Bio/Necropolitical Capture and Evasion on Africa–Europe Migrant Journeys

Abstract

Introduction

Mebratu¹ left his home country, Eritrea, at the age of 17 because of his upcoming compulsory and unlimited military service obligation. He first crossed the Eritrea–Sudan border. Later, he traveled through the Sahara, from the Sudanese part of the desert to the Chadian part before finally arriving in Libya. His final crossing was from Libyan shores to Malta. Mebratu’s entire journey took more than a year and included crossing three land borders, one sea border, and many spaces of transit, from makeshift camps in the Sahara to militia-controlled confinement spaces in Libya. At the end of the interview, I asked Mebratu to reflect on the experience of his overall journey. He described it as a series of acts of capture by various armed groups and a series of evasive acts on his part. He further noted that even though he had agency (and some “options”), he did not have a real choice other than to evade forces of capture. He explained, “You know they wanted to take us to the military. And we run away you know, like after that we always run.  . . Sahara, as always, we remember, and it’s not easy, this is suffering [. . .] But for me sometimes life is optional, sometimes it is not optional.”

Mebratu’s story shares similarities with other migrants² I interviewed. In different ways, they were all targeted for capture (for purposes including recruitment, ransom, extortion, immobilization, torture, slavery, and sexual violence) by various state and non-state armed groups both in their countries of origin (Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan) and during their long journeys to Europe; they all suffered due to the actions of these groups (from direct acts of violence such as torture and slavery to indirect forms of violence like not providing necessary water, food, medication, and accommodation conditions); and they all found ways to evade these forces of capture through various tactics, ranging from running away, hiding, calculating, and waiting for a good opportunity to escape to psychological survival tactics to ease their suffering such as praying, communicating (sometimes even in silence), thinking about their loved ones, and dissociating themselves from their bodies.

Building on and contributing to literatures on bio/necropolitics, borders/migration, and surveillance, this paper advances the categories of bio/necropolitical capture and evasion to make sense of these migrants’ experiences. Inspired by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and revisions/additions to this concept by Agamben (via his emphasis on thanatopolitics 1998) and Mbembe (via his concept of necropolitics 2019), critical migration/border scholarship focused on diverse bio/necropolitical practices impacting migrants at border crossing zones, camps, and beyond (e.g., Amoore 2006; Vaughan-Williams 2015; Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017; Davitti 2018; Aradau and Tazzioli 2020; Topak 2020; Minca et al. 2022; Stierl and Dadusc 2022). This paper’s categories of bio/necropolitical capture and evasion in Africa-Euro migrant journeys build on and contribute to this framework in three main ways. First, while the existing literature mainly focuses on acts of state officials (such as border guards), building on Mbembe (2019), this paper emphasizes the key role played by various non-state armed groups (including the Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Rapid Support Force [RSF] in Sudan, and particularly the Libyan Coast Guard [LCG] and various other militia/trafficking/mafia groups in Libya) in acts of capture. Second, following and extending Browne (2016), this paper further problematizes the undertheorization of race in Foucauldian conceptions of torture, spectacle, discipline, and surveillance and establishes them as microbio/necropolitical practices of racist violence. It also emphasizes racism as a foundational code of European borders that operates through delegated and opportunistic bio/necropolitical actors in vast spaces of Africa. Third, this paper contributes to the understanding of migrant agency through developing the category of the bio/necropolitics of evasion. It builds on and highlights the significance of Hartman’s (1997) work for understanding migrant agency and defines evasion as not only involving acts of bodily escape (such as running away and hiding) but also various psychological, mental, communicational, and spiritual tactics of survival under extreme conditions of violence.

The paper also contributes to the broad migration literature, which predominantly focuses on migration from one location to another, or migration/border control practices in singular sites (such as a border or detention center). This paper provides a more holistic view of migrants’ long journeys, involving multiple countries, borders, and sites. By doing so, it also highlights persisting patterns of bio/necropolitical capture and evasion despite changing actors and locations. Finally, the paper contributes to the literature on the violence of European border externalization. Critical scholarship observed that European borders diffuse inside Africa, reproducing “colonial matrices of power” (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019, 248) and turning black bodies into borders (Mbembe 2024, 95). This paper highlights the role of non-state and quasi-military actors (particularly the LCG and its militia affiliates in Libya) in European border externalization. Rather than seeing these groups as passive implementers of the EU’s border externalization project, it establishes them as opportunistic actors, incentivized by both the EU and the conflict environment, which prey on transit migrants.

The arguments of this paper are primarily based on fieldwork conducted in Malta³ in late Summer/Fall 2022. In total, I interviewed twenty-four migrants who fled their home countries (Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan)⁴ and irregularly traveled through Sudan, Sahara, Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea, and eventually reached Europe. All interlocutors were men,⁵ and except one (who was over 40 years old), all were between the ages of 20 and 30. All traveled during the period of armed conflict in Libya (2011-), and except one who traveled in 2012/2013, all traveled between 2015 and 2021. In addition, I also interviewed a Sudanese community representative in Malta and gathered secondary sources relevant to the topic (including reports from civil society, human rights, and humanitarian organizations). I initially established connections with migrants who had been active in their communities through migrant community associations and Facebook. I explained the nature of my research, my academic and personal background, and shared some of my earlier writings. I worked with interpreters/research assistants of Eritrean and Somalian origins who had made journeys of their own and had experience working with vulnerable migrants. The research followed the ethics protocol of York University, adapted for situations of forced migration (see Clark-Kazak 2017). Among others, the risk of retraumatization was explained before the interview, and counseling services were offered if needed. Migrants had contact (in some cases ongoing) with mental health care professionals and did not express a need during or after the interviews. While the structural power hierarchies between the researcher (an academic employed at a Global North University) and the interviewees could not be remedied, I encouraged migrants to ask me questions about the project, my previous work, identity, opinions, and positionality (see Dempsey 2018). Given my background as a Middle Eastern (Turkish-Muslim) man who writes on migration and authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, this encouragement led to dialogues about authoritarianism, state violence, Islam, border/migration policies, and the human rights of migrants, refugees, and dissidents. In order to create a safer environment for participation, better protect interviewees’ privacy and anonymity, and minimize the risk of instrumentalization of the research by authorities, I avoided asking questions resembling refugee status determination or police debrief interviews (such as specific personal details,⁶ origin locations, or smuggling/trafficking routes or spaces) and instead focused on migrants’ experiences with capture/evasion and their agency.

