More than 6,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean since 2014 (IOM, 2020a). When the number of disappeared is included the figure rises as high as 19,803, about half of all those reported dead or missing while crossing a border on land or sea globally (IOM, 2020b). The devastating death toll has led some to describe the Mediterranean as ‘a macabre death-scape’ (Heller and Pezzani, 2017), the ‘world’s deadliest border’ (Albahari, 2015) or one of the largest ‘mass graves’ in European history (Center for Political Beauty, 2015).

In an effort to contain the high death toll, the European border and coastguard agency Frontex established a dense web of geospatial intelligence, comprised of remote sensing devices, satellite imaging and real-time tracking technology for the dual purpose of intercepting migrant vessels and assisting bodies in need. Combined with the calculative capacities of big data and algorithmic computing, this pervasive regime of scopic possibilities allows for the real-time tracking of maritime movements and conjures up matrices of ‘situational awareness’ that promise to render the sea governable and transparent for the purpose of stopping smuggling activity and irregular border crossings. Humanitarian agencies, activists and people smugglers are simultaneously experimenting with the possibilities of real-time earth observation, pursuing objectives quite distinct from the Frontex surveillance regime.

Measured by the sheer volume of data generated by humanitarian agencies, activists and border security, it is fair to suggest that irregular migration constitutes one of the best-mapped ‘crises’ in the history of humanitarianism. And yet looking at the amount of information available on dead and missing bodies, it is startling to realise that little to no reliable data exist. It is not known how many bodies are never retrieved from the sea and thus these bodies become unavailable, either for counting or identification (Laczko et al., 2017). Between 1990 and 2013, the majority of those who washed up on Europe’s shores remain largely unidentified (Binnie and Kambas, 2016; Last et al., 2017).

This chapter interrogates the key factors contributing to the critical gaps and blind spots within the maps of Europe’s alleged migration ‘crisis’. Drawing on intersectional analysis and post-humanist, feminist thinking, I assess how logics of utility, cost effectiveness and securitisation articulate and reproduce the logics of racialisation, subalternity and enclosure that are constitutive of the ways dead and missing migrants become readable, visible and intelligible in humanitarian border regimes. Born out of critical feminist theory, intersectional analysis (Crenshaw, 1991) examines how apparently value-free, bureaucratic processes such as counting, mapping and data extraction (re)distribute violence unevenly across populations, amplifying possible harms for those who are already targeted on multiple levels at once, such as race, class, gender, ethnicity and able bodied-ness (Grosfoguel et al., 2014). Relayed back to the context of digital mapping, this involves interrogating how targeted exclusions and power asymmetries are amplified, reformulated and/or reproduced by digital infrastructures as they diffract unifying signifiers such as race, class, gender, age or ethnicity across sociotechnical, legal and political registers and domains. Their combined impact has produced a new underclass of ‘datafied’ subjects – digital subalterns – that are kept outside the political and symbolic order and whose inaudibility is a direct result of their ambivalent standing within registers of security and the state. The absence of dead and missing migrants on Europe’s crisis maps is indicative of a double rejection and denial. It bespeaks a radical rejection of the ethical and political responsibilities towards floating bodies that defy the political authority of the state, while at the same time denying their material agency to give testimony and to speak their own truths.

Empirically this chapter draws on a purposeful sample of (big) data sets and visualisations generated by the main organisations governing irregular migration in the Mediterranean, most notably the European Union (EU) border and coastguard agency Frontex, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Additional material was gathered from operational reports, workshop proceedings and semi-structured interviews with staff members of all the above-mentioned organisations, representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), national coastguards and Frontex officials at the international border management and security conference SHADE in Rome, 2018. This eclectic mix of sources allows for a layered analysis of how the conflicting interests of humanitarian actors, security and border policing and activists intersect with the materiality of legal, political, technoscientific rationalities and environmental conditions to extend the border as political space and epistemic practice deep into the operational scripts of contemporary data regimes. In line with this approach the main emphasis will be on the non-linear transition of the corporeality of migrant bodies into map data and the particular modes of silencing, objectification and foreclosure or subordination that this entails.

