Issue 9(1), 2026
© Verein zur Förderung der kritischen Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung e.V., Göttingen
This paper approaches dead bodies as material traces of necropolitics in the Mediterranean border regime. The ways in which dead bodies are handled reveal a lack of state responsibility and the abandonment of migrants as a ›disposable‹ population. I introduce the notion of deathcare to unpack practices of Search and Rescue NGOs on board rescue ships. Activists develop respons-ability for the dead and build connections with them. In this context, I understand deathcare as resistance, challenging necropolitical logics in the border regime. Based on interviews with four activists, I describe practices of preparation and decision-making around deathcare, documentation and visibilization as well as material aspects of hands-on deathcare and mourning. Deathcare challenges the necropolitical imperative of abandonment, as activists enter into relations with the dead and build a community. Through deathcare, as I argue, necropolitics become visible, because care enables dead bodies to ›speak‹ about the policies that killed them.
Deathcare, Necropolitics, Border Death Regime, SAR NGOs
Civil Search and Rescue organizations (SAR NGOs) put to sea to rescue migrants in distress in the Mediterranean. However, there are instances in which rescue is impossible or too late, and crews are faced with dead bodies in the aftermath of shipwrecks. Activist Pia Klemp describes an incident of encountering dead bodies during a rescue operation in her fictional book Lasst uns mit den Toten tanzen 1:
»The RHIB2 goes out again to search for dead bodies, which they find. Most of them sink to the bottom and stay there. The sea doesn’t care about their passports; it takes everyone in without prejudice. All we can do is examine the drifting bodies for distinct features, mark them with lifejackets, and report their position. Of course, no military or coastguard will collect them, we know that, too. Nobody cares about a Black body. The last thing we can do for them is to make them a number in the system. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even be that, they would just be gone, as if they had never existed.« (Klemp 2020: 57; translation SSP)
This fictional but realistic scenario indicates several issues SAR NGOs face when dealing with dead bodies, which will be explored in this paper. There are concerns around counting dead bodies and making them visible. To make them visible, life vests are attached to the bodies to stop them from sinking. Klemp illustrates the dilemma activists face, that the bodies will sink and be lost if they do not recover them. This makes activists feel responsible, and they step in to provide deathcare under emotional distress.
How bodies are handled at sea is structured by the Mediterranean border death regime (Cuttitta/Last 2020), in which undesired populations are left to die.3 Necropolitics, governing the living through the »power of death« (Mbembe 2003: 39), confers upon migrants taking to the sea »the status of the living dead« (ibid.: 40). In the Mediterranean border death regime, neglect and abandonment are key components of necropolitical modes of governing (Stauffacher/Maddrell 2023; Stierl/Dadusc 2022; Vives 2023). State actors often neglect dead bodies and leave survivors and families alone with care responsibilities under extremely difficult circumstances—if bodies are recovered at all. In this context, I focus on SAR NGOs as one actor in providing care for dead bodies at sea, which includes recovering, cooling, and documenting a body as well as commemorating the deceased. NGOs are not legally obligated to provide deathcare, as this is, in general, a state responsibility. The dead, though, cannot assert any rights against the state. When NGOs engage in deathcare, they do so on ethical grounds, aiming to restore dignity to the deceased and support survivors and grieving families in their own care efforts.
The main interest of this paper is to reconstruct how SAR NGOs provide deathcare on board their ships, and the broader significance of these practices. Therefore, I pose the following question: How do SAR NGOs care for dead bodies, and what significance does deathcare have in the face of necropolitical government? Care, as I use it in this paper, implies two dimensions: a practical hands-on dimension and a way of relating to one another, even after death. This second dimension is political in the way that it constructs communities, which, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1989: 23), is »political power par excellence«. It differentiates NGOs’ practices from those of state actors. This twofold perspective on care makes necropolitics discernible and thus criticizable. Based on empirical observations, I argue that, firstly, necropolitics become perceptible through material traces—which in this case are dead bodies. Deathcare makes bodies, and therefore necropolitics, visible. And secondly, in the context of necropolitics, deathcare becomes an act of resistance.
The data used in this article were collected for my PhD project within the research group »Navigating the Mediterranean: Search and Rescue and the Dissensus on Democracy« (Universities of Bonn and Münster). Although part of a wider body of ethnographic data, this article draws mainly on interviews with four crew members of different NGO ships, including additional interview data and field observations where necessary. Even though the data is collected as ethnographic fieldwork, I have not observed deathcare practices myself, and I have not sought out opportunities to do so for ethical considerations. The analysis, therefore, makes death and dead bodies indirectly visible through the activists’ accounts.
In this paper, I first examine the context of the Mediterranean border death regime, explaining how the dead at sea are counted and governed, followed by a description of the material conditions of dead bodies in the water. These observations are embedded in Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics and the notion of »bare death« (O’Neill 2012). I then introduce care and deathcare as theoretical concepts. The empirical findings are presented in three sections: (1) the constant possibility of death during SAR missions, including preparations and decision-making; (2) aspects concerning documentation and visibilization of bodies; and (3) relations between the living and the dead, expressed in practices of deathcare and mourning. In the end, I discuss how deathcare in the necropolitical border regime can be understood as resistance.
