MBEMBEOVA NEKROPOLITIKA I KALKULISANO NAPUŠTANJE NA CENTRALNOMEDITERANSKOJ RUTI: PROSTORNE TEHNOLOGIJE LETALNOSTI
MBEMBE'S NECROPOLITICS AND CALCULATED ABANDONMENT ON THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN ROUTE: SPATIAL TECHNOLOGIES OF LETHALITY

Summary/Abstract: The article develops a precise theoretical-empirical thesis that emerges at the intersection of Achille Mbembe's late conceptual apparatus — necropolitics as the power to dictate “who may live and who must die” extended through his later work on necropolitical spatialities and lethal formations — and the documented trajectory of the central Mediterranean migrant route across the 2019–2023 interval: how is one to analytically understand a configuration in which the mass deaths of migrants do not occur through the classical forms of state killing, but through distributed, administratively deniable mechanisms of structured omission which the formal-legal framework of the EU and its Mediterranean partner states maintains outside the field of clear responsibility? Starting from Mbembe's necropolitical paradigm, the article develops the concept of calculated abandonment as an operative mode of contemporary border necropolitics. The original contribution of the article is the elaboration of the concept through a typology of five recurrent forms: (1) agreement externalised abandonment, through the formal delegation of rescue responsibility to the Libyan and later Tunisian coast guards by means of bilateral agreements; (2) operational architectural abandonment, through the systematic withdrawal of state and EU rescue vessels from Mare Nostrum through Triton to the transition to Irini; (3) criminalising abandonment, through the legal and administrative mechanisms that disable non-state NGO rescue ships; (4) coordinative-deniable abandonment, through the systemic delay and non-response of maritime coordination centres to distress calls in jurisdictional “grey zones”; and (5) legaljurisdictional abandonment, through a structural configuration in which no state assumes jurisdictional responsibility for the deaths occurring across the Mediterranean space. The article argues that calculated abandonment constitutes a distinctive mode of contemporary border lethality that is reducible neither to explicit state killing nor to the incidental consequence of poor coordination, but operates structurally through a distributed and deniable configuration of actors, whose distributed nature is itself the principal feature of its operative efficacy.

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