Bio/Necropolitical Capture and Evasion

The concept of biopolitics was originally coined by Foucault to explain “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (1978, 140). Despite his major conceptual innovation, Foucault’s overall marginalization of violence in his concept was aptly criticized by Agamben (1998) and Mbembe (2019), who respectively emphasized the thanatopolitical and necropolitical aspects of biopolitics. Agamben positioned the production of bare life by sovereignty as the primary function of biopolitics. He defined bare life as a life without any protections, a life which therefore can be taken without any legal or moral implications (Agamben 1998). Mbembe largely followed Agamben’s argument and introduced the concept of necropolitics, defining it as “the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe 2019, 92). Mbembe’s major contribution was to highlight racial colonial violence and its legacies as constitutive categories of bio/necropolitical practices. In his theory of necropolitics, Mbembe discusses the necropolitical practices impacting racialized bodies both historically and today, from the historical practices of transatlantic slavery and the plantation system to the contemporary practices of “small massacres” (Mbembe 2019, 8), and “the brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people” (Mbembe 2019, 86). In critical migration/border scholarship, scholars inspired by Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe have studied bio/necropolitical practices at and beyond territorial borders. These included interdiction, pushback, and abandonment practices at borderzone spaces; management of migrant lives at various camps, detention, confinement, and “hotspot” spaces; deportation and expulsion of migrants; and datafication and surveillance of migrant bodies at various sites as well as remotely (e.g., Amoore 2006; Vaughan-Williams 2015; Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017; Davitti 2018; Aradau and Tazzioli 2020; Topak 2020; Estevez 2022; Minca et al. 2022; Stierl and Dadusc 2022; Fuentes and Hernández 2023).

This paper’s categories of bio/necropolitical capture and evasion in the context of Africa–Europe migrant journeys contribute to this literature in three main ways. First, through its emphasis on the role of non-state armed groups in bio/necropolitical capture. Second, its reconsideration of Foucauldian conceptions of torture, spectacle, discipline, and surveillance as racialized bio/necropolitical practices. Third, through its emphasis on migrant agency with the category of evasion. To begin with, the existing literature heavily emphasizes state agents (such as border guards, military actors, and camp administrators) as the main actors of bio/necropolitical controls. This emphasis can be explained by the fact that most of these studies focus on practices at Western/Northern borders. Similarly, even though Foucault’s overall theory of governmentality leaves analytical space for including non-state actors, these are meant to be private economic or civil society actors (such as corporations) rather than non-state armed groups. And in Agamben’s theory, despite a strong focus on violent state sovereignty, there is a lack of attention to non-state armed groups as agents of biopolitical violence. It is in Mbembe’s theory, grounded in the realities of African contexts, where there is a strong emphasis on non-state armed actors operating as key agents of necropolitical violence. Mbembe discusses how the “progressive loss of the monopoly of violence” on the part of many African states goes in hand with the rise of non-state armed groups who “acquired capacities for capturing and remobilizing the resources of violence for economic ends, and even capacities to engage in by-the-book warfare” (Mbembe 2019, 35). He further notes that the fights among these groups replace war between states and increasingly harm unarmed civilians (Mbembe 2019, 35–6).

While state actors operate as the main/key actors of bio/necropolitical capture in some contexts (such as in Eritrea, which is ruled by a military dictatorship), in Africa–Europe migrant journeys, non-state armed actors are generally the main/key actors. As Abadir put it in an interview: “It reminded me of Somalia when I arrived to South Sudan, because how the cars and militias were running around.  . . [And later] again in Libya.” Similar to many other Somalians, Abadir was targeted by Al-Shabaab in Somalia for recruitment. He evaded them and fled Somalia, only to encounter many other non-state armed groups in South Sudan, Sahara, and Libya before reaching Europe. These groups indeed “remobilize the resources of violence for economic ends” (Mbembe 2019, 35). They violently target migrants for ransom, extortion, and (sexual) slavery. As Ishag put it in an interview: “For them, you are walking money.”

These actors cooperate with each other on the long route from East/Horn of Africa to Europe. Typically, one armed group hands migrants over to another after receiving or extorting money from them (through the hawala system), and earning a commission from the new group. Then, the new group extorts further money from migrants (or uses/sells them as slaves, especially in Libyan contexts), and hands migrants over to another group, repeating the routine. For some migrants, their work is counted toward their release money, but a release is not guaranteed, and there is always the risk of recapture by another armed group (thus further extortion and slavery). By the time they reach the Mediterranean Sea, migrants have often experienced many instances of capture and recapture by armed groups. Many never even make it to this stage. Migrants can also be captured by quasi-military groups recognized by international actors, such as the LCG. The LCG has been recreated and heavily supported by the EU and Italy for its efforts to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. LCG units, similar to other armed groups that nominally operate under the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), “act as managers of the criminal underworld as much as law enforcers and quasi-governors” (Micallef et al. 2021, 15) and collaborate with smuggling/trafficking/militia groups (UNHRC 2023). Consider the story of Ishag, who, after experiencing many captures and exercising evasion, made it to the Mediterranean Sea on a boat only to be pulled back by the LCG and later sold. As Ishag put it: “Some of them they put . . . to the detention and others they sold . . . It depends on your physical situation. If you are good physically, they sell. When they brought us, there were like 600 persons because they capture many boats that day.”

