaknesses in Greece’s asylum and reception apparatus were not addressed. Additionally, the economic crisis of the 2010s and the COVID-19 pandemic left institutions in Greece politically stretched and underfunded. Tolerance at the government level, which was once high in the interest of humanitarian necessity, has decreased in most communities, especially on the islands. All of which harks to a dire reality: Greece remains highly vulnerable to a potential new wave of displacement in the years to come. Absent broader systemic reform and substantive burden-sharing from the EU, the country could once more be pushed towards another full-blown humanitarian crisis—one it is no longer able to contain itself.

Why the future looks even harder

What distinguishes the moment in time from the earlier waves of displacement is not merely the magnitude of world instability, but also the simultaneity and variety of the crises.

While the 2015 crisis was characterized by one specific territory—Syria and the region around it—Greece may soon face simultaneous arrivals from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe. These flows will get to include individuals with enormously disparate legal status, cultural identity, and protection needs. This puts enormous strain on frontline services, namely asylum processing and legal triage, which are already clogged up by normal business. Managing such a complex influx requires not just numbers and infrastructure, but sophisticated, context-sensitive capacity—something that no single EU member state can deliver alone.

Climate change, meanwhile, is acting as a force multiplier at every stage of displacement. In regions like the Sahel, East Africa, and South Asia, drought, flood, desertification, and collapsing agricultural systems already are forcing people to migrate for survival. Where political instability or conflict already exist, environmental stress makes displacement not only more likely, but also more permanent. According to the World Bank’s Groundswell Report, climate change can potentially displace over 200 million individuals by 2050, and the hotspots would be the Middle East and North Africa—both directly related to Mediterranean migration corridors [World Bank, 2021]. Greece, both a literal and figurative point of entry for the majority of these trends, will need to gear up for the era of “climate refugees”—not yet a fully defined term in international law.

A third complicating factor is Türkiye’s shifting geopolitical position, an ever-present wild card in EU migration policy. Türkiye presently hosts more than 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees and thousands of others from other nations, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and is the globe’s largest host country of refugees [UNHCR, 2024]. While the sea crossings have been reduced with the EU–Türkiye Statement of 2016, the political situation has been volatile. During times of diplomatic tension—say, in early 2020, when Türkiye invited migrants to pass into Greece temporarily at the borderland of Evros—migration flows have been used as a means. Under President Erdoğan’s precarious tightrope act between national populism and regional politics, the possibility of Türkiye easing its border control once again is there. If Ankara does open up the route again, Greece could once more face tens of thousands of people arriving in weeks’ time, in a state of maximum political tension and humanitarian risk. These cross-cutting issues—legal, environmental, geopolitical—ensure that the next wave of displacement will be harder to contain, harder to predict, and harder to manage. Absent a concerted, long-term effort on the part of the European Union, Greece will need to ride out the tempest alone.

Towards European responsibility

As Jean Monnet famously said, “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” That insight is sharply relevant today. Greece today needs not praise for being at the front lines but pre-emptive aid and measured solidarity. Extended crises have shown that feelings of sympathy do little to solidify front-line states unless supplemented by resources, foresight, and a sense of shared responsibility. This includes reinforcing Greece’s reception and asylum systems with sustained EU funds and staff, investing in efficient and dignified corresponding services, and making channels of predictable relocation so that no single country should bear the burden alone. Temporary crisis management will no longer suffice; systemic resilience must be a policy priority, unlike the past when according to the European Court of Auditors, the EU resettlement and relocation policies were “limited in their effectiveness” due to the lack of political will and proper legal implementation [ECA, 2019].

But real responsibility doesn’t begin at the border—it begins upstream with consistent investment in the places people come from. The EU must make a stronger effort to address the root causes of displacement: war, economic deterioration, environmental degradation, and political repression. This requires more than diplomatic response—it requires serious commitments to ending conflict, while developing a solid network of developmental aid, and climate resilience, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. According to the OECD, a mere 10% of EU development aid is targeted specifically at fragility and forced displacement, despite being one of the main causes of migration towards Europe [OECD, 2020]. Without investments under such frameworks, Europe will remain caught in crisis response and not sustainable management.

At the same time, order and security are not incompatible. A functioning migration system must include strong and compassionate border security. This means strengthening Frontex and national coast guards to discourage illegal arrivals—while adhering to international standards and the right to claim asylum under the 1951 Refugee Convention and EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Another of the pillars being neglected is the returns system, still disintegrated and not functioning well across the EU. Given that, as the European Commission itself has acknowledged, in 2022 fewer than 21% of third-country nationals who were issued a notice to leave the EU were actually removed from their countries of origin [Eurostat, 2023], this deficiency creates illegality and undermines the credibility of regular channels. To address this, the EU must enhance bilateral readmission agreements, enhance the use of readmission clauses in trade agreements, and ensure returns are safe, dignified, and human rights-based [ERRIN, 2023].

At the same time, uptake of “return hubs”—centralized EU-financed facilities in bordering states or third countries—has been proposed by several think tanks and politicians. These hubs would serve as processing and staging areas for people with final negative asylum decisions, offering services, legal aid, and coordination with Agencies for voluntary return or reintegration. While politically sensitive, policy briefs by Migration Policy Institute and European Stability Initiative argue that such hubs, openly governed and humanely managed, would bring order without transgressing rights [MPI Europe, 2021] [ESI, 2020].

The EU’s external migration policy aspect—criticized for years as containment-oriented at the cost of cooperation—needs to be transformed. Long-term mobility arrangements, visa liberalization policies, and investment in regular migration channels can be effective in fostering trust and reducing illegal flows. As the European Parliament has pointed out, overly securitized approaches risk backfiring, undermining diplomatic ties and failing to address the drivers of movement [EP Study, 2022]. Ultimately, this is not only a humanitarian imperative—it is a political one. To not control migration fairly will deepen polarizations in the EU, embolden anti-democratic and xenophobic forces, and further undermine confidence among the public. If Europe just keeps contracting out responsibility and lets nations like Greece take the hit, it will not only be abandoning its values—it will be undercutting its own unity.

Be prepared now or pay later

History is replete with lessons that revolutions and wars, wherever they begin, never care about frontiers. The ongoing wars in Gaza, Khartoum, Kiev, and Timbuktu are tragedies for their immediate perpetrators and victims, but for Europe as well, a warning or an omen. Greece has again been at the intersection of geography and geopolitics. Its shores will most likely be the first to witness the next chapter of forced migration into Europe. Whether the chapter comes in another crisis or a moment of coordinated, decent response is something that will be decided now. Because the disarray abroad never remains abroad. And the waves are already rising.


Disclaimer

This article reflects the personal views of the writer and in no way expresses the official policy and administrative practices of the Hellenic State, Greek Authorities and EUAA.


Bibliography/Sources Cited

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Marios Kaleas is General Director of the Greek Asylum Service and Deputy Chair of the Management Board of the European Agency for Asylum (EUAA).