The Necrotic Face of The European Border Infrastructure: The Left-to-Die Boat

This thesis examines how the European border infrastructure manufactures migrant death in the Mediterranean Sea. To highlight the intentional violence and death that migrants are subject to, practices of (non) assistance are examined from a legal perspective. The case study of the Left-to-die boat, which drifted off for two weeks without assistance and killed 63 people, is then used to demonstrate the enactment of these practices. The data of this case was obtained through the investigation by the Forensic Architecture Research Centre. By redescribing this incident using the theoretical concepts of Necropolitics, the state of exception, and bare life, the narrative is shifted from assigning responsibility and blame to acknowledging that this incident is the product of a necropolitical mode of migration governance. Having international laws that clash with sovereign laws puts the migrants in a state of exception and transforms them into racialized bare lives. The sea then turns into a deathscape where migrants are subject to necropower due to being a superfluous population. These liberal politics of disposability that are fed by colonial and racial imaginations cannot be the source of reform or justice. Instead of continuously adapting laws and policies, the necropolitical world order should be examined, and knowledge from the lived experiences of migrants should be at the centre of this examination. In the end, deaths at sea will only stop when unrestricted movement for all becomes a fundamental human right.