Paper Short Abstract:

This paper analyses disappearances and border deaths of refugees and migrants as inherently an exceptional phenomenon. I argue that only by insisting on this exceptionality we can seek to bring questions of accountability to the fore. This does not, however, preclude paying attention to their agency

Paper Abstract:

Recent attempts to normalise or, rather, de-exceptionalise cross-border human mobility has been an attempt to shift focus from nation-state-centred viewpoints to the agency of refugees and migrants themselves. While this shift has understandable and recommendable analytical and moral grounds, the problem often persists that there is also something exceptional about the many migratory trajectories which take place in the context of enforced clandestinity and illegalisation, on dangerous routes, and under the threat of violence. There is, thus, a tension between two analytical points of departure: on the one hand, refugee and migrant agency and action and, on the other hand, state and intra-state action.

This paper is based on research into refugee and migrant disappearances at Greek-Turkish borderlands. I analyse refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths as a phenomenon distinct from other kinds of disappearances from the ‘ordinary missing’ to organised crime and warfare to enforced disappearances of political dissidents under authoritarian regimes. I argue that refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths are set apart by the very conditions in which they happen: anti-migration policies, life-threatening crossings, border violence, lack of access to medical care or recourse to law, and undocumentedness. By insisting on their exceptionality, we can address such disappearances and border deaths with the seriousness they deserve and bring questions of accountability to the fore, give name to what is taking away thousands and thousands of lives every year. This does not mean abandoning refugees and migrants’ agency but, instead, ‘seeing the state’ with them.