Undocumented migrants’ deaths at the Mediterranean Sea: A social and political psychological perspective on remembering and mourning

In the last thirty years, thousands of migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea. According to scholars, shipwrecks are far from being accidental. Rather, these deaths correspond to specific strategies having the aim of securitising the European continent. Through politics of frontiers’ militarization, patrolling, and externalization, and by withdrawing or delaying from any safe and rescue operation in the Sea, the Mare Nostrum become a Mare Nullius. The political regime of death, the rhetorical discourse of casualties, and the public anaesthesia surrounding the phenomenon is engaged by a fragmented constellation of civil societies’ groups and individuals. Using interviews with activists and artists, and by retracing the socio-historical context in which the so-called civil fleet emerged, the presentation highlights how the frame of social remembering and mourning drives the constitution of political subjects which try to subvert institutional absence, crack its deadly logic, and trigger wider process of cultural trauma elaboration.