Mahmoud Keshavarz, Filippo Furri, Charles Heller, and Carolina Kobelinsky
On 18 April 2015, more than 1,100 people sank within minutes in the central Mediterranean. The catastrophe came after Italy, and the European Union ended Mare Nostrum, the proactive rescue operation, and replaced it with a regime in which death became foreseeable. The shipwreck remains one of the largest documented losses of life in recent Mediterranean history. Yet the violence did not end with the sinking. It continued in the delayed recovery of bodies, in the separation between forensic procedures and family search, in the lives of survivors left in the limbo of the asylum system, and in the fact that only a handful of victims have been formally identified eleven years later.1Forensic Oceanography, “Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of the EU’s Policies of Non-Assistance,” 2017; Giorgia Mirto, “In the Wake of a Boat: The Politics of Mourning the 18th April 2015 Shipwreck,” Death Studies (2024): 1-14
Such an act of killing by abandonment is an emblem of many other policy-driven deaths and disappearances along European borders, showing how borders stretch their violence beyond the moment of border crossing and grasp the lives of many besides the travellers. This abandonment belongs to a broader politics of carelessness and inaction, in which institutions do not merely fail to care but actively organise conditions that delay, displace, or deny care.2Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Fatal Prescriptions: Immigration Detention, Mismedication, and the Necropolitics of Uncare,” Death Studies 44, no. 11 (2020): 699-708. Border violence often aims towards border transgressors, but it eventually casts its power over the deceased, the disappeared, their co-travellers, friends, kin, and communities located far away. It expands in space and time, beyond the moment of crossing and beyond the site where death or disappearance occurs.
To investigate border violence at the edges of death is therefore to refuse the idea that death is the endpoint of bordering. Death and disappearance open another field of violence: the unrecovered body, the unidentified dead, the anonymous grave, the family without confirmation, the name detached from the body, the body detached from the social world that once held it. The question is not only how people are made to die at borders, which Border Forensics has worked with for a long time, but also how they are treated after death, how they are made to disappear, how they may be identified, how they are buried, and how families continue to search for them and what forms of justice can account for such expansive forms of uncare and violence.
Identification is one of the central sites where this violence continues. It is often treated as a technical matter: a body is recovered, forensic data is collected, DNA is analysed, and a legal identification may follow. But the problem is not only technical. It is procedural, political, relational, and social. The difficulty often lies less in collecting data than in connecting it: connecting post-mortem information from bodies with ante-mortem knowledge held by families, survivors, co-travellers, friends, and communities.3Mercedes Salado Puerto et al., “The Search Process: Integrating the Investigation and Identification of Missing and Unidentified Persons,” Forensic Science International: Synergy 3 (2021): 100154.
When these connections fail, bodies remain unidentified even when knowledge exists. Survivors may know who travelled with them. Families may hold names, photographs, phone numbers, travel routes, and memories. Civil society actors may have gathered fragments of information across borders. Yet official forensic systems often focus on the recovered biological body, while the social and relational traces needed for identification are excluded from the procedure.
Identification should be redirected from the narrow horizon of the biological body toward the social body and personhood. A person is not only DNA, remains, fingerprints, or an entry in a database. A person is also a name spoken by others, a relation, a journey, a household, a friendship, a history, a set of obligations, and a place in a social world. To identify the dead and the disappeared is therefore not only to match technical data. It is to reconnect a body to a person, a person to a family, and a family to the right to know, mourn, and demand accountability.
This requires what Amade M’charek and Sara Casartelli call “forensic care work”: an approach in which identification is not only a juridical act, but also a social and relational practice.4Amade M’charek and Sara Casartelli, “Identifying Dead Migrants: Forensic Care Work and Relational Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies23, no. 7 (2019): 738-757. Such care is not opposed to forensic rigour. It demands another form of rigour, one that takes the knowledge of families, survivors, civil society actors, and travelling companions seriously, while also protecting them from exposure and harm. It also demands caution, since forensic identification can reproduce racialised categories and forms of classification even when it claims neutrality. That is commitment to families and communities, and their different understanding of what constitutes dignity and care means that not every trace should be extracted, connected, mapped, or made public. A forensic practice committed to care must also know when not to visualise, not to disclose, and not to convert relational knowledge into institutional data.
Border disappearance unsettles the distinction between absence and presence. The disappeared are absent from registers, graves, and official confirmation, but they reappear in names, photographs, messages, dreams, rumors, family conversations, protests, and digital traces.5Laura Huttunen, Missing Persons, Political Landscapes and Cultural Practices: Violent Absences, Haunting Presences (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025). These appearances make families not only mourners but also investigators, archivists, organisers, witnesses, and political actors. Their work resocializes the disappeared by reconnecting names, histories, kinship, and personhood to those whom border regimes have rendered disappeared.
Border disappearance produces absence, but it also generates practices of presence. Families search across platforms, borders, bureaucracies, and memories. They use social media, legal channels, activist networks, and public protest. They transform personal loss into collective struggle. They refuse the state’s attempt to close down disappearance through silence.
Burial is another site where border violence continues. If border death is a death out of place, burial becomes a struggle over how and where the dead are placed. Bodies may be buried anonymously or collectively, placed in separate cemetery areas, incorporated into existing graves or family chapels, or commemorated through memorials that may be visible, hidden, intimate, public, dignified, or violent in their effects. Even the condition of graves, cemeteries, and the possibility for future mourning and remembrance differ across countries and places where migrants have been buried formally, informally, identified, or unidentified.
No single burial practice can be declared ethical in advance. A separate cemetery may reproduce the exclusion migrants experience in life, but it may also keep traces of border death visible. Burial in an ordinary local grave may include the dead in a community of the dead, but it may also silence the violence that brought them there. Public memorials may politicise border death, but they may also appropriate grief or turn suffering into spectacle. Hidden memorials may seem inadequate, but they may also protect a form of intimate remembrance. Burial after border violence, therefore, needs to be understood not only as logistical arrangements, but as political and affective practices through which dignity, exclusion, memory, and responsibility are negotiated.6Valentina Zagaria, “The Clandestine Cemetery: Burying the Victims of Europe’s Border in a Tunisian Coastal Town,” Human Remains and Violence 5, no. 1 (2019): 18-37.
At the edges of death, the border separates bodies from names. It separates names from families, families from knowledge, graves from histories, mourning from justice, and death from accountability. Border Forensics wants to work against these separations. Such an expanded field of Border Forensics rests on three commitments. First, to trace border violence beyond the fatal event and across the infrastructures that manage its aftermath. Second, to treat families, survivors, and communities as bearers of knowledge rather than merely as sources of data. Third, to develop forensic and representational practices governed not by maximum extraction and visibility, but negotiated by care, consent, situatedness, and the reduction of harm.
Border Forensics has often reconstructed the spatial and temporal chain through which border regimes produce death. We argue that this chain does not terminate at the fatal event. Recovery systems, morgues, laboratories, databases, consular procedures, cemeteries, family searches, and memorial practices are themselves border infrastructures through which violence is continued, redistributed, or contested.
The dead are not only dead. The disappeared are not simply absent. They remain in the names spoken aloud, in graves marked or unmarked, in death certificates and missing-person files, in social media posts and family testimonies, in maps that begin to show where harm travels, and in the continuing demand that border violence be made accountable beyond the moment of death.
To work at the edges of death is to refuse the border’s attempt to finish its violence in silence. Recovery, identification, burial, mourning, and reappearance are not secondary matters. They are part of the struggle against border violence itself.