Border deaths in the Mediterranean are produced in a complex, sometimes contradictory regime of different actors, policies, and interests. This means that death is not a byproduct, but part of a system of »governing migration through death« (Squire 2017; cf. Cuttitta 2020: 10). The notion of the border death regime (Cuttitta/Last 2020) captures the links between border politics and border deaths. For the arguments made in this paper, there are three relevant aspects of the regime, that I focus on: (1) the (un)countability and (in)visibility of the dead; (2) the governing of the dying and dead, including relevant legal frames; and (3) material aspects of encountering dead bodies at sea, crucial for understanding deathcare practices.
Counting fatalities in the Mediterranean Sea is an ambivalent practice. On the one hand, counting and creating statistics create visibility and make it possible to grasp the phenomenon of border deaths. For instance, Amade M’charek and Julia Black argue that counting dead bodies can be an act of care, in that »[n]umbers are capable of producing a profound proximity and of doing the political work of accountability« (2020: 90). On the other hand, counting can be an instrument of governing, producing dehumanizing statistics that fail to depict the significance of the phenomenon (Pugliese 2019: 358). However, scholars seem to agree that counting is not enough, and that it matters how the numbers are presented and received. As Judith Butler put it: »We may know how to count […], but that is not the same as figuring out how and whether a life counts« (2016: xx).
Several practical problems occur when trying to count the dead in the Mediterranean (Tazzioli 2015). It is part of the characteristics of this maritime border space that death happens in many cases, unseen and unheard of. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization of Migration (IOM) are two important actors who count the dead and missing persons at the Mediterranean border and publish statistics. ›Missing‹, in the context of the Mediterranean border, mainly refers to cases in which people are lost at sea and most likely dead, but their bodies have not been found or recovered to confirm their deaths. Joseph Pugliese problematizes the ambivalences of turning the dead into statistics:
»The Missing Migrants Project [by IOM] emerges as a type of electronic morgue that, precisely as a digitised repository, has an infinite capacity to absorb the asylum seeker dead. As digital morgue, the project transmutes flesh and blood bodies into anonymous numbers. The numerical scale and weighting of these thousands of deaths suggests that we are dealing with a type of death that can be calculated in terms of human tonnage and transmuted into decorporealised infographics.« (Pugliese 2019: 358)
In the process of making them countable, the dead are dehumanized and turned into »decorporealised« numbers, as Pugliese argues. Creating statistics of fatalities in the Mediterranean requires the recovery of a dead body or the documentation of a shipwreck or fatality, which is often done by survivors, but also by Coast Guards and NGOs. This information is then collected and communicated to those who create the statistics. While the dead are made countable, they are still anonymous and »decorporealised« (ibid.); the deceased person is invisible. This demonstrates that countability and visibility are closely connected; however, visibility goes one step further by making a deceased person (as opposed to a number) perceptible.
While many shipwrecks and deaths happen unnoticed, even invisible deaths leave material traces. South of Lampedusa, fishermen stopped using trawl nets because they kept getting stuck and ripping on the wrecks on the ground (Albahari 2016: 275). In the Tunisian city of Zarzis and some Italian cities, some people claim to have stopped eating sea fish due to the conviction that those feed on human bodies (ibid.; Pugliese 2019: 361). Corpses, or parts thereof, are washed ashore or end up in fishermen’s nets all around the central Mediterranean. Marie Aline Klinger calls these material traces of invisible deaths »traces of contactlessness« (2024: 79; translation SSP), indicating a form of violence that works through avoiding direct contact between migrants and state agencies. More than statistics, these material traces adumbrate the extent of dying in the Mediterranean Sea.
When it comes to handling dead bodies in international waters, there is a blatant lack of jurisdiction. Laws at sea depend on the location of interest. Coasts are usually surrounded by a twelve nautical mile zone of territorial waters, which is part of the national territory of the coastal state. Beyond that zone begin international waters, a space in which no national jurisdiction applies, and which is governed instead through international treaties. Those regulate many aspects of navigation in international waters, the most relevant treaties being the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (Wetterich 2022; Wittichová 2016). As part of these conventions, the Mediterranean Sea is divided into SAR zones, attributing SAR responsibilities to coastal states. However, the conventions include no regulations concerning dead bodies in international waters. Upon requesting information about legal obligations concerning dead bodies, the International Maritime Organization pointed me to a medical guidance manual, which, however, does not contain any information on legal obligations, nor any recommendations in case a ship encounters dead bodies in the water (as opposed to crew members or passengers dying on board). For dead bodies in international waters, there is no applied legal framework; deathcare responsibilities remain unregulated.
The situation is similar when it comes to national SAR plans: The Italian SAR plan mentions the necessity of a special police unit at the point of disembarkation in the case of corpses on board. However, it does not say how to deal with dead bodies, whether in the water or on board. According to an interview I conducted with a former official of the Italian Coast Guard, dead bodies do not fall into their mandate, which is limited to saving lives. The Coast Guard does not consider dead bodies in the water a case of distress at sea and therefore does not launch operations of recovery. After bodies have been brought to shore, there is no legal standard protocol either on how to deal with dead bodies found at sea (Cattaneo 2018: 12; M’charek/Black 2020). In Italy, a public health authority usually receives the corpses upon disembarkation and coordinates the following procedures. Identification of these bodies is not legally required. No register archives information about the unknown dead, oftentimes leaving families without the possibility to find deceased relatives (Cattaneo 2018: 15).