The cooperation among armed groups sometimes fails, which can lead to even greater bio/necropolitical consequences for migrants (proving Mbembe’s other point that fights among these groups replace war between sovereign states). Barkhad witnessed a fight between Chadian and Libyan armed groups at the transfer point in Sahara that resulted in the Libyan group firing artillery and killing an entire truck full of migrants. In numerous other interviews, migrants told stories of being targeted for capture and extortion by rival militia groups in Libya during their journeys (typically when on their way to the Mediterranean Sea) and how they were caught in the crossfire between militia groups in the Libyan civil war, resulting in many migrant deaths and injuries. These realities challenge the Western-centric versions of biopolitics. While the LCG has appeared in the literature, it did so as a collaborator of European authorities (e.g., Davitti 2018, 1182; Stierl and Dadusc 2022, 1464), and less attention has been paid to analyze how it functions as a quasi-military actor with linkages to various militia/trafficking/mafia groups. Migrants encounter many other non-state, quasi-military, and paramilitary actors in wider African contexts. This reality displays similarities with other Global South contexts. For instance, Fuentes and Hernández examined the Guatemala–Mexico borderzones and highlighted how “local and transnational organized crime networks dedicated to drug trafficking” practice “extreme violence” (Fuentes and Hernández 2023, 165). Similarly, Estevez (2022) argued that criminal groups, sometimes in coordination with state agents, operate as actors of bio/necropolitical violence in diverse contexts throughout the wider Americas.

Armed groups deploy violent discipline and surveillance practices as key bio/necropolitical practices against migrants. They use beatings and torture as a disciplinary mechanism to keep migrants docile and obedient. They beat migrants to fit them into trucks in the Sahara or boats in the Mediterranean and exercise further violence if migrants complain about their situation (e.g., if they ask for water or food) or attempt to resist or escape. In confinement spaces, torture is both systematic and random. Migrants are tortured systematically for extortion (so that their families will transfer money to armed groups) and randomly (at the sadistic discretion of some armed individuals). There is a surveillance system to categorize and keep tabs on migrants. Main categories include: migrants who paid money (these may possibly avoid some direct violence, although this is never guaranteed); migrants who did not pay money (these will be tortured further); migrants who are seen as “trouble-makers,” such as those who complain, resist, or run away (these could be tortured to death or killed outright); migrants who can act as collaborators (these can be used as interpreters, informants, and torturers); and migrants who are suitable for (sexual) slavery due to their gender, physical condition, or skills (e.g., in cooking, farming). These practices of discipline and surveillance operate through violence, which is racialized.

Foucault innovatively defined discipline and surveillance as “anatomo-politics of the human body” (1978, 139) and key elements of biopolitics. However, he did not theorize how violence and race/racism ground discipline and surveillance (categories of which he developed in the Discipline and Punish [1991]), despite his later emphasis on “racial sorting” (1978, 2003). This lack of attention is related to Foucault’s (and Agamben’s, for that matter, despite his central emphasis on violence) ignorance of race as a constitutive category of, and transatlantic slavery as a foundational event of modern bio/necropolitics,⁷ as aptly emphasized by Mbembe (2019). Even though race has begun to be integrated in the bio/necropolitical borders framework in a more systematic way recently, there has been less emphasis on racialized practices of torture, spectacle, surveillance, and discipline targeting migrants along their journeys. This paper builds on Browne’s (2016) work to establish these categories as key components of bio/necropolitics.

Simon Browne (2016) deconstructs Foucault’s Panopticon as the paradigm of modern discipline and surveillance. The Panopticon is a prison architecture plan, originally designed by Jeremy Bentham, that ensures constant surveillance of inmate cells by positioning them in a circular fashion facing a hierarchical central tower. Panoptic surveillance instills self-discipline in inmates and makes them obedient and compliant. According to Foucault, the Panoptic model of disciplinary surveillance gradually replaces violent and spectacular public execution and torture as the main models of punishment and pervades all institutions of modern society (Foucault 1991). In contrast, Browne argues that “the violent regulation of blackness as spectacle and as disciplinary [is] combined in the racializing surveillance of the slave system” (Browne 2016, 42). She further maintains that the historical slave system is not only a foundational bio/necropolitical mechanism, but it also continues to shape the treatment of black bodies today (Browne 2016). Indeed, in Africa–Europe journeys, discipline, surveillance, and brutal spectacles of punishment are all inseparable elements of bio/necropolitical violence. As Abdirizak described his arrival to a Libyan confinement space from the Sahara: “When he brought us the house, in order to terrorize the people . . . he parked the car in front of the house. And he ordered us to get off one by one. So, each person gets off from the car. They start beating. There were two people, one with gun and one with the stick. So, you find yourself getting beaten for no reason . . . their intention is to [make us] know that there is punishment here. So, we know that and pay the money quickly.” Thus, rather than torture and punishment spectacles being replaced by discipline and surveillance as assumed by Foucault, all four are combined if the body is black, even in the twenty-first century. Torturers benefit from new technologies to further this combination. For instance, they record torture videos and send them to migrants’ families to facilitate extortion, and they use mobile phones to alert each other about migrants who try to run away, thus constituting a more technologically advanced form of “slave patrols” (see Browne 2016, 22–4). Modern-day slave patrols also exist in the Mediterranean Sea: Migrants are surveilled by European drones and planes, which pass on information to the LCG for pullbacks to captivity (Topak 2023).

