The logic and temporality of the ‘border spectacle’ have dominated public reception of the violence endured by migrants and refugees on their journey to Europe, thus occluding the manifold ways in which daily, silent, slow violence unfolds through the EU border regime. The claim of this essay is that border assemblages are involved in the deployment of spatialized slow violence, especially through what I define as the political production of exposure to the elements. Scholars have shown how geographic and topographic factors are included in the strategies of border control and have become active factors in the policies of deterrence and ‘neo-refoulement’. Building on this work, I elaborate on the mediated agency of the environmental or ‘natural’ forces in the production of border-related violence. This is a violence that expands in space beyond the location of the geographical state border and extends in time beyond the concrete instance of border crossing. Here, sovereign violence operates not only through an unconditional power of death but also through the abandonment and exposure of migrants to the elements and therefore the production of a zone of mere biological survival, while accountability chains are concealed. What in the Western view is understood as ‘nature’ can be produced, mobilized and instrumentalized as an active factor in the infrastructures of border enforcement, producing spatialized forms of slow violence. This operation does not imply, however, that the possibilities of agency and resistance are neglected. Rather, it points to the allegedly neutral dimension of ‘nature’ towards which border struggles are being displaced.

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La desaparición se entiende aquí como la producción de modos de existencia por fuera de los marcos de inscripción sociales y civiles. Se trata de un desacople entre la vida cualificada y la esfera de la mera supervivencia: una vida expuesta, vulnerable, nuda. Esta definición revela una correspondencia íntima con la frontera, instancia en la que la protección de un estado es puesta en suspenso en forma más o menos temporal. La ampliación del espacio de las fronteras en el contexto de las políticas de securitización de la migración, que incluyen la externalización del control así como prácticas disuasorias que empujan a las personas en tránsito a rutas más peligrosas, implica también el ensanchamiento de aquellos espacios que hacen posible la desaparición. La producción de esos espacios se estudia aquí en el caso de las fronteras de la Unión Europea en torno a claves de lectura como movilidad, deriva e intemperie y a partir de las espacialidades de las islas, los mares y el desierto. Se interpretan estos nuevos modos de desaparición como operaciones que tienen lugar mayormente por efecto de estrategias de des-protección y abandono y se analizan las configuraciones del espacio emergentes.

The high number of persons lost, missing, or dead without confirmation of decease in the Euro-Mediterranean in the context of migration and seek of asylum pose a challenge to the technical and conceptual tools available in order to account for their lives. This article explores the reach and possible uses of the category of enforced disappearance. The genealogy of enforced disappearance in Latin America in the 1970s is presented and discussed in terms of its legacies and teachings, like the importance of distinguishing disappearances from deaths. The recent incorporation of “disappearances in context of migration” as a matter of concern in explorative studies of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances is subsequently exposed and analyzed. Indirect, outsourced, or externalized state agency, creation of spaces of abandonment from the states, and emergence of spaces of indeterminacy between life and death are some of the aspects related to migratory routes to Europe tackled by the recommendations of the Working Group. Finally, the text explores the affinity between migrants’ disappearances and other contemporary forms of exclusion or expulsion which may be subsumed under the category of “social disappearances.”