Ecologies of Accumulated Omissions: Witnessing Migrant Disappearances in the Mediterranean
Topics: Human Rights
, Legal Geography
, Political Geography
Keywords: Disappearance, Witnessing, Violence, Law, Migration
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 45
Authors:
Anna Rahel Fischer,
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Abstract
This paper investigates two intertwined “modes” of truth production in the context of migrants’ disappearances in the Mediterranean: legal processes and forensic interventions. Enforced disappearance relies upon the refusal to acknowledge circumstances leading to disappearance, the concealment of fate and whereabouts of the disappeared and the denial of their legal existence referred to as an act of silencing in trials. This paper critically interrogates the nature of this silence - and the possibility of witnessing disappearance - when the right to truth for the disappeared is relegated to an exclusively humanitarian mode of governance. It takes as its pivotal point the accumulated omissions between the legal text, the seascape and fabricated borderlands as what constitutes the effacement of the event of disappearance in migration contexts. Drawing on an ethnography of jurisprudence, this paper aims to understand silence as a constitutive element of liberal law ́s approach to the disappearance of racialized people on the move in the Mediterranean as well as an aspect that drives the outsourcing of responsibility through the weaponization of natural environment in those cases (Sheikh 2018; Heller&Pezzani 2019). As a “perfect crime”, it is argued that these “traceless” disappearances, while constituting a silence, do not constitute a wrong under liberal-humanitarian governance in Jean-François Lyotard's terms (Lyotard 1980). And yet, silence, with its power to suspend hegemonic frames of interpretation holds the potential to disrupt the violent effects that law has unleashed along its colonial-liberal continuum by contesting legally-inscribed exclusive modes of audibility, legibility and perceptibility.
Ecologies of Accumulated Omissions: Witnessing Migrant Disappearances in the Mediterranean
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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