Description
Greece is a significant part of the Eastern Mediterranean migratory route and has been at the forefront of the refugee crisis for years. Yet one aspect that is not fully explored in migratory research within the International Relations (IR) framework is the liminality of life and death: that transitional moment that takes place before, during and right after a person on the move crosses a border. Researching those liminal spaces of life, and more particularly death can prove a challenging task for any researcher.
This paper looks at the way research takes place at the ‘deathscape’ of the island of Lesbos in Greece. Not only does it discuss the way documentary photography can contribute to the wider field of IR, but also what IR’s approaches to the border could learn from the visual research of death. The way this is achieved is by walking the reader through the refugee cemetery of Lesbos; a rough piece of land where people on the move perished in the Aegean Sea end up.
