Border leakages: counting deaths in the Mediterranean
Bruno Magalhães
28/10/2024 | Reflections
The Mediterranean Sea has become a graveyard for migrants seeking a better life in Europe. When we think of migration-related deaths, our minds often go to the tragic images of overcrowded boats capsizing. But these are just the deaths that make the headlines. Countless more deaths go unrecorded, unrecognized, and ultimately uncounted. As a result of complex and opaque processes of border externalization, many deaths are hidden from official statistics. In this post, I explore the complexity of quantifying migrant deaths, drawing on the concept of "leakage".
The Mediterranean Sea is divided into overlapping maritime zones, including territorial waters, exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and international waters, each governed by different rules. This complex structure makes it difficult to apply the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which was designed for more straightforward, single-zone governance. The overlapping zones create a "marine problem space" that escapes effective control, as no single authority or legal framework can fully regulate the region. This leads to a fragmented and contested maritime environment.
The Mediterranean, as a point of passage and relatively ungovernable space, enables certain leakages and fluidities. It fosters a selective permeability whereby goods move freely while migrants face deadly resistance. As a space, it amplifies the invisibility of migrant deaths that result from border externalization; pushing containment responsibilities onto North African countries, and obscuring the full human costs from European accountability. The sea’s fluidity contrasts with the rigidity of militarized borders. Environmental degradation driven by European demands further fuels migration, creating unseen cycles of displacement. Symbolically, the Mediterranean embodies a duality as both a gateway of aspiration and a graveyard of despair.
The concept of leakage refers to what escapes attempts at counting, controlling, or making visible, particularly in the context of migration and border policies. It reminds us that leaks exist in a complex relationship to containment. As French philosopher Michel Serres puts it in his book The Parasite (page 79), "systems work because they don't work. Non-functioning remains essential for functioning. Every system is a sieve; it leaks.”
The concept of leakage originally comes from Serres, who used it to highlight how systems function by allowing for what escapes or leaks out. In my research, I adopt and adapt this idea, together with Amade M'Charek, to explore how migration policies and border externalization fail to fully account for the hidden human costs—particularly the uncounted and invisible deaths of migrants. This adaptation of Serres' notion helps to push beyond mere numbers and offers a broader critique of how we measure and understand the true impacts of border control.
In my research, I adopt and adapt this concept by examining the hidden costs that the externalization of borders has to migrants beyond visible tragedies. I use 'leakage' to explore how these deaths go uncounted and unrecognized. My hope is to challenge conventional quantification systems that fail to capture the full human costs of externalized border control. This challenge does not dispense with attempts at quantification —which are useful for humanitarian work — but it seeks to rethink these systems for greater accountability. By applying the lens of leakage, my work emphasizes the intersections between migration, environmental degradation, and the politics of invisibility, urging for a broader understanding of border externalization.
Migration, Death, and the Politics of Numbers
The European Union's cooperation with North African countries like Tunisia has pushed the responsibility for containing migration further away from European shores, making migrant deaths less visible and harder to count. Border externalization involves the EU shifting its migration control efforts beyond its borders, outsourcing the management of migration flows to African countries like Tunisia, Libya and Morocco. Through financial and political incentives, the EU engages these nations to intercept migrants, manage detention centers, and conduct surveillance, turning them into buffer zones to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. While this strategy reduces direct migration pressure on EU borders, reports have long noted that it often leads to human rights abuses, as many partner countries lack adequate legal protections and resources. Moreover, as reports have also cautioned, it disperses and obscures EU responsibility for poor detention conditions, unrecorded migrant deaths and violations of asylum rights. Under these conditions, the task of tracing the impacts on individuals seeking safety and better opportunities becomes more complicated.
In Tunisia, soil degradation and pollution from pro-export agriculture are forcing people to abandon their land and seek a better life elsewhere. These environmental pressures, exacerbated by European demand for agricultural products, create a vicious cycle in which people are driven to migrate, only to face death on their journey. Yet, the deaths resulting from these conditions are rarely, if ever, counted as migration-related. They fall through the cracks of quantification systems and challenge our ability to fully grasp the human costs of externalized border policies.
To understand this intersection of migration and environmental degradation, I suggest we can mobilize the concept of leakage.
Leakage
The STS literature on both containment and migration studies on autonomy explore border crossings, yet dialogue between them has been difficult. The concept of leakage might bridge this gap. Both fields focus on boundary-making. STS examines how containment systems, like in Schoot and Mather's study on aquaculture, create boundaries to maintain order. Meanwhile, migration literature, like Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos’ work, highlights how migrants defy borders, turning them into sites of struggle and negotiation.
Containment involves not only physical barriers but also controlling narratives and behaviors, as Hilgartner and Jasanoff & Kim suggest. Similarly, Mezzadra's work shows how borders shape identities, aiming to control migrants, though not always successfully.
The divergence lies in each field’s respective understanding of control. STS sees control as stabilizing complex systems, while migration literature critiques control as domination. For STS, failure is a learning opportunity. For migration studies, however, it represents a breakdown in control; opening space for resistance and new forms of autonomy.
Despite these differences, both literatures could engage through the concept of leakage, as Serres describes. Leakage challenges the idea of borders as strict separations and sees containment and migration as interconnected processes in managing complexity.
