Title
Infrastructural Synergies for Body Identification in Italy: Contesting the Necropolitical Condition of the Central Mediterranean by re-dignifying migrant deaths
Abstract
At Europe’s southern maritime frontier, migrant deaths are simultaneously hyper-visibilised and administratively erased: bodies wash ashore, yet many remain unidentified, inconsistently buried, and unevenly memorialised. This research examines how the bodies of migrant people who die along the Central Mediterranean route to Italy are managed within an identification framework shaped by legal ambiguity, resource scarcity, and political neglect, and asks how these failures affect both the deceased and their families. It further investigates whether and how multi-actor, dignity-centred interventions can “re-dignify” border-death victims.
Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative design combining semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders (including forensic experts, prosecutors, NGOs/associations, and law enforcement) and participant observation conducted through volunteering and technical engagement with DNA-forensics discussions.
The thesis argues that identification is not merely technical or humanitarian, but political, ethical, and relational. It shows how current practices, which are often reliant on prosecutorial discretion, fragmented procedures, and undertrained or under-resourced actors produce lasting harms: unnamed deaths, uneven accountability, and families suspended in uncertainty. At the same time, it documents “infrastructural synergies” in which forensic institutes, local authorities, NGOs, and families sometimes overcome systemic gaps and restore names, stories, and recognition. These synergies, however, remain uneven and crisis-dependent, pointing to the need for institutionalised, adequately funded, and standardised cross-actor networks to make dignified identification the norm rather than the exception.
Keywords
Ambiguous loss; bio-necropolitics; body (non)identification; border deaths; Central Mediterranean; human dignity; humanitarian forensics; memorialisation; multi-actor infrastructural synergies
Author
Clara Aruanno
Universities
Linköping Universitet, Universität Osnabrück