Situating border deaths in the Mediterranean

Mapping dead and missing migrants poses a series of intractable challenges. It confronts humanitarian agencies, activists and border security with the difficult task of accounting for bodies that are no longer immediately present or that have reached a stage of decomposition in which they cannot be easily identified. There is no system in place to report migrant fatalities in any systematic and reliable fashion. Many bodies are never found or recovered from open waters and even if they are discovered, it can take years before their identity is established (Laczko et al., 2017). This is in part due to the clandestine nature of irregular border crossings. They are designed to be untraceable and to disguise the point of departure and identity of those involved. Migrants and refugees do not carry passports or any other personal identifiable information in the hope that this will protect them from being sent back if intercepted by border patrols. This severely complicates the process of attaching a name, place of origin and surviving relatives to those who die or go missing. Doing so requires lengthy and tedious forensic investigations in which unique identifiers such as DNA samples, dental records and other authenticating details are collected and compared with data from a time before the presumed death (Grant, 2015; Mediterranean Missing, 2016; Pinchi et al., 2017). Few coroners or medical examiners from the local municipalities along the Greek, Italian or Turkish coastline are prepared, or equipped, to conduct such a demanding task due to a lack of financial resources and technical expertise (Last et al., 2017; Pinchi et al., 2017).

The chance of retrieving corpses lost beneath the waves is even smaller. Doing so demands specialist instruments such as transport vessels with human refrigerators and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), which marine control offices and national coastguards of EU border states can rarely afford (Kovras and Robins, 2016; Pinchi et al., 2017). This leaves search and rescue teams, fishermen and survivors of shipwrecks as the only first-hand source available to humanitarian agencies and activists for documenting fatalities. Yet, given the traumatic circumstance of their journey, survivors may not always remember the exact number of fellow travellers or may not be in a position to be interviewed at all. As a result, the current death toll circulated by activists and humanitarian agencies varies greatly. While IOM reported a total of 17,589 by the end of 2018 (Kovras and Robins, 2016; Pinchi et al., 2017), activists such as United for Intercultural Action (2018) or Fortress Europe (2016) count 34,361 and 27,382 for the time periods of 1993–2018 and 1988–2016 respectively. These rather striking differences can be explained by the different time periods measured, but they also result from the fact that each group builds on its own unique set of secondary sources. These include official records from national coastguards and medical examiners, media reports, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups to verify and supplement survivor and eyewitness accounts.

The uncertainty created by the gross variation in the migrant death count challenges the idea of the Mediterranean as a transparent and governable space that Frontex likes to imagine in its annual mission reports (Frontex, 2018). It exposes the ‘patchy visibility’ at play in the real-time tracking of movements across borders, bringing a critical remainder of blind spots and ‘shadow zones’ (Tazzioli, 2015, p. 5) to the fore. At the same time, it has left migrants in an ambivalent state of ‘known unknowns’ – an amorphous mass of muted bodies, without name or identity – visible only through their last recorded geopolitical location and vague descriptions of the immediate circumstances of their deaths. Such circumstantial evidence can certainly reveal changing patterns and trends once they are aggregated into statistical charts, flow diagrams and situational maps, yet they also leave behind what Lahoud (2014) calls an ‘excess of variables’ without clear designation, opening up ‘a natural reserve of complication’ that can be exploited and mobilised for various political agendas and aims. For Frontex, they provide a convenient backdrop to underline the success of their own rescue operations and to legitimise the increasing militarisation of Europe’s borders under the pretext of saving lives and preventing future deaths (European Council, 2019; Frontex, 2019). For intergovernmental organisations such as UNHCR and IOM, on the other hand, these knowledge gaps open up ample space to affirm their position as central clearing houses of politically sensitive information and to use their first-hand access to survivors and eyewitnesses of clandestine border crossings for developing new projects that further strengthen their authority as data brokers in global migration governance (IOM, 2014).

The increasing monopolisation over migrant data by intergovernmental organisations has become a source of much frustration among humanitarian activists, such as UNITED, Fortress Europe or WatchTheMed (WTM), who have been counting the human cost of ‘irregular’ migration since the early 1990s, long before IOM arrived on the scene. They openly criticise the organisation for depoliticising their work by making the phenomenon more knowable, predictable and hence governable in the interest of affected states (Heller and Pezzani, 2013). Data on ‘irregular’ migration, in their view, do not merely describe a pre-existing social reality, but rather contribute to its existence. In Heller and Pezzani’s (2013, p. 292) words: ‘If the border only exists in its violation, the latter must first be detected, either by human perception or by its various technological extensions’. Against this, activists draw on a variety of open-source tools and crowdsourced geospatial intelligence to produce their own set of ‘counter-maps’ and ‘counter-statistics’ as part of a wider political project to shame European states into action and change their asylum and border policy. While ambitious in their political aims, these lobbying activities did little to release the dead and missing from their liminal status as ‘known unknowns’, much less to reinstate their agency to speak on their own behalf. Instead, the activist maps merely added another version of truth to the conflicting ‘knowledge ecology’ (Heller and Pezzani, 2013, p. 291) surrounding ‘irregular’ border crossings in the Mediterranean. Thus rendering the voice, recognition and visibility of migrants contingent on the variously differentiated definitions of border death and the struggle of where to situate it in the political geography of Europe that divide humanitarian agencies, activists and European states.

Frontex, for example, does not count border deaths per se, instead they record only those they encounter in search and rescue and security missions in which their own forces are involved. IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (IOM, 2014), on the other hand, counts all deaths at external state borders or those that occur during migration towards an international destination. However, IOM does not include those who die after their arrival in Europe, that is, in immigration detention facilities, refugee camps and asylum homes, or after deportation to their homeland. Also excluded are deaths connected with a migrant’s irregular status, such as labour exploitation or lack of access to free health care. Activists, by contrast, include a variety of instances far away from the European border, such as in the Sahara desert on the way to the Libyan coast, but also deaths in detention centres inside Europe, which IOM and Frontex do not count. Migrant deaths, in this view, do not follow territorial or legal definitions of the border, but instead include the sum total of deaths that emerge as an effect of Europe’s bordering practices and their dissemination into other states (Heller and Pécoud, 2018, p. 9). Thus, while the death count of Frontex and IOM reinscribes the border as a central organising principle for safe and controlled migration and accepts border deaths as an unintended consequence of protecting the national interests of European states, the activists’ maps stand firmly in line with their wider political project to delegitimise bordering practices as a technology of containment and undue restriction of human mobility. Yet each map, in its own way, projects a universal experience of harm upon the singularity of dead and missing corpses and in doing so converts the power to look into a self-legitimising mandate to speak on their behalf.

Death as geopolitical location

The conflicting interests and mandates undergirding the death count of irregular migration renders the bodies of dead and missing migrants as highly contested geopolitical locations where fundamentally opposed concepts of human mobility and the border collide. To speak of the body as location in this context is to recall the inherent instability and situatedness of knowledge and vision and to stress their inherent entanglement with historically distinct relations of power and privilege. Maps, just like any form of representation, always speak from particular places, not just in a geographic sense but also with regard to onto-epistemic (dis)positions that determine who gets to speak, on what terms and to what effect (Barad, 2003; Gajjala, 2013; Haraway, 1988). Attempting to relay this inherent partiality of knowledge into an emancipatory project, feminist scholars have long insisted on the body as the primary locus of political definition and self-definition, mobilising it for ‘a politics of location’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 589) from which one’s partial perspective can be enunciated and reclaimed. As Petra Hinton (2014, p. 101) writes, in emphasising the historical and political specificity and substance of what it means to be a woman, a refugee or migrant, feminist scholarship has aimed at disrupting the myth of objectivity and disembodied viewing that has been constitutive for Western epistemology and science, revealing the sexual, cultural and historical determinations that produce objects, environments, subjects and bodies while successfully obscuring the mechanisms of silencing and marginalisation that they engender and sustain. In the words of Donna Haraway (1988, p. 585), a pioneer of feminist critiques in science and technology studies, ‘vision is always a question of the power to see and the violence implicit in our visualizing practices’. Both operate in hegemonic spaces that ground knowledge in the disembodied fantasy of seeing everything from nowhere and that allow a distancing of the knowing subject from the world, ‘purging the marked body from all elements of subjectivity’ (Agostinho, 2019, p. 5). Against this backdrop the activist maps appear equally complicit in the silencing of dead and missing migrants, just as the mappings of Frontex and IOM do. Their ambition to resituate ‘the space of death’¹ by turning the surveillant gaze of the state against itself merely stabilised the matrix of intelligibility that read the human cost of irregular border crossings from a disembodied view of nowhere, in pursuit of political projects that left the migrant’s own partial perspective invisible and foreclosed. What is more, by recording migrant deaths primarily on the basis of their last known geolocation, the activists, just like Frontex and IOM, ended up spatialising death in ways that reified the territoriality of the current geopolitical order, in so far as they read the material substance of the dead and missing solely in relation to the state and the expansive geography of its border regime. What was lost on the way was the potential to rewrite the map from the viewpoint of the dead and missing migrant body itself – not as a fixed or bounded essence – but as a multiplicity, a scattered and diffracted presence, stretched across various spatial, temporal and affective registers and locales. Admittedly, the extensive notion of border deaths in the activists’ account is a first important step in this direction. Not least because it successfully extends ‘the space of death’ to the full spectrum of localities where migrants may have died or disappeared. But the activists’ determination to condemn the political violence of the border ended up evidencing, above all, the interests of the state, without reinstating the fractured voice of the migrant as political space and location in its own right. The rather tragic irony here is that these effects unfold against a backdrop of a radical decentring of power in the field of vision. New sensory devices and remote viewing techniques have opened up a whole new spectrum of frequencies for engaging with forms of intelligence and modes of speech that have previously been inaccessible to humans or disavowed. Scholarship on this extended field of sensibilities (Bratton, 2014; Hansen, 2014) has shown how the datafication of ever-more aspects of the world enables insights into the basic building blocks of life and the planet (i.e. climate change, subatomic activity or the biophysicality of the body), which far exceed the capacity of human perception, opening up ways of knowing, understanding and interacting with domains of experience that would otherwise be foreclosed.

The fact that hardly any of these possibilities are currently utilised for the search and retrieval of dead and missing migrants calls for a critical review of the particular modes of silencing and erasures that take place in the non-linear transition between the materiality of the body and their data proxies and how they may reify, reproduce, but also transform long-standing patterns of structural inequality, racialisation and targeted exclusions inherited from historical knowledge regimes. What is clear from the above is that databased vision has added new layers of complexity to the politics of location inhered in digital mappings. It allows new actors to make use of maps and to insert alternative visions into the geo-/biopolitics of knowledge production, while at the same time diffracting the objectifying force of ‘disembodied viewing’ (Haraway, 1988) into a highly decentralised and distributive operation, with the effect that the question of who or what does the seeing and from what location becomes increasingly less clear. Before demonstrating how this decentring of visuality is implicated in the silencing and delegitimation of migrant bodies in the Mediterranean, I want to spend a few moments laying out some conceptual contours for this new post-human visual regime.

