Necroharms: Obscene and Grotesque Violence

Abstract

The chapter explores the human consequences of the ‘necropolitical’ (Mbembe, 2003) border regime upon the lives which are made ‘unliveable’ (Butler, 2004). It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) of border crossers, inside and beyond the refugee camp, in appalling conditions that not only are tantamount to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but also inflict, normalize and naturalize disposability, humiliation, social death and suffering. This chapter builds on Achille Mbembe’s (2003) work on necropolitics to explore the governance of migration through abandonment to social death. It also builds on existing academic literature on the politics of abandonment, the production of humiliation and degradation, racialized social death and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance (Cacho, 2012; Davies et al, 2017; Mayblin et al, 2019; Gordon and Larsen, 2021).The chapter also engages with three bodies of literature: the social harm approach (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007), critical migration and border studies (De León, 2015; Squire, 2017) and social anthropology of violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). It provides insights into border crossers’ lived experiences of violence. Furthermore, the paper contributes to the growing academic literature on the politics of abandonment (Davies et al 2017; Gordon and Larsen, 2021; Mayblin et al, 2019), and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance.