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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways families of missing migrants mobilise to demand justice, and how communities organise to bury the unknown border dead in Niger and Tunisia. What relationships, practices, and shared political imaginaries emerge from local and transnational movements forming around grief?

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, the European Union’s management of migration has been increasingly outsourced to countries on the African continent, whilst its ever expanding border became more and more violent and deadly for people on the move. In September 2022, families of missing migrants from North and West Africa, as well as activists and civil society groups in solidarity with them, gathered in the south-eastern Tunisian town of Zarzis. The town was chosen for this “CommemorAction” due to the growing involvement of its fishers and citizens in contesting the EU border, and because it hosts a cemetery of unknown persons who lost their lives while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Families and activists from Senegal, Mali, Niger, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia exchanged on the histories of politisation of their grief, on the search for the missing, on the legal and protest experiences they accumulated, on identification procedures, and on how to advance together across contexts as a movement. They also discussed civil society’s involvement in the care of cemeteries for the unknown border dead, whose remains are found in these same countries where local families are looking for their children, disappeared on the same irregularised journeys. Taking this gathering as a starting point, this paper explores how struggles for truth, justice, and dignity for missing loved ones and unknown border dead have developed in Niger and Tunisia, and the relationships, practices, and political imaginaries that arise as collective grief is turned into a movement cutting across national and regional divides.