The material agency of digital crisis maps

Maps are never value free but operate in historically situated fields of power that give them political efficacy and value (Blomley, 2003; Elden, 2010; Harley, 1989). As such they cannot be separated from the rules, tastes or technical abilities of societies that produce them, nor from the geo- and biopolitical effects they have when they are used (Bargues-Pedreny, 2019). Humanitarian maps are no exception in this regard. They may be presented as purely utilitarian, free from political or economic interests, but as Specht and Feigenbaum (2018, p. 1504) contend, whatever their political context, method or motif, humanitarian maps can never escape their embodiment in military technology, whose conventions of seeing are firmly rooted in practices of containment, persuasion and oppression that defined modern-colonial knowledge regimes. Therefore, humanitarian maps at best fail to represent the plurality and fluidity of emergent crises and at worst further malign the interests of security or humanitarian agencies. Specht and Feigenbaum’s (2018) critique draws attention to the critical role of operational rationalities and infrastructural arrangements in the performativity of digital maps. Their reliance on satellite imagery, crowdsourcing volunteers and geographic information software (GIS) makes the mapping of crises and catastrophes dependent on platforms, filters and geocodes designed by non-local actors (i.e. international space agencies, commercial satellite operators or platform monopolies such as Google), all of whom bring their own terms and conditions to bear on what appears and what is written out of the map (Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018). Therefore, crisis maps operate in a long-standing tradition of scopic regimes that have successfully harnessed visuality for control and profit (Sheppard, 2015), embedding their utility within wider power differentials of political economy. And yet, following Sheppard (2015), while the impulse towards exerting visual power through the disciplinary and territorial deployment of maps may still resonate, the instantaneity of satellite imaging and ubiquitous earth observation has also added new layers of instability to mapping practices that come with their own flavour of objectification and immanence.

The seamless integration of real-time GIS with locative media and algorithmic computing has given way to a knowledge politics in which maps, as an ‘external’ cognitive artefact, connect human reasoning with computational methods such that inherited distinctions between time and space, observer and observed, map and territory, are becoming increasingly blurred (Brantner, 2018; see also Sutko and de Souza e Silva, 2011). Thus, the surface appearance of the world, to paraphrase Bargues-Pedreny (2019, p. 3899), no longer provides a stable referent for modelling space and topological relations, much less for identifying change and distributions across space and time. Social, political and economic processes are increasingly studied on the basis of data sources that are only remotely connected to their underlying object, with the intention to reveal new patterns, tendencies and relations by selectively assembling previously unrelated data points (Amoore, 2011; Clough et al., 2015). Hence, digital maps, as Bargues-Pedreny (2019, p. 3895) writes, no longer intend to grasp the world as an object that can be held in place, claimed or governed. Instead, they are mapping specific aspects and correlations that can be flexibly reconfigured into infinitely variable descriptions of the world.

This inextricable entanglement of data, space and world introduces a whole new range of actors and agencies into the struggle over how to see where to situate the partiality of embodied perspectives, decentring the loci of power and accountability. This diffraction of visual agency becomes ever-more pertinent as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision are increasingly reconfiguring the world in their own image, independent of the preoccupations of human perception, aspirations and aims. They confront us with a kind of ‘autonomous visuality’ (Sheppard, 2015, p. 2), an active, non-localisable perceptual system that opens up new possibilities for the production of difference and the patterning of behaviours, while at the same time enrolling new political spaces of exclusion, delegitimation and erasure in geocoded space-times. These self-referential, generative capacities invest digital infrastructures with critical agentive possibilities that simultaneously enact and represent objects, designs, bodies and environments on the basis of values they themselves engender. That is, geographic coordinates and location tags but also demographic codes or ethnic and genetic markers, thereby converting bodies into material-semiotic nodes (Haraway, 1988, p. 595) that allow for the realignment of experiential surfaces along techno-political heuristics, such that logics of racialisation, dehumanisation and enclosure easily diffuse deep into the operational rationality of digital maps.

With this in mind, digital mapping technologies can be understood as powerful ontological machines, which variously position living and non-living forms in relation to their environment and other modes of being. Such positionings are not reducible to discourse and representation, but unfold as ‘productive materialisations’ (Clough et al., 2015, p. 157) of data relations that reconfigure and redraw the physical and the symbolic boundaries of objects, places and bodies in ways that hold their position within the normative registers of nature–culture, human–non-human distinctions in a state of continuous ontological uncertainty and flux. Such an approach demands to assess the normativity of digital maps across the full spectrum of materialities that constitute the ‘facticity’ of the body (Young, 2005, p. 16), including socio-economic and environmental conditions, as well as technoscientific, legal and political practices and arrangements, all of which sustain the dialectics of recognition through which digital maps produce their techno-existential effects.