The circumstances of death while crossing the Mediterranean can be diverse. People can die »through drowning, asphyxiation, dehydration, exposure, being crushed, or burnt by a toxic mixture of fuel and salty water. Migrants also reputedly die because of neglect or violence exercised upon them by border agencies« (Stauffacher/Maddrell 2023: 69). While at sea, crews of SAR NGOs can encounter bodies on board boats that are being rescued, or when there are fatal accidents during operations. Rarely, they find bodies floating in the water without a connection to a shipwreck. Most bodies sink after drowning, which makes recovering the body a precondition for an encounter with SAR activists. However, some might float at the surface if air is trapped in the clothing or lungs. Other bodies reappear at the surface during decomposition, when gases develop in the body that give them updrift (Vennemann/Brinkmann 2003: 209). Consequently, most bodies are never found, and if they do drift to the surface, crews are under time pressure to either recover them from the water or ensure they do not sink by attaching life vests to the bodies.
Understanding the circumstances of death and how dead bodies behave in water matters in understanding the conditions of encounter between SAR activists and dead bodies. Encounter, here, implies a physical proximity, a sensory experience in which the body can be seen, often smelled, and possibly touched. It presupposes the body's materiality, its »corporeality« (Verdery 1999: 17). However, there is another layer, since encounter also describes a way of relating between the living and the dead. The physical proximity and sensory perception make the deceased person perceptible as a subject to those handling the body.
Besides SAR NGOs, local fishermen on all shores of the central Mediterranean are other relevant non-state actors who encounter dead bodies regularly. How they handle dead bodies is heavily influenced by previous experiences with police authorities and the economic pressure they find themselves in: »Some fishermen, fearful of the protracted bureaucratic processes that would ensue if they brought the bodies to shore, turf the corpses back into the sea as though they were simply an unpalatable part of their catch« (Pugliese 2019: 356). In other cases, fishermen bring bodies (or body parts) to shore, where they find a lack of institutional responsibility (Corso 2023: 340).
In sum, in the Mediterranean border death regime, dead bodies are governed mainly by neglect and abandonment. With Amade M’charek and Khaled Tabbabi (in this issue), I understand neglect as the absence of responsibility or the failure to act according to an existing relation. Abandonment is »a political relation« (O’Neill 2012: 525) of expulsion. Those who are abandoned are eliminated from the community. I argue that abandonment and neglect are two important aspects of necropolitics in the Mediterranean and that they are difficult to observe empirically because they often consist of non-action. Yet, they manifest in their material effects, in this case, dead bodies, which makes an empirical analysis possible.
However, there are cases in which states engage in recovering and identifying migrant bodies, mainly in mass fatality events or when dead bodies gain public visibility. An example is the case of Alan Kurdi, whose image remains present in the media. Decomposing corpses left uncared for in plain sight are a threat to state authority, as James Martel argues: »[T]he corpse, being effectively beyond the reach of the state’s biopolitical power, suggests a way in which that power is not totalizing« (2018: 3). While states can let people die, they cannot leave dead bodies uncared for once public visibility is obtained. Two key cases from Italy illustrate this: the 3rd October 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck and the case of the »Barcone« from 19th April 2015. In both cases, the Italian Coast Guard retrieved the wrecks with bodies inside from the ocean floor and launched a process of investigation and identification. In her book Naufraghi senza volto 4 (2018), Cristina Cattaneo, leader of the forensic team, describes the technical and bureaucratic procedures of recovery and identification in these mass fatality events heavily covered by the media. Despite significant efforts in the two cases, they remain exceptions, affirming Martel’s argument that states react only when unburied bodies challenge their authority.
So far, I have outlined key points for understanding the context of deathcare: The ambivalences of counting and visibility, the lack of legal regulations of responsibilities around deathcare, and an understanding of how bodies behave in water. Now, I turn to theoretical perspectives on necropolitics and deathcare.
Death does not ›just‹ happen in the Mediterranean; rather, it is the product of deadly conditions produced in and by the border death regime. The concepts of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) and »bare death« (O’Neill 2012) help reveal the link between migrant deaths and border politics. How dead bodies are handled is conceptualized with the notion of care, particularly deathcare.
Necropolitics describes how the living are governed through the »power of death« (Mbembe 2003: 40). States use death’s constant threat and possibility as a means of control and power. With this argumentation, Mbembe builds on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as a form of sovereignty exercised by states. He shifts the analytical attention from the sovereign’s right to »make live« to the right »to let die« (Foucault, quoted according to Gebhardt 2020: 120). Mbembe tightly connects necropower and (neo)colonialism, since it marks an integral part of colonial rule, making the colonized subjects potentially »disposable« (2003: 27). As many scholars have argued, necropolitical logics are prevalent in the Mediterranean border death regime (Albahari 2016; Corso 2023; Gebhardt 2020; Pugliese 2019; Stierl/Dadusc 2022; Stümer 2018); and death at the Mediterranean border is a result of willful neglect, abandonment, and policy decisions.
