Popisi, brojevi, ljudi: povijesni, politički i afektivni aspekti dokumentiranja smrti na granicama
Authors:   Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb, Hameršak Marijana 
Published: February 2025

Border deaths, also referred to as migrant deaths or deaths during migration, are premature deaths of individuals whose movement and/or presence in a certain territory has been irregularised. Data on border deaths, presented separately or alongside figures on border length, the number of border crossings, irregular crossings, asylum seekers, or smugglers, are often part of the repertoire of contemporary media representations of irregularised migration. As such, they can be also mobilised in perpetuating narratives of “crisis” and reinforcing the perception of certain mobilities as illegal and dangerous, and even in normalising death as an inevitable element of irregularised migration. In sharp contrast with the media representations, data on the deceased and disappeared at borders remain invisible in official statistics. Since states do not record in official documents whether a deceased individual was a migrant or if the death is related to migration, deceased refugees and other migrants are “invisibly” included in post-mortem administrative procedures, and thus in official mortality statistics – assuming those statistics even account for non-citizens or unidentified persons. Consequently, local actors, including municipal cemetery services, hospitals, police, and activists, have taken the initiative to document these deaths. Some do so out of professional duty, while others respond to a perceived moral obligation to preserve records. However, motives vary widely, and systematic state-level documentation efforts only emerged in response to heightened media attention.
The oldest known initiative for documenting deaths at borders, the List of Refugee Deaths by the United for Intercultural Action (UNITED) network, was initiated in the 1990s in the context of reconfiguring and hardening border controls in post-Cold War Europe, the internationalisation of the European anti-racist movement, and the turn to metrics in the field of human rights. UNITED list is regularly updated and published in a revised edition on an annual basis. The list aims to highlight the systemic failures of European migration policies that endanger lives. It draws attention to a wide range of deaths tied to irregular migration, including those occurring in detention centres, during deportation etc. UNITED’s approach emphasises the importance of acknowledging every death while recognising structural violence, clearly positioning border deaths as lethal outcomes of current migration policies, or deaths by policy.
Despite systematic efforts by UNITED to systematically document and disseminate data on border deaths, information from this area seemed to reach the broader public only after the major shipwreck near Lampedusa in October 2013. In response to the shipwreck, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), known for its project-oriented approach and constant search for new operational niches, began collecting and soon distributing data on border deaths. As already highlighted in literature, the methodological focus of the IOM project on deaths in transit, antismuggling advocacy, and its geographic emphasis on the Mediterranean results in selective representations that obscure the state origins of violence i.e. state responsi bilities for border deaths. Unlike the UNITED list, which politicised border deaths by positioning them as a catalyst for a broader struggle against racism, the IOM project, despite shifts in the last ten years of its existence, is inclined towards their naturalisation and humanitarianisation, aligning also in this area with the demands of states and donors. From this perspective, the IOM project could be related to the growing migration industry and its constant demand for new activities and niches, on the one hand, and, on the other, the humanitarianisation of borders, rooted in the fusion of care and control, or the care-control nexus.
In spite of their differences, both UNITED’s and IOM’s projects call for reflection and raise questions about the game-changing effects of documenting border deaths and data-driven advocacy. Globally, as well as in Croatia, where the numbers of those killed and displaced in the 1990es war – and even in World War II – remain among the most sensitive (daily) political topics, the numbers of border deaths are not subject to dispute. In fact, the opposite seems to be happening: there is a conflict-free circulation of various, often contradictory, and hard-to-compare numbers from different sources and methodologies that blend in media reports and public statements into an amorphous mass of figures surrounding knowledge of irregular migration and border deaths. Moreover, while even the slightest rise in asylum seeker numbers or irregular crossings readily prompts at least nominal responses like reintroduction of border controls in the Schengen Area, the continuous rise in border deaths does not provoke remotely similar, concrete, and prompt reactions. Starting with this observation, the article brings this discussion to artistic, feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist critical approaches to documenting racially coded violence and border deaths. Is it enough to include the excluded into the existing order? Or is it necessary, as Judith Butler argues, to return to the questions: Whose lives are considered lives? Whose lives are deemed unreal, and whose real? Whose lives are grievable, and whose are not? The question is not simply about the presence or absence of violence, but about whose lives are made to matter. And, what if documentation efforts focused on deaths at borders align with, rather than challenge dominant order, policies, and practices of border control, degradation, and scaling of people? Can practices of documenting violence serve as relevant factors and effective agents of change in a context where border violence is tolerated when racially coded, where it is an integral part of, rather than an aberration from, the border regime? Is documenting and presenting data about violence, especially when decontextualised, reducing victims of violence to objects of the spectacle of violence, while simultaneously reinforcing the superior position of researchers and activists as those who are in a position to condemn and expose that violence?
Scarce or almost non-existent socially transformative effects of documentation efforts focused on border deaths – even those that emerged within broader social movements and struggles, like the UNITED List of Refugee Deaths – empirically support the idea that this type of data could align with dominant social relations and administrative procedures. In this vein, the IOM project, as an example of the appropriation and even commodification of activist practices – since it involves the transfer of knowledge and procedures from activist struggles and movements into the migration industry – can be seen as supporting the thesis of the (potentially) active role of documentation efforts in sustaining existing social inequalities, systems of control, and dehumanisation. However, the question remains as to what extent presented problems and perspectives apply to other, more grassroots and vernacular documentation efforts by survivors, families, and activist groups, which emphasise the egalitarian and affective dimensions of documenting border deaths. These efforts and the related affects of grief and resentment could be seen as potential triggers for struggles for alternative values and, in terms of Clare Hemmings, affective solidarity. This solidarity is not based on shared identity or experience, but on a sense of “desire for transformation born out of the experience of discomfort and against all odds” (Hemmings, 2012: 158). It is created from anger and frustration, and sustained through mourning and connection, in which documentation practices can also play a role.