Indeed, race is not only a key category of the “micro-physics of power” (Foucault 1991, 26) in Libyan confinement spaces; it is also a foundational category of macro/global level power relations, together with class and gender, which are all embedded in what is termed “border imperialism” by Walia (2013) and others (e.g., Gahman et al. 2019). Mbembe, in both Necropolitics (2019) and Brutalism (2024), discusses the racism of global borders, which are ultimately products of Western colonialism. Furthermore, and building on recent border studies literature, he explains how Western borders are extending into diverse spaces in Africa and, as a consequence, how “all Africans as a racialized class, is what now constitutes Europe’s border” (2024, 95). Indeed, the very cause of bio/necropolitical capture practices against migrants traveling from East/Horn of Africa to Europe is European border policies, which not only militarize EU borders but also extend them to Africa through EU partners such as the LCG and Sudan’s paramilitary RSF (e.g., Tubiana et al. 2018; Lemberg-Pedersen 2019; Mengiste 2019; AI 2021; Micallef et al. 2021; Stierl and Dadusc 2022). These actors are not passive implementers of the EU externalization policies. Recent research in border externalization literature emphasized that some “states in the Global South are using externalization policies as a political tool” (Stock et al. 2019, 5) to advance their interests. These also include various local actors who use EU support “to build domestic security, military and police apparatuses, often whilst continuing intimate links with the smuggler networks” as observed in the Sahel–Maghreb region (Lemberg-Pedersen 2019, 258).

Extending this literature, this paper establishes these actors as delegated and opportunistic actors of EU’s externalized bio/necropolitical borders. On the one hand, they, directly or indirectly, operate as agents “of externalisation of violence [. . .] in the name of Europe’s continued prosperity” (Savio Vammen, Cold-Ravnkilde, and Lucht 2022, 1318). These groups occupy positions within the global racist structure of borders, from which they perpetuate violence against Black African migrants. Yet, at the same time, they are opportunistic actors who exploit migrants as resources, and some do so in explicitly racist ways. In interviews, migrants particularly emphasized the racism of Libyan militia. Massawa from Eritrea explained, “Libyans have these thoughts . . . if someone is black, they call A***. A*** means not blessed or slave,⁸ so they just make fun . . .” Cilmi from Somalia said, “They hate Africans.” The Libyan militia’s treatment of migrants is fueled by deeply rooted racism against Black Africans in the Middle East (see Brown 2019).

Migrants targeted for bio/necropolitical capture are not passive beings; they resist capture via diverse acts of evasion. Mbembe draws on the works of Roger Abrahams and Paul Gilroy (1993), and discusses the human agency of black slaves even under extreme necropolitical violence of the plantation slavery. He emphasizes how slaves were “able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the body itself that was supposedly possessed by another” (Mbembe 2019, 76) and how even death (such as through suicide) can be understood as a resistance against necropolitical capture (Mbembe 2019, 91; cf. Gilroy 1993, 63). Mbembe also refers to the work of Saidiya Hartman (Mbembe 2019, 74), but curiously, he does not engage with Hartman’s “subterranean “politics’ of the enslaved” (1997, 50). This is where this paper takes off to theoretically elaborate on migrants” acts of evasion on their journeys.

In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman (1997) examines various practices which “challenge the authority and dominion of the slaveholder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body” (1997, 51). These include not only acts of “escape capture or detection” (68) or “physical confrontation with owners” (51) but also using “stealth” (50) to avoid getting noticed and forming “networks of affiliations” (59) to perform verbal (such as “talking about when we were free in Africa” [61]), bodily (e.g., dance), or spiritual forms of communication (e.g., prayers) (67). These practices are “transient,” “fragmentary,” and “precarious” (Hartman 1997, 50–1): They can have limited or temporary success or fail. Building on Hartman, and drawing on interviews concerning migrants’ journeys, I define these diverse practices, even if they may seem “infinitesimal” (Hartman 1997, 56) at the outset, as practices of evasion from bio/necropolitical capture. The relevance and value of Hartman’s work for understanding migrant agency are yet to be explored by critical migration scholarship. While migrants’ acts of “escape” (e.g., Papadopoulos et al. 2008) and “desertion” (Squire 2015) were studied, less emphasis was placed on migrants’ precarious survival evasion tactics under extreme structural violence. It is telling that the influential framework used in migrant agency/escape literature has been “autonomy of migration” (AoM), which has its origins in the struggles of Italian factory workers in the 1960s, while Hartman’s theory is built upon the historical survival tactics of African slaves in the plantation economy. An alternative perspective (sometimes used in conjunction with AoM) is critical citizenship studies literature, which examines migrants’ acts, some of which are nonverbal and precarious (hunger strikes and lip sewings) or evasive (such as the invisibility strategy of sans papiers) (see, e.g., Nyers and Rygiel 2012). Yet, this literature follows a narrow understanding of politics that is limited to disruption of citizenship regimes and/or enacting citizenship by migrants. It also assumes (Western type) state sovereignty (despite being critical of it), which does not fit in Southern contexts where non-state actors are prevalent, as examined in this paper. Certainly, these are not the only frameworks scholars use in the massive literature on migration, and there are others that align better with Hartman’s theory. For instance, migrant waiting literature (see below) has examined migrants’ seemingly minor (yet always vital) agency in response to structural violence. Hartman provides a comprehensive framework for understanding both seemingly infinitesimal and monumental acts of evasion as well as their transient, fragmentary, and precarious nature, which are all political in subterranean ways.

In Africa–Europe journeys, migrants engage in both major heroic acts of escape (such as from Libyan confinement spaces) and seemingly small-scale but no less vital (or heroic for that matter) acts to endure bio/necropolitical violence. These involve verbal communications among migrants—such as discussions about their countries of origin, families, and future plans in Europe or prayers (which can be both individual or collective)—and nonverbal forms of communication within “networks of affiliations” that serve to protect their subjectivity. As an example of heroic escape, consider the story of Taban, who was sold to a farmer by Libyan militias. Taban, together with his friends (sold to the same farmer), calculated an extremely detailed evasion plan and started waiting for a good time to escape. They were aware that they cannot simply run away at the first opportunity because there are militias all around the city; they can be captured and sold again (possibly by another militia group) or even be killed. They needed to have knowledge of the area, a safe place to reach quickly, and reliable contacts to help them. They slowly gathered information for their escape. They heard about the Red Cross building from their Somalian contacts. They found a reliable Sudanese taxi driver who could get them to the Red Cross building. They also found other Somalians inside who could pay for the Sudanese taxi driver. In an interview, Taban said: “It took us two months to collect all information . . . to find a map, find a direction, find a telephone number who is in town, to find a Sudanese taxi driver to call and take you to [the] center.” Their careful planning bore fruit. They escaped the farm at 2 a.m., called the Sudanese taxi driver, went to the Red Cross building, and jumped over its wall.