Mbembe’s understanding of the production of disposability directly translates into the neglect and abandonment that shape the practice, rules, and regulations of the Mediterranean border regime, resulting in violence, suffering, and border deaths (Stauffacher/Maddrell 2023; Stierl/Dadusc 2022; Vives 2023). People are abandoned at sea, left to die, and their bodies decompose and vanish. Decomposing bodies are the most obvious materialization of the necropolitical regime, but this should not lead to disregarding other effects of necropolitical violence. As Cuttitta emphasizes:
»Suffering and injustice do not only materialize in death; they can also be expressed in many different ways. Unjust and violent migration and border policies would remain unjust and violent even if border deaths decreased or zeroed« (2020: 15).
At the same time, necropolitical violence as abandonment extends beyond death. Following Giorgio Agamben’s concept of »bare life« (2002: 18), these abandoned bodies are in a state of »bare death« (Corso 2023: 336; O’Neill 2012: 514; Stümer 2018: 22). Bare life describes the simple (biological) fact of life, which is distinguished from the politically relevant life (Agamben 2002: 18). Jenny Stümer develops this further for dead bodies:
»Bare death, in essence, is death reduced to mere body or the simple fact of a corpse. It negates all relations with the living; it is nonrelational death. [...] Bare death refutes all kinship and thereby works as the ultimate point of rejection from the communal, political realm« (2018: 32).
A body is rendered bare through neglect and inadequate care as well as the negation of relations between the dead and the living. In its bare state, the body can be abandoned and even mistreated without punishment, since it is not recognized as (politically) relevant: It is disposable. Therefore, relationality as the connections between individuals and communities challenge necropolitical abandonment, making it an important observation point for this paper.
As I understand it, care entails practices, ways of relating to each other, and building communities. Relations matter for practices and ethics of care, since care is rooted in a (more or less radical) relational ontology, oftentimes based on the works of Donna Haraway (2016). Her term »respons-ability« means realizing the ontological relatedness of all »critters« and acting in the consciousness of being in relations. This radical relational ontology contradicts the idea of bare life and bare death and makes a depiction of ›disposability‹ impossible. Many theoretical conceptions of care are based on Haraway’s understanding of relationality and »respons-ability«, seeing care as characterized through »significant relationships« (Thelen 2015: 510). The twofold conceptualization of care as practice and as relation makes it possible to see care not only as an empirical phenomenon, but also as an analytical perspective.
Deathcare describes practices of taking responsibility for a dead body. It includes, for instance, planning the funeral, cleaning the body, holding burial ceremonies, and caring for a tomb. These practices are usually attributed great significance to, since »death and the rituals surrounding it provide an important window into the socioeconomic and political orders and hierarchies that structure human life« (Balkan 2023: 2). Arnold van Gennep (2005: 154f.) already observed in the early 20th century the importance of deathcare for the living, who will be haunted by the dead if they did not receive adequate care, since they neither belong to the world of the living, nor the realm of the dead. Practicing deathcare and responding to the needs of dead bodies as well as those of living relatives and communities makes »dying well together« (Haraway 2016: 116) possible. How we care for dead bodies is political, as explained by Katherine Verdery: »A dead body is meaningful not in itself but through culturally established relations to death and through the way a specific dead person’s importance is (variously) construed« (1999: 28). The way a body is handled indicates how that person is positioned in society and providing deathcare in a certain way can change this social position even after death. Recent scholarship politicizes care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Thelen 2015), and in the following empirical cases, I argue that deathcare, too, is inherently political.
I now turn to the results which will be structured according to three phases of deathcare by SAR NGOs in the Mediterranean Sea: (1) preparations for possible encounters with death; (2) documentation measures taken by crews to render bodies visible; and (3) relations between the living and the dead onboard, considering hands-on deathcare and mourning.
The empirical findings are based mainly on interviews with four activists and crew members of different (often multiple) rescue ships and with various positions on board. Anja*5 has been a crew member of three different NGOs; in the interview, she refers to her experiences on board a sailing boat with a German NGO. Her main task on board is the communication with the authorities involved in operations. Stefano* looks back on years of experience on board a rescue ship of an Italian association. Ayla shares experiences from missions with different NGOs and her perspective as a physician on board. She is a member of a network of medical professionals working in SAR and gives an overview of different organizations’ practices. Diana* reports on her experiences coordinating care for survivors on board an NGO vessel. She has worked in this organization’s office as well. In addition to the interviews with SAR activists, I refer to interviews with a former member of the Italian Coast Guard and a volunteer of a humanitarian NGO based on Lampedusa, as well as press releases and reports by SAR NGOs. In total, eight narrative and semi-structured interviews were conducted for this article in English, German, and Italian6 and analyzed with qualitative data analysis (Kuckartz/Rädiker 2022).
