Ungrievable lives: On the apathy and mourning of European border deaths

This paper takes a critical look at how and why the avoidable deaths of people on the move at Europe’s internal and external borders appear to be widely tolerated or glossed over with apathy, as shipwrecks and mass drownings in the Mediterranean and English Channel receive limited outcries and mild reactions from the media and wider public.  While ‘compassion fatigue’ is recognised as a major factor in this apathy, Europeans do arguably not consider all human lives to be equal, or in the words of philosopher Judith Butler, equally ‘grievable'. This follows on from lengthy historical processes of dehumanisation, rooted in the darkest eras of colonialism, and more recently through the continuous discursive framing of migrants as constituting a ‘threat’ to European safety, cohesion and purported core values. As such, racialised migrant bodies continue to be inscribed with otherness, dispensability and ‘ungrievability’, and lives lost become mere numbers, a means to an end, and an alleged measure of effective migration management and deterrence politics.

At the same time, however, research unveils collective acts of mourning and grieving of lives lost in Europe’s borderlands. Efforts to collectively grieve, bury, or repatriate bodies to their families have been documented over the years, and arguably serve to reappropriate the humanity and grievability of migrant lives. As Butler writes, “The differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of enormous significance. It has been since at least the time of Antigone, when she chose openly to mourn the death of one of her brothers even though it went against the sovereign law to do so.” In the same vein, this paper thus illustrates the notion of grieveability through field research findings from Calais, Greece and other borderlands, where mourning of lives rendered ungrievable by the state and public arguably constitutes a form of resistance in itself. The paper moreover reflects on the potential limits of mourning as resistance, and the question of whose migrant lives are mourned and by whom. It moreover addresses the risk of grievability being appropriated by the very state actors whose restrictive and exclusionary policies co-produce these deaths in the first place, as a tool to justify further state interventions. As such, the paper ends with a more critical engagement with mourning which recognises it both as a crucial form of resistance and at the same time as susceptible to political appropriation, and as potentially reinforcing humanitarian hierarchies and exclusions.