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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses EU bordering practices and techniques in Mediterranean migratory contexts. I argue that there is a distinct regimen of illegalisation and precarity at work which routinely inflicts a particular form of disappearability on people on the move as means of deterrence.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in the Mediterranean, I argue that death and/or disppearance, through drowning, hypothermia, exhaustion, deprivation of medical care, and accidents, to name but a few instances, has become an integral part of border enforcement at the European Union's southern border zones. To engage analytically with such an instantiation of border violence, media spectacles, and humanitarian impulses, I propose to utilise the notion of 'disappearability'.

I draw from Coutin's notion of 'spaces of nonexistence' (2000) and recent anthropological discussions of the dislocation of the state borders (e.g. Andersson 2014; Heller and Pezzani 2017), to explore 'disappearability' as distinct social condition of precarity. This is to make sense of the myriad of disappearances, unknown destinies, and unnamed bodies of migrants attempting to cross to Europe, or the danger of meeting such fate, in which the particularities of the various migratory contexts are always implicated. Vessels which are not sea-worthy, sanctions imposed on carrier companies, regimes of surveillance, interception, and pushbacks, threats of deportation and detention, passages through rough terrain or in unsafe vehicles, human trafficking, and the state of being undocumented all reflect, and contribute to, this disappearable state.

'Disappearability' is a produced condition of everyday existence, which does not necessarily lead to a disappearance but does, nevertheless, put racialised and illegalised migrants under a particular risk. Furthermore, the state of being disappearable is a social space that manifest and disappears; while not at the forefront at all times, it looms above and whispers: 'you are not welcome here'.