The critical task for the remainder of this chapter will be to discuss how these non-linear transitions of the facticity of the body into and out of data affect the way dead and missing corpses become visible, readable and intelligible as subjects of legal and moral protection able to make their voice and presence count and heard.

The violence of non-identification

The recovery and forensic investigation of natural disaster victims and mass casualties has greatly benefited from advanced imaging technologies, such as panoramic cameras, ground-penetrating radars, surface laser scanners or photography in the near ultraviolet (UV) spectrum (Urbanováa et al., 2017). When combined with drones, underwater robotic devices or the real-time earth observation capacities of satellite systems, these tools can create a critical resource for the search and collection of drowned bodies from deep seas and other inaccessible terrains. The recovery operations after major crashes such as the 2009 Air France plane crash in the Atlantic or the Malaysian Airlines accident in the Indian Ocean in 2014 both involved the use of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), equipped with colour video cameras and long-range sonar scanners, capable of detecting scavenged and decomposed corpses on seabeds that would be unsafe or unfeasible for humans to search (Ellinghama et al., 2017). Similarly, oceanographic forecast models can now be used to predict the resurfacing of drowned corpses that remained undetected during ROV missions. This requires combining weather data with forensic research about the main oceanic factors that lead sunken bodies to resurface from the sea (Ellinghama et al., 2017, p. 230).

Yet, none of these possibilities has so far been mobilised for the recovery of dead and missing corpses in the Mediterranean, bar three notable exceptions: the two shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, on 3 and 11 October 2013, which left 639 people dead (Molinario, 2014), and mass casualties off the coast of Libya in April 2015, among whom 700 people died (Mediterranean Missing, 2016). In each instance big navy vessels with submarine robots were deployed to recover corpses lying 370 metres beneath the surface, which were then carried on land with large transport barges properly equipped with liquid nitrogen refrigeration systems. The total cost of this operation amounted to 9.5 million euros, paid for by the Italian government (Pinchi et al., 2017). The high death toll of these accidents drew a lot of media attention, which may explain why such exceptionally vast infrastructure resources were made available (Mediterranean Missing, 2016).

The cost involved in using high-end underwater equipment on a regular basis is certainly one reason why it is only mobilised in rare circumstances. And yet, when compared with the overall budget made available for the surveillance infrastructure of Frontex, it becomes possible to see involvement of the wider political economy. The EU has earmarked a budget of 2.2 billion euros for the 2021–7 period, which will enable Frontex to hire 10,000 core operational staff and purchase its own equipment, such as vessels, surveillance drones and vehicles, available to be deployed at all times and for all necessary operations (European Commission, 2018). This is a major boost for the operational capacities of the agency that has so far relied on the support of air, sea and land assets volunteered by EU member states. Frontex currently commands a fleet of 22 ships, equipped with night-vision instruments and military radars, as well as medium-range, long-endurance drones, which stream real-time observational data to Frontex’s central control room in Warsaw (Frontex, 2018). Additional surveillance capacities, such as satellite images, flow monitoring and big data mining instruments for predictive trend analyses, are made available through the European Space Agency (ESA) (ESA, 2017, 2018). Finally, the automated identification systems (AIS), used for commercial cargo tracking, are also an integral part of Frontex’s situational awareness regime. These pervasive scopic possibilities are almost exclusively put in the service of securitisation, that is, for combatting ‘criminal’ activity and ‘irregular’ border crossings and not for identifying migrant vessels in distress or for recovering dead bodies lost at sea.

