On June 15, 2012, President Barack Obama stunned even the most optimistic of a generation of young immigrants with his words, “it makes no sense to expel talented young people who, for all intents and purposes, are Americans.” Just about this time, a near audible cacophony of “Si, Se Puede!”s echoed from east to west coast.

Much reaction to this announcement of a two-year reprieve of deportation proceedings for children of undocumented parents has–perhaps cynically–centered on the political strategizing behind the president’s decision. But the back story is about the DREAMers. The name derives from the proposed legislation, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which has been introduced in Congress for more than a decade, but never passed. How were these young activists able to move a campaign over a single issue (the right for those who were brought into the country without official papers as children to regularize their status) to become the linchpin of a larger debate, that of immigration reform, in a presidential election year?

When I ran across these activists while conducting research with immigrant women over the past several years, they were not yet on the radar of national media or politics, but were already taking dramatic actions on behalf of their cause: marching, picketing, petitioning, video-documenting their stories. If the late sociologist Charles Tilly were still with us, he would most certainly recognize strategies that he had documented across effective social movements. For example, such movements use credible displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. How much more worthy than the image of an activist in a graduation mortar board? Than petition signatures from hundreds of respected professors? Than endorsement by leaders of conservative religious denominations? Than echoes of our own American rhetoric: “dreaming”? And how much more commitment than hunger strikes and coming-out parties, at the risk of deportation? Across the past two years, these activists gradually became bolder, staging acts of civic disobedience and public events nationwide.

Immediately after the president’s announcement, their dream went global. As I was sitting in the offices of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants in Brussels, Belgium on June 27, staff leaders beamed over their Time magazine copy with the “We are Americans” cover story about the DREAMers–which they planned to frame. In the U.K., an activist announced to a House of Lords delegation, “We need our own DREAM Act,” sparking visible curiosity in the room: (“What is the DREAM Act?”). An estimated 120,000 young people in the U.K. face the same problem.

History was made once again in September of 2012, when DREAMer Benita Veliz, from San Antonio, addressed the Democratic National Convention in a short speech to introduce an Obama endorser, becoming the first undocumented immigrant ever to address a national political party convention. When Latinos voiced their preference in the polls for Barack Obama and the Democrats in November, the most cynical virtually accused the president of buying their votes with his announcement.

Although DREAMers celebrate the hurdle that they have now overcome, the battle for full rights continues. An estimated 1.8 million individuals are now eligible for “deferred action,” which means that, under several conditions, young people who arrived in the United States before age 16 and under age 31 are not targets for removal proceedings for 2 years. The DREAM Act still has yet to pass, and nothing in the current situation opens any legal doors to other demands of the DREAMers, including access to in-state tuition in colleges and universities in their home states. There is talk of incorporating the activist proposals into a comprehensive immigration reform platform currently being crafted by Congress.

According to The Immigration Policy Center, most beneficiaries of the DREAM Act would be Mexican, and my current state of North Carolina is among the top 10 states that will benefit—given this state’s large higher education sector combined with the rapidly growing foreign-born population settling here. This past week, North Carolina agreed to issue driver licenses and identification cards to those who qualify for deferred action under this reprieve.

That a group of individuals without voting rights or political representation, across disparate nationalities, could demonstrate the power of American-style civic engagement calls for reflection, given much hand-wringing over the question of whether native-born Americans have become disengaged. Here’s where DREAMers may have something to teach us. While critics charge that the undocumented flout our legal system and thus are unworthy of becoming Americans, these youth respond that they sample the proudest of our own civil rights movement traditions: civil disobedience of unjust laws. Perhaps these DREAMers can finally get the DREAM Act through our Congress. Perhaps they can persuade our journalists to drop the label “illegal” from their stories. And perhaps they can even teach us to be Americans again.

The economic crisis in Greece is heading towards yet another showdown today. The Greek electorate threatens to strike a serious blow against neoliberalism and its European offshoot. At the same time, these elections promise to unravel the Greek state’s monopoly on the structures of violence and fear.

Sociologist Charles Tilly drew a compelling analogy between the state as the place of organized means of violence, and racketeering. He defined the racketeer “as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction,” in order to gain control and consolidate power. In this regard, a state and its government differ little from racketeering, to the extent that the threats against which they protect their citizens are imaginary or are consequences of their own activities.

Considering the pain, the humiliation, and the social degradation that the economic and political policies of the Greek government have inflicted upon the country the past four years, Tilly’s analogy may offer us a useful tool to both describe and evaluate the current crisis and the regime of fear that the state has unleashed on the Greek public.

The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), which is now a democratic socialist party in name only, governed Greece for almost 30 years, moving steadily from Keynesian economic policies in the 1980s to rampant neoliberalism in the 1990s. New Democracy (ND), which had dominated the political scene until PASOK’s first electoral victory in 1981 and alternated in power with it ever since, professed its ideology to be “radical liberalism.” Today, after three decades of cronyism, unbridled corruption and economic scandals, the ideological convergence of the two parties is complete.

Despite its initial apprehension towards the European Union, membership in the organzation enabled PASOK to implement its policies and boost the Greek economy. With the help of substantial financial inflows from the European Economic Community, PASOK was able to redistribute wealth.

