Necroharms: the normalisation and routinisation of social death in refugee camps on the Greek Island of Lesvos

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the consequences of the necropolitical border regime on border crossers’ lives on the Greek island of Lesvos. It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) that border crossers experience inside and beyond the refugee camps and detention centres, arguing that this inhuman and degrading treatment inflicts, normalises and naturalises disposability, humiliation, and social death. The paper combines a social harm approach, critical migration and border studies, and insights from anthropology to analyse border crossers’ lived experiences of violence. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the politics of abandonment and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance. It also expands on social harm typologies by introducing a new conceptual category of harm which I term ‘necroharms’.

KEYWORDS:

• Social harm
• necroharms
• necropolitics
• border violence
• Lesvos

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Evgenia Iliadou

Evgenia Iliadou is an independent researcher. Her research focuses on the continuum of border violence, border controls, asylum policies and practices across time and space. In addition, she is interested in the issue of border deaths, migration governance, vulnerability, and refugees' lived experiences of violence. She has worked for many years as an NGO practitioner in immigration detention centres in Greece and the UK providing support to survivors of human trafficking, torture, and sexual violence.