From the viewpoint of law enforcement this selective deployment of machine vision follows a strictly utilitarian logic. The dead are of no value for the purpose of border policing. They are no longer perceived as an acute threat, and hence there is little to gain from knowing how many people died and where or who they are. It is those who facilitate the journey – human smugglers and their middle men or possible survivors – who are of central concern. IOM, on the other hand, has put the use of state-of-the-art mapping technologies and big data at the centre of its mission to facilitate safe and humane migration by way of knowledge provision, humanitarian assistance and the coordination of international cooperation in migration management. The agency commands similar privileged access to the real-time flow monitoring and remote data-tracking capabilities of ESA. But it also maintains its own Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC) that compiles all available information into two open data portals: the Migration Data Portal (GMDAC, 2019), dedicated to the mapping and analysis of general trends in global migration, and the Missing Migrant Project (IOM, 2019), which tracks the number of migrant fatalities around the world. Drawing on these rich data resources, IOM has produced a series of reports (Ardittis and Laczko, 2017; Brian and Laczko, 2016; Laczko et al., 2017) that highlight critical gaps and weaknesses in the current state of information about migrant fatalities, stressing in particular the lack of systematic data collection on the dead and missing that would ensure the identification of nameless bodies and allow for their proper burial or return to their families. The reports also make practical suggestions for improvement. Most notably there is a global database for collecting and exchanging post- and ante-mortem data, including DNA samples and personal identifiable information such as body marks, clothes and personal items, to support migrant families searching for lost relatives. Yet up until this point IOM has not been able to secure the necessary funding for such a global exchange platform, nor has it been able to promote a steady and effective data exchange between its member states. Part of this has to do with IOM’s weak institutional mandate, which severely limits the amount of pressure it can exert (Pécoud, 2018).

Unlike UNHCR, which operates on the basis of internationally recognised, humanitarian principles and laws such as the 1951 Geneva Convention, IOM cannot rely on a clear, internationally agreed political agenda to enforce policies, recommendations and demands (Pécoud, 2018, pp. 1626, 1632). This requires IOM to carefully balance its ambitions with the priorities and interests of national governments, on whose collaboration and financial support it depends (Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010; Geiger, 2018; Heller and Pécoud, 2018; Pécoud, 2018, p. 1627). A special issue in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (Pécoud, 2018) summarised IOM’s ambivalent position as follows:

In my own interview with IOM, the project coordinator for the Missing Migrants Project readily admits that the organisation’s efforts to improve the quality of data on dead and missing migrants are severely compromised by the hesitancy of affected states to invest in the systematic documentation of migrant death. However, this reluctance is not only a lack of political will but also a shortage of financial resources and technical expertise. Stefanie Grant (2016, pp. 64–5), senior researcher on human rights of the dead, described the main factors preventing a proper information management of migrant deaths in no uncertain terms:

The most pertinent problems in this regard are the lack of forensic expertise, insufficient morgue and cemetery space, inadequate procedures and lack of collaboration between local municipalities, police forces, international organisations and home states. Added to that is the profound lack of trust and the fear of migrant families to engage with state institutions and the police, which often prevents them from requesting or providing information about their relatives, even if a proper system was in place.

The combined impact of mistrust, lack of cooperation and conflicting political, financial and strategic priorities and potentials has resulted in a striking imbalance between the level of detail and amount of data made available through the interpellating gaze of securitisation and policing, and the quality and depth of knowledge generated through a careful examination of the individual migrant body, up to a point where these gaps and blind spots take on profound racialising and dehumanising effects in their own right. This structural impossibility for the experiential surface of the body to speak for itself not only disintegrates the dead into a scattered assemblage of data fragments, spread across legal, political and administrative registers, but it has left the migrant body by and large unreadable and unrecognisable as an historical subject and also as a subject of legal and moral protection and care.

Simone Brown (2009) coined the notion of ‘digital epidermalisation’ to describe the dehumanising effects of technologies that cast certain kinds of bodies outside the order of normalcy on the basis of calculations of the textures of the skin. Her work builds on the alienating effects of biometric devices, i.e. electronic finger printing, face-recognition software or iris scans, but the notion of digital epidermalisation equally applies to forensic data and crisis maps. Building on Fanon (1967), epidermalisation provides a way of thinking about the ontological insecurity of the racialised body as it experiences its ‘being through others’ (Brown, 2009, p. 133). Brown (2009) explains that this dissociation between self and world is experienced not least through the skin – a porous surface perceptive to touch. Calculating its texture into an abstract matrix of plot points mapped against normative templates or grids conjures up a visual economy of recognition in which variously charged registers of alienation – race, gender, age, ethnicity, migration – can become the measuring stick for rendering some bodies as deviant or lacking, and hence to deny their social and political relevance. In Browns words (ibid.): ‘The body is dissected, fixed, and woven out of a thousand details, anecdotes and stories, denied its specificity’ and hence cast outside the political and symbolic order, the paradigmatic position of ontological insecurity (see also Fanon, 1967).