Amade M’Charek and I use the concept of 'leakage' to provide a conceptual bridge that helps those interested STS, as well as in migration and borders, to grasp how containment and migration interact—how attempts to contain generate leaks, and how these leaks, in turn, shape the evolution of containment systems. For M’Charek and I, 'leakage' serves as a lens to examine the gaps and oversights inherent in systems designed to manage and regulate movement. The concept refers not simply to uncounted migrant deaths but also to the broader inability of these systems to fully capture and address the complexities of migration. This use of 'leakage' transcends the immediate, pointing towards the fluid and often uncontrollable nature of life that defies rigid boundaries. As M’Charek puts it, this means, “slowing down and accepting that spaces open up even in the midst of an urgency”( Percolating Presence and the Politics of Neglect: Trailing Life and Death in a Postcolonial Landscape (forthcoming)).
At the same time, unlike certain autonomist approaches that can overly emphasize self-determined resistance - to the point of romanticizing it - the notion of leakage also encourages us to appreciate the enduring influence of control structures.
In my research, I adapt 'leakage' to emphasize the hidden impacts that border externalization exerts over migration, such as environmental degradation and the unrecorded deaths along migration routes shaped by EU border policies in North Africa. The Mediterranean Sea becomes a key site where 'leakage' and 'containment' intersect—an (un)governable space that facilitates the smooth passage of goods while simultaneously becoming a site of peril and obscurity for migrants. Here, 'fluidity' captures the selective permeability of the sea, where economic interests glide through with ease, but human movement is constrained and criminalized. The Mediterranean’s dual role as a connector and divider underscores the ambivalent interplay of leakage, exposing the structural failures and the unseen, yet pervasive, costs that elude the grasp of official narratives and statistical frameworks.
Death in Zarzis
The effects of European border externalisation are evident in Tunisia, straining the country’s resources and migration management. These pressures are particularly acute in the coastal town of Zarzis, where the local infrastructure and the community are bearing the burden of Tunisia's role as Europe’s gatekeeper. In Zarzis’s beautiful beaches, the sea washes ashore the bodies of migrants who didn't survive the journey. Yet, many of these deaths go unrecorded. Local activists accuse authorities of burying some bodies in garbage dumps to avoid the hassle of registering them. This practice, they argue, is a direct consequence of externalized border policies that prioritize containment over human dignity.
Fear of Leakage and the Reinforcement of Containment
Leakage also manifests in the ways governments respond to environmental crises. In El Hamma, as contamination from agricultural pollutants worsened, the Tunisian government implemented stringent control measures under the guise of public health. Checkpoints were established, and travel permits were required, effectively trapping people in an increasingly toxic environment. These measures, driven by a fear of leakage—of contaminants, diseases, and ultimately migrants—reinforce containment strategies that prioritize control over care.
Seeds of Resistance: Reclaiming Identity Through Agriculture
In the mountainous region of Tamaghza, a small community of farmers is fighting back against degradation. By reclaiming what they see as native seeds and ancient farming practices, they are striving to restore food sovereignty and resist the pressures that push people to leave their homes. This slow, steady process of reappropriating agricultural knowledge is a form of resistance against migration connected to environmental degradation—a way to plug the leaks that erode their communities.
This slow, deliberate process of reappropriating agricultural knowledge is more than just an attempt to improve crop yields; it is a profound act of resistance. It challenges the broader dynamics that compel people to leave their homes, particularly those related to environmental degradation exacerbated by global economic demands and external agricultural policies. By nurturing biodiversity and enhancing the fertility of their soil through time-tested techniques, these farmers are essentially plugging the 'leaks' that threaten to erode their communities from within—leaks that manifest as lost traditions, diminished self-sufficiency, and the forced migration of their youth. In essence, their efforts represent a reclamation of both land and identity, offering a localized, grassroots counter-narrative to the pervasive forces of displacement and environmental exploitation that characterize much of the region.
Farmer in a seed bank in Tamaghza. Photo by Bruno Magalhães. All permissions granted [Image credit: Bruno Magalhães]
As this story reminds us, migration is driven not just by economic or political factors that can be measured—like poverty rates or conflict—but also by deeply personal and cultural reasons that are hard to quantify. These reasons might include a sense of hope and longing for a better life. These are things that people feel, believe, or aspire to, which don’t fit neatly into data points or statistics. If we only focus on what can be counted, we miss the richness and complexity of human motivations.
Conclusion
The concept of leakage, developed by M’Charek and I, offers a potentially powerful lens through which to examine the hidden costs of externalized border controls. By focusing on what both escapes and reshapes attempts to contain, we can begin to see the full picture of how migration, environmental degradation and border policies intersect. The stories from Tunisia, whether of uncounted deaths in Zarzis, toxic containment in El Hamma, or agricultural resistance in Tamaghza, reveal the deep entanglements of power, visibility and accountability that shape the realities of migration today.
Bruno Magalhães is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. This post was developed based on a paper presented at EASST/4S. It is part of the wider project Vital Elements and PostColonial Moves, directed by professor Amade M'Charek (for more info about the project, please, visit this link). The panel was convened by Fredy Mora Gamez (University of Viena), Karin Krifors(Linkpöning University), Stoyanka Andreeva Eneva (Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia) and Silvan Pollozek(European New School of Digital Studies). More information about the other extremely interesting papers discussed in the panel - including interventions by Nadia Chaouch (University of Genoa), Philipp Seuferling(London School of Economics), Yasmynn Chowdhury (University of Oxford), Jasper van der Kist (University of Antwerp) and Paul Trauttmansdorff (European New School of Digital Studies) - can be found here. Finally I am grateful to the European Research Council for supporting my research through the ERC Advanced Grant (Vital Elements-101055218) led by Amade Aouatef M’charek.
Published: 10/28/2024
