Median line: A century of border violence and the alluvial geopolitics of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa River border

Abstract

AbstractThe border river of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa has been shaped during the century since its demarcation by the Lausanne peace treaty. Over this period, a dense overlap of environmental, geopolitical, legal and cultural actors has turned it into both a riverised border and a borderised river. The border regime appropriates the riverine characteristics of flow, erosion, mud, turbulence and fog as much as it is founded on military technology, international law, agricultural and conservation practices, resource logistics, border crossing and the denial thereof. Here, the river's movement of sand and alluvium has become an agent in the policing of the river border. Drawing on interviews with asylum seekers, locals, forensic pathologists, legal scholars and fish scientists, this paper weaves field research, primarily undertaken on the Greek side, with a historic and ecosystemic perspective of a century‐old border that has become a hotspot for violent practices. These practices themselves harness the uncertain physical conditions that the riverscape affords. In this article we argue that the disjunctures of the river's dynamic geomorphology and the history of demarcation of the median line frame the contemporary politics of mobility of those illegalised by the border regime. In the ambiguous territorial pockets produced by the movement of the river away from the median line of 1926, islands of hyperlegality have been produced where state violence takes place with impunity.