The selective reading of dead and missing migrants into and out of data, and indeed the refusal to verify their identity as such, can equally be read as an ontological displacement, albeit in the opposite direction. Here it is the refusal to make contact and to establish a connection with the experiential surface of skin, as embodied locality of the migrant’s subjectivity, that becomes the point of dehumanisation and displacement. It reveals a new face of racialisation, subalternity and erasure peculiar to contemporary data regimes. It conjures up an arithmetic of skin in which certain deaths no longer register and that renders them outside of existence, or outside the spectrum of humanity.

This structural abandonment is not a systemic glitch nor is it reducible to inefficiency or lack of funds. It is integral to the biopolitical calculus of migration and the violence of the humanitarian border regime at large. It has locked dead and missing migrants into an ambivalent state of ‘absent presences’ that powerfully evokes Spivak’s (2010) notion of the ‘subaltern’ – as the one placed outside the symbolic order – defined above all by its inability to speak on its own terms. Subalternity, it is worth remembering, is not an incapacity or impossibility to speak, but a failure of speech, the inability to register one’s voice within the surplus of reason that always already laid out the terms and conditions of speech in advance (Sunder Rajan, 2010). Relayed back to the specific context of digital speech – by way of mapping and datafication – this denial of enunciation is not a function of discourse or targeted exclusions on the level of populism and ideology, but needs to be understood through the non-linear transitions of the facticity of the body into and out of data and the specificity of muteness and inaudibility this affords.

Conclusion

The proliferation of real-time mapping and surveillance technologies in the management of ‘irregular’ migration is indicative of the increasing securitisation of the Mediterranean, both as a political and humanitarian space but also as a moral location. It reflects a critical shift in the biopolitics of ‘surplus populations’ that calls long-standing ethical commitments and legal obligations into question, or renders them entirely obsolete. The criminalisation of NGOs that have rescued migrants in recent years has shown that the commitment to indiscriminate search and rescue operations at sea can no longer be taken for granted, nor is the principle of unconditional assistance and non-refoulement of persons seeking asylum consistently met. This is even more surprising as digital mapping technologies have enhanced the possibilities for pre-emptive seeing and risk calculations to an unprecedented scope and scale. In this chapter I have tried to show how this political space of calculability silently inscribes the border deep into the operational logic and protocols of crisis mapping that delegitimises the muted migrant body as a subject of moral and legal protection and care. The strategic misrecognition is indicative for the new faces of subordination afforded by datafication. It has produced a new underclass of datafied subjects – digital subalterns – whose unreadability and inaudibility directly reflect their ambivalent legal and political standing within the humanitarian bordering regimes.

The problem cannot be resolved on the level of rights to datafication. Existing principles and frameworks in international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international criminal law and international maritime law all confer rights on the dead, in particular the right to be identified after death. None, though, refers specifically to the treatment of the dead in the context of irregular migration (Ampuero Villagran, 2018, p. 10; Grant, 2016, p. 1). This resulted in a highly uneven recognition of state responsibilities towards drowned and deceased corpses, enabling European governments to draw a clear distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Read in context with the historical power asymmetries and inequalities that continue to define the (post-)colonies of the South, one could say that the selective recognition of ethical and legal principles and obligations implicitly makes the figure of the citizen and by extension ‘whiteness’ and Europe as the invisible measuring stick to determine whose deaths matter and how they are made to count. In this regard, the systemic non-identification of migrant bodies can be read as the result of a double rejection and denial: as a rejection of the ethical and political responsibilities towards those who openly challenge and undermine the political authority of the border, but also as a denial of the material agency of the racialised Other to give testimony and speak their truths, on their own terms and on their own behalf.

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