Performing geographies of disappearance: migration and the case of the Saharan knowledge claim

Abstract

This article explores the performativity of data practices and knowledge claims regarding migratory death and disappearance. Engaging with Science and Technology Studies inspired migration research, it assesses the political contestedness and the performative effects of knowledge practices on migration. Data practices do not simply measure, reflect or represent a self-evident reality ‘out there’ but are deeply entangled in the making of migration realities that are acted upon, including by states and international organizations. In the article, based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews, a specific knowledge claim is analysed. Namely, the claim that more ‘people on the move’ die when seeking to transit the Saharan desert than when trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. By tracing the emergence and circulation of this claim in the epistemic community of international organizations and in the context of heightened post-2015 migration anxiety in Europe, the article shows how the claim helped perform the Sahara as a geography of disappearance where a messy, dangerous and deadly migration reality required governmental intervention and taming. Echoing colonial imaginaries of the desert as a space of emptiness, unknowingness and danger, the claim underwrote justifications for humanitarian deterrence where, in the name of saving lives, cross-desert movements needed to be prevented by further securitizing and bordering the Sahara.