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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography with NGOs supporting missing migrants in Sicily, this paper examines how activists mobilize grief after shipwrecks as political labor. It shows how politics emerges from death through the making of kinship ties, generating moral legitimacy and claims beyond necropolitics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the early stages of mourning in the aftermath of migrant shipwrecks, focusing on how grief, anger, and death recognition are cultivated and mobilized by NGOs supporting families of the missing in Palermo and Lampedusa. Based on multi-sited ethnography—including in-person meetings, online assemblies, internal communication and press releases, and interviews—I analyze how affective labor sustains trans-Mediterranean ties while shaping political legitimacy, kinship claims, and organizational positioning.

I ask how activist groups circulate grief and anger in their engagement with families of the missing, and how these affects become infrastructures for political action and moral authority. Immediately after a shipwreck, activists mobilize to determine how many people have died, how many remain missing, and where bodies will be landed—information often accessed through informal maritime solidarity networks rather than state authorities. Families are central not only for identification processes but also as sources of legitimacy for NGOs. The mandate to “support families” is contested across organizations, producing political tensions over access, representation, and responsibility. Interlocutors describe becoming “relatives” of the missing, or envisioning NGOs as kin-like entities, revealing how affective proximity becomes a form of authorization.

I situate these dynamics within a reinterpretation of grief as culturally and politically constituted (Scheper-Hughes 1992), intertwined with the formation of kinship with strangers at the border. I argue that mourning practices become sites where necropolitical governance is negotiated, contested, and partially reworked, illuminating how care, accountability, and political claims emerge through affective labor.