Before narrating their experiences and the measures of deathcare on board, most interlocutors mentioned that they felt like they did not have much to say—only to demonstrate substantial knowledge and reflections during the interview. Even though not all of them provided direct deathcare, they still spoke about standard procedures, logistical preparations, and essential reflections regarding the potentiality of death during an operation. With the potentiality of death, I describe the fact that shipwrecks, drownings, or other forms of dying are a constant possibility for people taking the Mediterranean route and, consequently, for SAR activists to come into contact with dead bodies or accounts of fatalities. Migrants and activists are mostly conscious about the potentiality of death, and their actions are informed by this reality. This holds, even when bodies are not visible or present. Ayla recounts a situation where in the absence of dead bodies, death still significantly impacts the crew and survivors:
»I think it’s always a heavy weight. Honestly, even if the body is not on board. If, let’s say, a rescue vessel where people were already gone before you arrive there. I mean, sometimes the people are not even on board anymore and then they are by no means to be recovered because they were lost like, I don’t know when, hours, days ago. That’s also very, very heavy, even if it’s not always being talked about by all the survivors, it is something that is in the air.«
The potentiality and invisibility of death are two aspects of the necropolitical regime illustrated in the experiences of SAR activists. Death is always already on board, if not in the form of dead bodies, then in the migrants’ and activists’ consciousness that it can happen any time or in the loss they experienced without being able to recover the body or bodies.
To prepare themselves for the encounter with dead bodies, SAR NGOs take several measures. Usually, they have developed a standard operational procedure that indicates steps to be taken for different scenarios. These include finding corpses alongside survivors on boats in distress, encountering corpses drifting in the water without a boat, or people dying during a rescue operation or afterwards on board the ship. NGOs are equipped with body bags (large plastic bags to store dead bodies) and stretchers to transport the bodies. Some ships have reefer containers to store bodies, although a lack of those has been mentioned repeatedly as an issue. Some preparations are of a bureaucratic nature, namely death certificates, filled out by medical staff and handed over to authorities upon disembarkation. All crew members receive training for the situations described above; however, handling dead bodies is primarily a task for the medical staff on board.
Stefano* speaks about how the potentiality of death, which materializes in the presence of this equipment on board, impacts the crew as well as the survivors: »I can tell you that the experience of death, of having to do with death, of considering it possible, is an experience that remains strongly within the living.« He also mentions that the crew decided to remove the (unused) body bags from the sick bay (medical room on board) and store them out of the survivors’ sight to not irritate them. The fact that SAR NGOs are prepared for fatalities reveals necropolitical structures: Necropolitics produce an environment in which death is a constant possibility through abandonment and a lack of responsibility. In the words of Ayla, death is »something that is in the air«.
Decision-making about whether and how corpses can or should be recovered was essential in all interviews. Diana* explains why this is a crucial moment: »It is always a dilemma between actually you don’t want to leave the persons behind, because you just know that then nothing else will be done. At the same time, the conditions on board are just not adequate to do it well.« Multiple factors play into that decision: technical and logistical resources like cooling capacities (also considering potentially hot weather), the amount of space available on the ship to store a corpse, and the state of the dead body. Other emergencies might require immediate action of the crew, leading to a triage situation in which recovering dead bodies is usually of low priority. Stefano* mentions the presence of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard as a threat, due to which the crew may decide to hurry out of a situation and leave dead bodies behind to ensure the safety of survivors and crew. The decision is usually taken by the crew under consideration of the wishes of possible family members or close friends and other survivors, as Ayla explains:
»It is really not pleasant to have a body on board for multiple days. And if there is a large group of survivors that would be sharing this space. But sometimes they know that and they also choose: ›No we really want to keep the body.‹ And then partially to respect people but maybe partially also out of a crowd control perspective you want to have a situation where if you engage in a couple of days of navigation together with people on board that are already quite vulnerable and stressed, to do it in a way that is as okay as possible with them. Usually, it’s at least been tried to come to a sort of mutual agreement.«
The dilemma of either having to leave the bodies behind or providing deathcare in a manner that is perceived as inadequate, reflects the necropolitical abandonment that the bodies are left in. Authorities like the Mediterranean Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome are usually not involved in the decision-making processes around deathcare. Recovery of bodies not being within the mandate of the Italian Coast Guard puts officials in a difficult situation, as they have no clear guidelines when confronted with dead bodies. NGOs strongly criticize the inactivity or inability of state actors to recover and identify bodies. When asked what would make the decision-making process easier, Diana* responded like this, summarizing the problems of identification and the non-relationality of border deaths:
»I think if you had the guarantee or if you would know that authorities took care of recovering the people, that they take efforts, that identification processes take place, that there is a last dignified step after ALL THE undignified. That it is dealt with a bit better and there are burials, also burials among family or friends. That they are not anonymous burials with a number, in Italy, where nobody knows who the person is. That instead, there really are efforts taken, like it would be the case for me or for you, where it is clear that we would be identified.«
Deathcare practices by state actors are criticized as undignified by Diana*. Dignity plays a crucial role in motivating activists to provide deathcare and becomes a substantial base to criticize the state practice of constructing ›disposable‹ bodies (see Maria Ullrich and Lena Laube in this issue).