The escape story of Taban shows similarities with those of many other migrants and attests to the radical skillfulness of migrant agency even under heavily constrained conditions. It is important, however, to emphasize that such skillfulness is not limited to acts of bodily escape. It can also include communicative and even contemplative acts of survival. Consider the story of Mawael, who was detained in a Libyan confinement space for more than 1 year and experienced extreme bio/necropolitical violence, including torture and starvation. When I asked him how he was able to survive and whether his community helped him, he stated, “We used to live as friends as brothers,” and added that their communication was vital for his survival. Here, communication should be understood in a broader sense, inclusive of verbal and nonverbal connection acts, which provide some form of support to migrants within the context of “networks of affiliation.” Mawael’s communicative experience included both verbal and nonverbal components and a gradual replacement of the former by the latter. He explained that at the beginning they were talking about life in Eritrea and their plans in Europe, but gradually the verbal part of their communication broke down due to prolonged waiting under bio/necropolitical conditions: “. . . we get used to everything. We were tired. We were just looking at each other. We just don’t talk anymore.” Still, staring at each other had a communicational and survival value for him: “We used to look each other. We just staring you know . . . we were just in a deep thinking so that’s how we communicate.”

Indeed, such forms of “deep thinking” are adopted by many other migrants as a survival tactic. As Cilmi pointed out in an interview: “You have to ignore your situation. If you don’t ignore the situation, then it would destroy your mind.” Another migrant, Ishag, explained that ignoring the external reality and tricking his mind that he is already a dead person helped him to survive: “I thought myself I was in a movie or a bad dream. I couldn’t believe these things were happening [. . .] I kept saying [to] myself I am dead anyways, not to be afraid.” These mental acts of evasion can be understood as “dissociative defence mechanisms” as discussed in the psychology literature (see Ataria and Gallagher 2015, 116). These mechanisms are often activated under conditions of torture and severe trauma to help victims preserve some form of agency in exchange for losing a sense of ownership over the body. Ataria and Gallagher described it thus: “By giving up, to some degree, the sense of ownership over his body, the subject gains sense of agency in other areas (e.g., mental control or the ability to engage in imaginative distraction)” (2015, 116).

Waiting is another domain where migrants exercise agency and evasion. To be clear, waiting itself is a bio/necropolitical practice that amplifies the effects of other bio/necropolitical practices (such as torture or starvation) by prolonging migrants’ suffering (see Topak 2020). Many migrants die while waiting (such as for ransom money, water, food, or medical care). The gradual breakdown of verbal communication and its replacement by nonverbal forms of communication (as illustrated in Mawael’s story) is another example of how waiting amplifies bio/necropolitical effects. Yet, even waiting can be a domain of agency and evasion (e.g., Topak 2020, 1871–3; Jacobsen, Karlsen, and Khosravi 2021; Achtnich 2022; Ilcan 2022). For instance, some migrants use the time spent waiting to plan an escape. In fact, as illustrated by Taban’s story above, not running away immediately and rather waiting for a good opportunity to escape is a key practice of agency. Another example is Dawood, who, in an interview, wisely stated, “You have to wait to find your chance.” Dawood was enslaved in a restaurant run by Libyan armed groups. While working there, he was also gathering information, waiting for a good chance to escape. Opportunity showed itself during a Friday prayer attended by the Libyan militias. Dawood’s careful planning and patient waiting secured his successful escape. Even if it may not involve bodily escape, migrants engaging in diverse communicative, psychological, and spiritual acts also add an “evasive” element to their waiting. They transform waiting from a field of pure bio/necropolitical domination into a battlefield where they resist domination and fight for their agency.

Evasion acts are often “transient,” “fragmentary,” and “precarious” (Hartman 1997, 50–1). They come with a great risk of recapture by bio/necropolitical means. Consider the story of Massawa, which, similar to those of other migrants’, involves many cases of recapture. Massawa evaded bio/necropolitical capture in his home country and in Sahara. But in Libya, he was captured by militias and detained under intense bio/necropolitical violence involving torture, sickness, and starvation. After 7 months of suffering, his family transferred money to militias, who then sent him, together with a group, to the Mediterranean Sea on a boat. Their boat was captured by the LCG, and his group was returned back to a prison in Tripoli. In that prison, he began waiting for an opportunity to escape. After 2 months, Libyan armed groups began to fight each other, and he and his friends took the risk to escape. But later, he was captured once again and ended up in two other confinement spaces. He said, “We managed to break the door, and we escaped from the prison. We don’t know where to go . . . We keep walking, walking, walking, and at some point, we just come out from the area, and some soldiers came. They put us in another prison. We stayed one night there, and [later] they took us to [another] place.” After 6 months in this second place (nominally a detention center), and following a visit by the MSF, Massawa was conditionally released with a special permit, initiated by the MSF, to accompany his sick friend (who was fainting every 5–6 hours) to get medical treatment in a hospital in Tripoli. He then escaped from the hospital and found his way to a migrant boat headed for Europe. On his second try, he evaded LCG capture and managed to arrive in Malta.