Despite the growing government deficits, the emphasis remained on sustaining employment and modernizing the welfare system. In the meantime, democratic socialism – enveloped in patronage and nepotism – evolved into a process for democratizing corruption. Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos’s infamously vulgar statement in 2010 – “We [the government and citizens] fooled away the money together” – alluded to government-bred tactics which for years secured positions for its electorate in an ever-expanding bureaucratic machine.

Under the weight of economic scandals, pressure from PASOK’s “modernizing wing”, and the Maastricht Treaty’s aim to bring about monetary convergence by 1998, the Greek government launched an extensive program liberalizing the financial and banking sector, slashing government subsidies and pensions, deregulating the labor market and privatizing more than 100 companies from 1994 to 1999.

Some of the most prominent of these businesses included: AGET-Hercules, the cement company that literally built Greece after World War II, the Hellenic shipyards, Piraiki-Patraiki, a textile industry that in the 1980s was the second-largest employer after the Greek public sector, and ETVA, the Hellenic Industrial Development Bank. New Democracy, which governed briefly between 1990 and 1993, effectively championed the same policies.

The implementation of neoliberal policies, increasingly executed by an emerging new breed of technocrat politicians, was often met with strong resistance by labor unions and powerful interest groups which for years had enjoyed the state’s protection. Economic scandals underscored the “restructuring” process. When AGET-Hercules was sold for a fraction of its value to a nearly bankrupt Italian industrial group, extreme violence erupted. The assassination of Michael Vranopoulos, a former chief of State Bank who had handled the sale, by the terrorist group November 17, highlighted the public’s discontent.

The largely tolerant attitudes of the Greek public towards November 17, which operated from 1975 until 2002 with an anti-American, anti-capitalist agenda – it was viewed almost as a modern Robin Hood – reflected Greeks’ increasing frustration with the political establishment. Most importantly, this predisposition reflected people’s inability to effectively react.

The Greek state has always had a tight grip on society, and Greek society has always had a love-hate relationship with the state. Strongly dependent on the state for employment in an ever-expanding public sector, which was tied up with unions that over the years had come under the control of the government, the Greek public often vented its dissatisfaction with riots, protests and strikes, largely orchestrated by the parties of the Left. But it was unable to fundamentally challenge a system that was excluding them from decision-making processes.

But Greece’s booming economy at the time – fuelled by the adoption of the euro, easy credit conditions, and substantial transfers from the EU – painted the picture of a seemingly prosperous society. In reality, a small elite was reaping vast profits from the government’s neoliberal policies, while the lower and middle classes paid the hefty price, as the massive Greek stock exchange scandal of 1999-2000 highlights.

A central role of the state is that of offering protection to its citizens. “Protection,” however, as Tilly suggests, echoes two contrasting tones: a comforting and an ominous one. It calls forth images of shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend, an insurance policy or a sturdy roof. It also evokes, however, the racket in which a local strong man, for instance, forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage – damage he himself threatens to deliver – or a neighborhood mobster who claims to be a brothel’s best guarantee of operation free of police interference.

The death spiral that the Greek economy entered in 2008 called for all the government protection that the public could use. Instead, the government signed up for the financial bailout packages imposed by the so-called “troika,” the European Committee, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund. The packages included a series of unprecedented austerity measures which brought the lower and middle classes to their knees, while leaving intact the privileges of the financial elites and their political aides.

As a result of the tremendous economic pressure, the government had started losing its tight grip on Greek society as far back as 2008. Massive protests triggered by the police killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, expressed young people’s increasing frustration with the prospect of a bleak future.

By the spring of 2011, a whole new movement had been galvanised. The “Indignant Citizens Movement,” an offshoot of the Spanish Indignados, occupied central Athens’ Syntagma Square for four months. Organized collectively and independent from any party or trade union affiliation, the movement was another indication that the government was governing without the consent of the people. Civil disobedience and organizations dedicated to collective action sprung up to deal with the pauperization unleashed by austerity.

The backlash has been a campaign of fear, which on occasion escalates into outright terror. Instilling fear in its clientele is the primary mechanism employed by any racketeer. The violent suppression of mass protests, the detention of undocumented immigrants, and the arrest and public display on the Greek police’s website of 12 prostitutes infected with HIV have had a single goal: to terrorize the Greek public and ultimately offer “protection” against the dissidents, anarchists, protesters, and immigrants. The rise of Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party, which won about seven per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections in May, was the direct result of these practices.

Fear is the sovereign’s predicament, as 17th-century political philosopher Hobbes has shown – not a natural emotion, but one cultivated through a system of moral education conducted by state institutions and their affiliates, most prominently, in our days, by the media. When these institutions lose legitimacy, their tactics may ultimately backfire, as the May elections showed. The rise of Syriza, a coalition of anti-austerity leftist parties ahead of today’s elections has triggered a new round of propaganda alluding to a communist takeover, loss of private property, alienation from the markets and the international community, and most importantly, to a financial Armageddon.

In defiance of this fear, an awakening of political consciousness is taking place in Greece’s squares, streets, and online social networks, not merely condemning the policies of austerity and social degradation but collectively working towards new types of political resistance. It is becoming clear that only the people of Greece can deliver and ultimately save themselves from the racketeering, criminal practices of their “protectors”.

This article was first published by Al Jazeera English network on June 15, 2012.