To create visibility of the dead body is seen as valuable by the activists, independently from whether or not that leads to an eventual identification, as Stefano* reports:
»In the rare case that you find a body without having a target, like it happened to us, obviously, you register the coordinates of the place of discovery and you try to photograph it. But I think, this activity is more of an ethical documentation, meaning it avails to not letting this death remain silent and is obviously less functional for the identification of the person.«
In this case, the documentation takes the body out of the bare, non-relational state. Instead, it makes it possible to establish relations to the dead person by taking on responsibility for the body and making it visible. Issuing a death certificate, for example, makes a deceased person visible to authorities, even when identification remains unsuccessful. Stefano* explains that activists of his organization create visibility through collecting testimonies from survivors about the deceased person and the circumstances of their death. SAR NGOs can witness invisible deaths and give public testimony about them, especially in cases of shipwrecks without any survivors. An example of this was an incident that happened on 7th and 8th June 2024: A civilian aircraft of the NGO Sea-Watch discovered a number of lifeless bodies in the water, which were then recovered by the rescue ships of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and SOS Méditerranée. In a press statement issued after the incident, Soazic Dupuy, Director of Operations of SOS Méditerranée, said:
»Had it not been for civilian Search and Rescue ships and aircraft, this recent tragedy would have likely been one of many invisible shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. We know that more bodies were spotted at sea, which we were not able to recover. We will never know their identity, nor how many people died in this shipwreck.« (MSF 2024)
Dupuy points to the importance of witnessing deaths and giving testimony. Bearing witness to deaths and collecting testimonies are ways of caring for the dead (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2023: 33). It can entail publishing reports, like the above statement. Through the politicized narration of the deaths, NGOs express resistance against the necropolitical logic of ›disposability‹.
Sometimes, the accusation of white saviorism is brought up against SAR NGOs: »[W]hite individuals embody the figure of the hero by saving or rescuing non-white people in a pattern that denies agency to the non-white people who are the passive recipients of white benevolence« (Geeraert 2024: 317). Civil sea rescue in the Mediterranean can be represented as white saviorism, and it can be applied as critique in the context of deathcare. However, it should be considered that NGOs try to make the dead bodies of Black people visible through deathcare to make them protagonists of their own narrative. This visibility is used by the NGOs to criticize and challenge the violent necropolitics that give rise to these neocolonial relationships in the first place. I argue that deathcare transforms these structures and can be seen as a form of solidarity and resistance (see Mareike Gebhardt in this issue).
The documentation of dead bodies is a bodily process that requires physical touch and hands-on care, even when the body is not recovered, as Ayla explains:
»In case people are not to be recovered, on most ships there is the concept that this would need an intermediate step. That if the body is not being recovered, at least photography is used for identification and an attempt is being made for properly taking the body at least in the RHIB for a moment. So being there with a small team that is enough people to do this, but not more people to not be exposed. Usually, a medical person would be involved in that from the point of view that they’re maybe less likely to freak out in this kind of situation and be more systematic and probably […] also have some knowledge about what kind of documentation would be needed.«
Documentation usually includes taking pictures of the body with attention to distinctive features of the deceased, like tattoos, scars, or birthmarks. Sometimes, crew members (in particular, medical staff) additionally record descriptions of the body and collect hair in plastic bags for DNA analysis. It can also be helpful to take the deceased person’s clothes or any personal belongings they might have on them. The information and objects collected, and even more so the documentation process, create an encounter between the activists and the deceased and thus affirm their relationality.
Despite logistical limitations, it is of particular importance that the documentation is done as early as possible, ideally while still at sea, since the situation might be chaotic on land and documentation thus impossible. An account from a member of a humanitarian organization at Lampedusa illustrates that the management of dead bodies on land can be chaotic and violent. In this incident, there were only four survivors of a shipwreck who were brought to port by the Italian Coast Guard along with eight dead bodies, some of them the survivors’ relatives. Upon arrival, police separated the living from the dead. The bodies were put into coffins, which were then sealed, marked as unidentified, and taken away—disregarding the vivid protest of the surviving relatives who demanded the bodies to be identified. Afterwards, the coffins were impossible to track back, and the deceased were probably buried in one of the many unmarked grave sites in southern Italian graveyards (Mirto 2019). The dead were forcefully put into a state of bare death and non-relationality. Even though this example portrays an exceptionally violent occurrence, it illustrates the blatant neglect and systematic lack of responsibility regarding dead bodies, which spawn such violent injustices.
Although it is questionable if NGOs can prevent these situations through deathcare, the time on board can be an important window for crucial steps in the identification process. The information they collect is communicated not only to authorities, but—if considered necessary and appropriate by the crew—also to a network of civil society and activist groups as well as diaspora organizations. Together, they combine the different information and resources they have access to and make a collective effort to identify the body. Stefano* explains: »Obviously, there are some things that you can do, like taking the coordinates, and based on the coordinates you can try to reconstruct it with the other actors, for example, Alarm Phone7. To which case might it correspond? Then maybe you try to make some matches.« In another case, Diana* described how a 17-year-old from Bangladesh died on board the NGO ship after being rescued from the lower deck of a wooden boat, severely intoxicated by fumes. There were no direct relatives or friends among the rescued people. However, in a joint effort of the rescued, the Bangladeshi community in Italy, and the NGO Memoria Mediterranea8, the person’s name was found. The group managed to get in contact with a brother of the deceased who lived in Italy and was eventually able to identify the body upon sight.