Massawa was a survivor of bio/necropolitical capture and, through a series of heroic evasion acts, made it all the way to Europe, but many others he met on the road were not as lucky as him. As he pointed out: “If you are blessed only, you survive; if you are lucky, lucky. If you’re not lucky, like I know people that fall four times . . . I know my friends that came with me in Libya and still they are in Libya right now. I know some people they [are] dead. I know some of them they suffer depression and anxiety. Some they give birth from Libyan guys, the ladies . . .” Massawa emphasizes both bodily and mental recapture by bio/necropolitics. Indeed, migrants’ communicative and contemplative evasion acts to retain their agency may not be successful, resulting in depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders, in addition to or in combination with somatic suffering. Ataria and Gallagher explain that dissociative defense mechanisms can collapse after a certain threshold is reached, resulting in subjects who are “totally helpless,” similar to the Muselmann (2015, 117) described by Agamben (1998). Magan explained that he was close to this state of mind: “I was crazy, and I can’t remember how many months I was sleeping . . . my mind changed.” Taban emphasized that most people are not in the necessary mental state to even imagine evasion after months of being tortured, starved, and enslaved. As he put it: “90 percent of people are not mentally fit . . . no one even thinks about when you leave from here. Everyone thinks . . . about today [and] when is your time to die .. . .”

It is also questionable the extent to which those who make it to Europe have fully survived bio/necropolitical capture. Massawa, despite feeling extremely lucky that he survived, was also experiencing bio/necropolitical effects (including depression and anxiety) even after 2 years in Europe. He explained that it is impossible for him to forget his journey, especially the Libyan part, both because of what he suffered and due to thoughts of his friends who are still trapped in Libya. He said, “I was in mental hospital because I get a lot of depression and anxiety . . . I remember Libya, I remember my friends, some people . . . even though sometimes I love forgetting and looking for the future, but still they call you from Libya, do you know this guy? Yes. You have been together in these detention centers. He died. Then no thinking about yourself, you think about your friends, they suffer a lot.” Furthermore, migrants typically do not have the socioeconomic opportunities to help them sufficiently integrate into society.⁹

Bio/Necropolitical Capture and Evasion in Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan

Migrants’ decisions to flee their countries are shaped by structural factors including poverty, conflicts, and environmental destruction, the origins of which are related to global structural hierarchies solidified through processes of historical and contemporary capitalism-colonialism. Among my group of interlocutors, being targeted by armed groups for bio/necropolitical capture was the culminating factor. Migrants from Somalia fled from the Al-Shabaab, migrants from Eritrea fled from the Eritrean Army, and migrants from Sudan (they were from the Darfur region) fled from Sudanese armed groups. Mbembe observes that, in many postcolonial African contexts, terror is engaged by both state actors and various militias and gangs (many of which have linkages with political and military elites) to repress civil, political, and economic demands of the populations and to engage in “violent resource appropriation” (Mbembe 2019, 35). Mbembe’s observations shed light on the situation in Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan.

Somalia is characterized by “state collapse,” a phenomenon that gave rise to “clan warlords, armed militias, and other violent non-state actors,” among which the militant group Al-Shabaab has gradually become the most powerful (Tar and Mustapha 2017, 277). Al-Shabaab controls “large swathes of territory in central and southern parts of Somalia” (Tar and Mustapha 2017, 285) and targets “locals operating against the organization in any way” with “imprisonment and execution” (Sinkó and Besenyő 2023, 228). In addition to dissidents, Al-Shabaab targets youth and children for recruitment and singles out others (such as farmers, traders, and business owners) for heavy taxation (Tar and Mustapha 2017, 288; HRW 2018). Indeed, most of my interlocutors fled to evade forced recruitment, and some fled because they had rejected Al-Shabaab efforts to force them to become collaborators (in their economic and recruitment efforts). They all evaded Al-Shabaab’s bio/necropolitical capture in skillful ways. Consider the story of Magan, who was brought to an Al-Shabaab camp at the age of 15. In an interview, he stated that he was lucky that Al-Shabaab brought many other children to the camp that day. He was able to sneak through the forest at night without anyone noticing, found the road, hitchhiked to his village, and alerted his family about the situation. This was the beginning of his long journey of evasion. His family hid him for 10 days in another house and later sent him out of Somalia with a trusted contact. Al-Shabaab militants control most of the territories on the way out of Somalia, and migrants engage in various strategies of evasion to avoid capture. Abadir explained that he wore dirty clothes to avoid suspicion. Cilmi hid in the back of a truck carrying animals. Sugaal fled on a bike, using bypaths to evade controls on main roads.

Similar patterns of capture and evasion exist in Eritrea, even though the main actor of capture is the state military. Eritrea is ruled by a military dictatorship that targets youth for unlimited military service. The army has developed a range of surveillance mechanisms (such as ID cards and checkpoints) for “cracking down, identifying, and preventing defection” (Bozzini 2011, 93). Semere said: “It is not easy to escape from Eritrea because to go from a local to local, they ask ID . . . if you are not a student, you don’t have the document pass through. Every corner or . . . village you cross, there is a security checkpoint.” Semere was taken to a school-military camp (called Sawa) when he was only 16. Determined to flee the camp, he began planning an escape with his friends. It took him and his friends 1 year to familiarize themselves with the area, draw a map, and find a suitable time to escape. Having no technology, they relied on the basic map, and their knowledge of nature and the stars to find their way out of Eritrea. As he put it: “It took us three days [to reach the Sudan border]. We used a drawn map . . . and like a very old person who knows the star . . . if you don’t have the technology and then you depend on nature.”

