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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the concept of restitution in cases of border deaths. Analysing how families, authorities, and solidarity actors negotiate the meanings of bodies found at the border, I consider restitution an ongoing political process involving material, epistemic, and political dimensions.

Paper long abstract

This paper problematizes the concept of restitution in the context of border deaths and disappearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Morocco and Croatia, this article follows the traces of Yasser and Ahmed, two Moroccan men disappeared along the Balkan route, whose bodies were subsequently found along the border. Through these cases, I analyze how different actors—families, state authorities, and solidarity networks—negotiate meanings of the bodies, bringing to light contrasting conceptions of truth. The returned body becomes a site where necropolitical control and resistance meet. In the cases of Yasser and Ahmed, border authorities manage the remains through practices that depoliticize death, extending the border's logic of erasure beyond life itself. Families engage in processes of reappropriation, claiming truth as political recognition and, in one case, refusing to accept the repatriation of the body whitout accountability. Solidarity actors, in turn, reinscribe the bodies within mobilization practices, integrating them into collective demands for justice.

I argue that restitution emerge as an ongoing political process, involving multiple dimensions: material (the body itself), epistemic (the truth about the circumstances of death), and structural (the transformation of the conditions that produce disappearance). By keeping the dead politically alive—suspended between an unrecognized life and a depoliticized death—families and solidarity actors refuse the necropolitical management of absence. Instead, they sustain an insistent demand that disrupts attempts at depoliticization, transforming the body into a haunting presence that resists silencing: simultaneously an instrument of sovereign power and a testimony that refuses erasure.