Description
Since 2014, more than 55.000 migrants have died in border zones such as the Mediterranean and the USA-Mexican border. The rising number of migrant casualties has drawn attention to the politics of death and dead bodies and made increasingly evident an apparent paradox. While many of these deaths have been the product of the growing securitization of undocumented migration, suspension of search-and-rescue missions, and deliberate inaction to help migrants in need, governments often invest considerable resources in recovering the dead bodies of migrants, identifying, and giving them a proper burial. This raises a momentous question: Why do states grant rights in death that denied to migrants in life? We argue that ‘caring for the dead’ and particularly the granting of proper burials is not primarily a late recognition of the humanity of the dead migrants but a recognition of the humanity of those populations that, through their states’ securitization of migration, contributed to let the migrants die. This paper thus analyses the connection between humanity and burials in the context of the refugee crisis by exploring how, from Greek antiquity to modern times, burying the dead, and particularly the enemy dead, has become a fundamental measure of a people’s humanity.