Eritreans and Somalians aim to reach Khartoum, Sudan, to continue their journeys further north to the Sahara and Libya. Many Eritreans and Somalians pass through Ethiopia prior to reaching Sudan, and some Somalians use the South Sudan to Sudan route (from Kenya and Uganda). They encounter many non-state armed groups along their way (such as in conflict-ridden South Sudan, or along the Eritrea–Sudan border where Bedouin Rashaida tribes live). Sudan itself has long been a ground for “ethnic conflicts in different areas, including Darfur, Blue Nile, and Nuba Mountain” (Hassan 2022, 259), causing mass displacements. Migrants fleeing from these regions need to evade various government, paramilitary, and militia/smuggler/trafficking groups on their way out of Sudan. The border controls in the region have also become increasingly strict due to the EU’s externalization policies. The EU launched the Khartoum process (implemented since 2014) to target migrants traveling from the Horn of Africa route to Europe and included Sudan as a core country. The EU support resulted in the deployment of the RSF paramilitary force as the border control agent of Sudan (Tubiana et al. 2018, 36–53). The RSF committed many atrocities and war crimes in the context of repressing antigovernment insurgencies and protests across Sudan and has linkages with militias and trafficking groups (Tubiana et al. 2018; Hassan 2022).¹⁰ Thus, migrants have begun to face a greater risk of capture by both regular and irregular actors through their journeys in and out of Sudan (Tubiana et al. 2018, 36–53; Mengiste 2019, 1491–2).

Migrants who successfully make it to Khartoum stay in apartments before traveling on to the Sahara. During their transit period, migrants risk capture by Sudanese police, who may detain them indefinitely, deport them, or extract bribes from them. While Somalians often blend in due to their physical features showing similarity with Sudanese, Eritreans are viewed as outsiders and typically targeted by the police. As Fikru put it: “Sometimes they can come in the coffee shop and you have to run away. If you don’t have the papers, they ask you [for] money.” From Khartoum, migrants embark on their journeys to the Sahara with Sudanese armed groups until they reach a transfer point in the Sudan/Libya borderlands and are then given/sold to Libyan armed groups. Some first cross the Sudan–Chad border and deal with Chadian armed groups before being given/sold to Libyan armed groups.

Bio/Necropolitical Capture and Evasion in the Sahara

The Sahara Desert is a “death-world” (Mbembe 2019, 92), where migrants resist capture by the forces of death. These include armed groups that beat, torture, kill, rape, and kidnap migrants or indirectly bring them suffering (such as by providing insufficient water or making migrants wait endlessly). The desert itself, with its vast sand mountains and extreme heat, also acts as an agent of bio/necropolitical capture, especially when combined with the actions/inactions of the armed groups. Between 2014 and 2022, IOM documented 5,620 deaths, though the real number is likely much higher due to difficulties in documentation (Black and Sigman 2022, 8). Many of my interlocutors stated that they saw human skeletons during their journeys. Migrants’ journeys crossing the Sahara Desert show similarities with desert crossings from Mexico to United States (see Doty 2011; Squire 2015). In both cases, migrants are confronted with concentrated bio/necropolitical effects but exercise agency despite them.

Armed groups implement disciplinary violence throughout the journey. As Adonay put it: “In order to tell you to [get] in the truck, they start beating . . . and if they want [people] to go down, they beat you . . . So, basically, they beat [when] they want anything.” Armed groups treat migrants as commodities to be exploited and traded, and in order to maximize their profit, they violently stuff as many migrants as possible in trucks. Sometimes, they also tie them to the truck to prevent anyone from falling out. This model of spatial organization has less to do with Foucault’s assumption of nonviolent discipline than with the bio/necropolitical principle of discipline through infliction of pain on the body. Consider the story of Anbessa, who was beaten to fit into a truck and could not move one of his legs, which was hanging outside of the truck for seven hours. The ordeal resulted in gangrene. He explained: “It was very painful . . . It’s like black . . . not like this brown but it’s black black . . . You couldn’t say nothing. When you knock him, he will just say shut up and continue going.”

Armed groups violently discipline migrant bodies in an attempt to keep them from falling out of trucks, but this strategy does not always work in the desert conditions. Migrants falling out is a common occurrence and sometimes results in migrant injuries and deaths. Abadir said, “Every 20 minutes, two to three people fall.” Taban was one of them. He explained: “They drove very hard uphill to the sand, and then when the car was going down very fast again, I fell . . . Luckily, I didn’t get hurt. There were stones, but it was the softer side.” Not all migrants are that lucky. Semere said that one person from his group fell, hit his head on a stone, and died there. Armed groups beat those who fell from trucks to further discipline them. They do not always stop to pick up those who fall and might abandon them to die.

The journey typically takes 3–7 days but can take weeks, especially if there is a problem with the trucks or fights among the armed groups. Migrants are provided water and food only occasionally, often once a day, and therefore face the risk of dehydration and starvation. Mawael explained that after four days on the journey, people began to die in his group: “We found out while we are sleeping . . . they were dead, we found out in the morning . . . Two people die[d] in the same day, and the other six people . . . die the [next] day.” In interviews, many migrants said the water they were given was mixed with petrol. Some explained that armed groups do this purposefully to discipline their bodies (so they won’t ask for much water). Others explained that the taste is due to residual petrol in repurposed tanks. Complaints about water are met with spectacular violence to send a message to all migrants to remain docile. As Cilmi put it: “There was a guy who was feeling very thirsty, and he went to ask them [for] water. They stabbed him on the shoulder, and they say, ‘Now you die for real’.” Migrants’ mental health also deteriorates in the Sahara and creates bio/necropolitical consequences. As Baxsan put it: “People were afraid. Everyone was expecting to die. You’ll never know when you die in the desert.” Cilmi said: “We were praying to see where people live, like a town or something . . . We felt powerless, hopeless.”

Sexual violence is a routine part of the Sahara journey for women (Gerard and Pickering 2014; Mengiste 2019; Adeyinka, Lietaert, and Derluyn 2023, 1501). While all my interlocutors were men, many described witnessing sexual violence against women. Cawo stated: “At night, you hear women screaming . . . The one they like, they take to the other side.” Sometimes, migrant men try to protect women who come from their same ethnic group, but their efforts are met with violence. As Anbessa said: “When they see ladies, they try to have sex with them. And while we are there, we don’t allow that. There were a lot of people fought about it, and like, being slapped.”