Decomposing bodies create a situation of urgency and demand care, they have »a strange kind of nonagentic agency« (Martel 2018: 11). Additionally, »they evoke the awe, uncertainty, and fear associated with ›cosmic‹ concerns, such as the meaning of life and death« (Verdery 1999: 31). In other words, corpses are not simply objects but have agency to demand care and attention and provoke certain associations and thought processes in the living. This agency lets the border dead in the Mediterranean ›speak‹: They convey testimonies about the violent structures that killed them. Bodies made visible cannot be ignored, and they evidence the deadly conditions and violence of the necropolitical regime. However, there are certain requirements for the dead to ›speak‹: Creating visibility of and respons-ability for the dead body through documentation and deathcare practices, as is done by survivors and families, and in this case by SAR NGOs, is required to lift the dead out of a state of bareness. When the dead ›speak‹, they perform a transformative agency with a powerful subversive potential in the face of necropolitics until they become a »counterauthority« (Martel: 2018: 5):
»Rather than being the weakest, the most vulnerable, the most victim-like site of control, the unburied body is the place where state projections of power and authority go to die themselves. Coming up against a form of materiality that is impossible to deny (given the corpse’s rotting, dreadful aspect), state authority is exposed as empty and void. In other words, the nothingness of the corpse, the way it is a marker of loss and death, exposes the nothingness of the state and other forms of projected authority in a way that little else could« (ibid.).
For this kind of authority, Banu Bargu coins the term »necroresistance« (2014: 63), ascribed to dead and dying bodies that escape the domination of state authority (Martel 2018: 36f.). Dying can, in Bargu’s reading, be seen as the ultimate form of resistant agency. This argumentation can only partially be transferred to the Mediterranean border regime, yet it shows the transformative potential of dead bodies. NGOs incorporate this power in their political strategies of resistance and transformation. The political struggles become an argument in favor of recovering bodies, as Ayla states: »Some of [the NGOs] even have as a part of their mandate to speak out about situations and they acknowledge that they can do that with a stronger voice if they make sure that there is an accountability of lives being lost and bodies are not left behind.«
The documentation of the dead body, as I described above, requires direct physical work on the body. Decomposing bodies produce a situation of urgency, which strikes the crew as a care need. By responding to it, crew members show respons-ability, which includes contemplating the needs of survivors, family members, friends, as well as fellow activists. Crew members try to slow down the decomposition process until disembarkation. If there is no reefer container, refrigerated packs are put into the body bag and regularly exchanged, or the body is flushed with cold water every couple of hours to cool it down. However, in cases where there is no reefer container on board, Ayla deems leaving the body behind possibly the better option, saying that »it is maybe in a way more dignified because you’re not so much confronted the whole time with the fact that this body is, yeah, just degrading in front of you«. Other activists speak about the smell of decomposition that makes the encounter with dead bodies, especially with those in a more advanced state of decomposition, a traumatic experience. The smell is produced by and refers to the »pervasive state of abandonment exercised by the institutions and the state« (Corso 2023: 341). Similar to Ayla, Alessandro Corso argues that it is indeed not dead bodies per se that are repulsive, but the neglect of dead bodies, which is immanent to the state of bare death.
With a decomposing body on board, space plays an important role. As mentioned above, crews usually try to put as much distance as possible between the survivors and the body and keep it out of sight to avoid (more) psychological distress. Depending on the size of the rescue vessel, this will be more or less doable. Space on board a ship is a crucial and scarce resource. Decisions about and practices of deathcare can thus be read as negotiations about space. Dead bodies will take up space that cannot be used by the living—even more so when there is a smell.
Through physical encounter and hands-on care work, crew members enter into relations with the dead, which has an important affective dimension. Emotional distress is not the only affective reaction that crew members describe, though it is mentioned in particular for those who do not have medical training. Ayla describes this as crew members being at risk of »freaking out«. There seems to be a fragile balance between being able to perform the »functioning-mode« (Diana*)—the professional role they are assigned to—and to apprehend the horror of the situation they find themselves in. Here, it becomes tangible that deathcare is not the only way care is performed by the activists. Instead, they understand their vulnerability when providing deathcare and pay attention to each other’s well-being in this situation. Caring relations are key to their mode of operation. They not only pertain to the dead but also include care for survivors as well as fellow crew members. Emotional distress is a reason why some SAR NGOs avoid taking dead bodies on board their ships. Ayla observes an »unwillingness« in some NGOs to recover dead bodies:
»I know one organization that, at least in the past, was really averse to the idea of actually recovering bodies. And that was very much from a sort of perspective that that’s not what they want to expose their volunteers to, and that that’s not what people are signing up for if they are joining sea rescue.«
She continues to explain that this NGO decided not to equip their ship with a reefer container, so that the crew is less likely to find themselves responsible for providing physical deathcare. According to Diana*, her organization does not foresee the recovery and transport of dead bodies as a standard procedure. However, the decision always depends on the situation, and the protocol does not relieve the crew from making the decision. The »unwillingness« needs to be put into the wider context of the necropolitical border regime. The recovery of bodies, deathcare, and transportation put the activists at risk in situations of emotional distress and burden them with responsibilities they might not be ready and willing to take on. The self-responsibilization of SAR activists sometimes finds its limits in this extreme situation. While on an emotional level it is understandable that not everyone can and wants to handle dead bodies, such distancing from the dead may be seen as evidence of the necropolitical regime extending its influence even into spaces of resistance and care. The »unwillingness« is based on the brutality of the necropolitical regime.
