Social Criticism and Political Thought

ABSTRACT: This talk centers on the regime of impunity surrounding migrant deaths, particularly in the Euro-Mediterranean region, by foregrounding two key dimensions of this problem: racialized vulnerability to lethal violence at the borders of states and the complicity of law in the justification of this violence. It develops a phenomenological analysis of migrant deaths as “forced disappearances,” borrowing a term from the human rights framework and reinterpreting it in a series of critical engagements with thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Frantz Fanon.