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Paper short abstract

This contribution examines enforced disappearance at the Mediterranean border as a necropolitical mechanism producing unequal regimes of grief. Drawing on research with survivors and families of the missing, it shows how grief is unevenly politicized across positions of power, absence, and survival.

Paper long abstract

The Mediterranean border has increasingly become a necropolitical space, in which enforced disappearance operates as a regulative function, producing suspended and differential forms of grief. In the absence of a body, those affected by disappearance engage with death in uneven ways. Survivors who remain trapped within the border zone often lack the temporal and material conditions necessary to grieve. At the same time, survivors and the families of the missing may redirect grief into contentious practices aimed at producing evidence, mobilizing political pressure, and seeking accountability. For others, mourning is perceived as impossible without the recovery of the body, leading to the abandonment of the search and the adoption of fatalistic interpretations of loss. Grief, therefore, is not politicized everywhere or by everyone in the same way, as it is shaped by the material, legal, and relational positions of actors within the necropolitical regime. Disappearance emerges as a contested field in which some actors engage in a politics of re/appearance, understood not as a mere quest for visibility and recognition, but as an ongoing negotiation with death, absence, and border violence. The contribution draws on ethnographic research centred on a case of enforced disappearance produced by the Tunisian–European border regime involving families from Sierra Leone. By following disappeared individuals, survivors who reappear, and relatives located in countries of origin, the study demonstrates how disappearance functions as a necropolitical condition, generating multiple forms of grief, ways of seeking meaning and pursuing justice.