Upon encountering a dead body, all interviewees describe how the crew performs mourning ceremonies. They can be small and subtle, like in Stefano’s* account: »When we found that corpse which floated in the water, we took a moment of, let’s say, attention, of concentration.« He continues to explain why he considers this moment of concentration important: »In that case, to pause or to do something helps you not to consider this deceased person simply a statistic.« Another example of a mourning ceremony is recalled by Diana* in the case of the 17-year-old who died on board after rescue. She mentions a moment of silence shared by the crew and the survivors and another ceremonial moment of mourning among the crew after landing: »After everyone disembarked and we were alone on the ship, we all got together again and made some paper boats and put them in the water, and someone read a poem.« Similarly, Anja* reported that some NGO ships are equipped with ceremonial objects that can be used for this purpose, like »paper flowers and so on, to really have a kind of ceremony. And ideally also together with the survivors, to give it a dignified moment.«
Mourning ceremonies are a way of relating to the deceased person as well as to the survivors on board and (unknown) mourning family members and friends elsewhere. The fact that all crews describe a (significantly reduced or more elaborate) ceremony when confronted with a dead body and even carry ceremonial objects is unique to civil organizations, since it cannot be confirmed for SAR authorities. Through mourning ceremonies, the deceased are rendered visible as part of a community—not only among friends and family members who might be on board, but also with crew members in a community of mourners. Here, radical ontological relationality is practiced and reaffirmed between crew members, survivors, family and friends, and the dead. Shared mourning is central for many SAR NGOs, who also participate in public mourning events in different locations on land. When asked what role grief plays for their activism, a member of the SAR NGO Mediterranea responded that it plays »a fundamental role«, explaining that the date of the foundation of Mediterranea on the 3rd October 2018 was intentionally chosen for the 5th anniversary of the shipwreck of Lampedusa.
Through care practices and mourning ceremonies, activists create a community with the dead, since mourning means »reorganizing relations with the dead [and] a way of reordering live human communities. That is, precisely because the human community includes both living and dead, any manipulation of the dead automatically affects relations with and among the living« (Verdery 1999: 108). As Stümer argues, public mourning can be an expression of disobedience through the visibilization of these relations: »This publicity of (bare) death and the ritual of the burial stages a performance of civil disobedience that undermines the nonrelationality of border deaths« (2018: 23). According to Maurice Stierl, this form of disobedient mourning, which he calls »grief-activism«, has the potential to develop a »transformative political practice that can foster relationalities and communities in opposition to a politics of division, abandonment and necropolitical violence« (2016: 174).
The moment of disembarkation reflects, in Van Gennep’s terms (2005: 21), the separation phase of the mourning ritual, as indicated in Ayla’s observation of the moment of arrival: »People have a chance to pay their respect.« To Diana* it seemed significant to mention that in the case of the 17-year-old, it was the crew who carried the dead body from the ship in a final act of care and physical touch, before handing the body over to Italian authorities. However, what happens to the body after this moment remains unclear to the activists and me. All activists emphasized the limitations of agency in the moment of disembarkation. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the story of the arrival at Lampedusa depicted above, it is possible that the presence of NGOs has a positive impact on the situation by transforming the corpse into a »matter of care« (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 117). To the NGOs, the disembarkation marks the end of both the practical care-giving to the body and the encounter, but, as implied by the continuous mourning, it is not the end of their respons-ability. Instead, the encounter inspires long-term political engagement and care relations between activists, the deceased, their families, and the »living dead« (Mbembe 2003: 40) who are still affected by the same necropolitical violence which, so routinely, causes death.
In this paper, I demonstrated how deathcare enables the dead to bear testimony to necropolitics in the Mediterranean. By providing deathcare, SAR NGOs—but also survivors and family members—make the dead visible and affirm relations with them. By doing so, they not only challenge the necropolitical regime but also render empirical research about necropolitical structures—like this one—possible. Activists resist the necropolitical imperative of abandonment. Instead, they affirm relations they were never meant to have in the normalized necropolitical routine of letting die. Their deathcare confirms the radical relationality between all critters. It thus becomes an act of resistance against necropolitics in the border regime, carrying transformative potential in solidarity with survivors, the dead, and their families.
Analyzing care within a necropolitical border regime has been productive in two ways: First, focusing on deathcare makes necropolitical structures and how they function through neglect and abandonment empirically tangible. Second, it highlights the inherently political nature of care, underscoring its subversive potential and the disobedient agency of the dead. In this paper, I explored deathcare as a practice of SAR NGOs that let the dead speak. Listening to what they say and acting accordingly remains an ongoing, open task.
The fieldwork was made possible thanks to the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft at the University of Bonn.
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