In addition to being abused by their accompanying armed group, migrants are also at great risk of violence from competing armed groups. Various armed groups operate on the vast desert routes, with some of them also engaged in “smuggling drugs, alcohol, weapons, and narcotics” (Micallef 2017, 23). They sometimes attack convoys, capturing migrants for ransom and extortion (Mengiste 2019, 1501). In fact, even if there is cooperation among these groups when it comes to the migrant smuggling, disagreements are common, and they often result in migrants being killed or injured as collateral damage (as described on page 6). Furthermore, due to a lack of coordination among armed groups, many migrants might be subjected to long waits at so-called transfer points, where many die of thirst or hunger.

Overall, migrants have no real options to engage in bodily evasion during Sahara journeys. They cannot confront armed groups without facing death or abandonment in the desert. They cannot escape because they are unable to navigate their way out of the Sahara by themselves. Under these conditions, migrants resort to various communicational, psychological, and spiritual acts of survival and evasion. These include communicating with each other to keep strong, praying, and trying to retain their humanity through cultural traditions. Abdirizak stated: “Those who were okay are those who were suggesting, “Let us be patient, let us stay,” encouraging people to wait.” Barkhad said, “Some people keep praying all day.” Mebratu witnessed a death of a friend in his group who received a ritual burial. He elaborated: “We have the culture . . . We said he’s a human you know, just grab some soil, put him. Just make a small prayer.”

Bio/Necropolitical Capture and Evasion in Libya

The fall of Kaddafi’s authoritarian regime in Libya after a “Western imperialist” (Pradella and Rad 2017) and “neo-colonial” intervention by the NATO (Nyere 2020) resulted in the rise of “circles of local and regional power and influence, including local councils, ethnic groups, militias, tribes, and a potpourri of religious movements” (St. John 2022, 171). Within this context, quasi-military and militia groups began to compete for political power and economic resources by using brutal violence and engaging in illicit activities, such as smuggling and trafficking (Micallef 2017). These groups perceive transitory migrants as economic resources and target them for ransom, extortion, and slavery. Thus, migrants’ journeys in Libya are “fragmented” (Acnith 2021, 155). They are captured by various armed groups and imprisoned in multiple spaces of confinement and detention. These spaces include both informal ones arranged by trafficking and smuggling groups (such as those in the Bani-Walid area) and detention centers nominally run by the Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM) and used by the LCG to transfer pulled-back migrants from the Mediterranean Sea (such as the detention centers in the Tripoli area). In practice, various militia groups control these “official” detention centers, and DCIM and LCG units collaborate with them (Micallef 2017, 37; 2021, 15; AI 2021, 14; UNHRC 2023, s. [44–6]).

These imprisonment spaces are “death-worlds” occupied by many “living dead” migrants (Mbembe 2019, 92). A recent UNHRC report concludes that “migrants across Libya are victims of crimes against humanity and that acts of murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape, and other inhumane acts are committed in connection with their arbitrary detention” (2023, s. [41]). These other inhumane acts include forcing migrants to live in extremely unhygienic and overcrowded conditions and failing to provide adequate food, water, and healthcare—all of which result in migrants suffering sickness, starvation, and ultimately death (UNHRC 2023, s. [53]; AI 2021). Experiences of my group of interlocuters mirror these findings. To begin with, they described various acts of torture, including beating, whipping, electroshock, and burning. As described by Abdirizak (on page 7), the purpose of the torture is to terrorize migrants so they will be rendered fully docile and to pressure their families to quickly transfer money to their captors. He further elaborated on the disciplinary-spectacle element of torture: “They had an electric shock. And they test on the wall and make it sound . . . in front of us. And they tell us anyone who did not pay in 16 days, you will suffer with this . . . You call your parent or whoever . . . and if they don’t call you back, then you will have torture.”

These migrant experiences do not align with Foucault’s version of discipline (1991). Foucault assumed a shift from (historical) brutal punishment spectacles to (modern) disciplinary prison routine and surveillance, designating the latter as not “involving violence” and “subtle”; furthermore, he argued it is “calculated, organized, technically thought out” in contrast to the former (Foucault 1991, 26). Yet, as Browne argued, when the body is black, violence never ceases to be the dominant paradigm of intervention (Browne 2016, 38). Rather than discipline and surveillance replacing violence and spectacle, all four categories are combined to subjugate black bodies. This combination involves “calculation, organization, and technics.” Armed groups have a surveillance/identification system to differentiate between those who have and have not paid. They sometimes spatially segregate these two categories of captives. Some migrants said that those who paid were recorded and/or given codes, and others said the Arabic-speaking informants keep tabs on who paid and who did not. While paying money does not guarantee release or even protection from torture, those who do not pay are the main recipients of torture. Armed groups organize communication technologies and messaging apps (“technics”) to facilitate extortion. They often torture migrants when they are speaking with their families on the phone or record torture videos and send them to migrants’ families via messaging apps. Other surveillance/identification categorizations include (but are not limited to) having contacts in Western countries, ethnicity, gender, physical conditions, and Arabic language skills. Migrants from some ethnicities, especially if they have contacts in Western countries, are asked to pay more money. Women are targeted for sexual abuse and slavery, and men are selected for slavery based on their physical conditions or skills. Armed groups also try to identify Arabic speakers among migrants whom they can use as informants, interpreters, and collaborators. These migrants may be directed to keep records of migrants who made payments, spy on the community, report escape plans, or even torture migrants on captors’ behalf.

Libyan militias operate as delegates of externalized European borders. In 2017, Italy engaged “with local authorities and tribal leaders and informal groups in Libya” and incentivized them to prevent migrant movements toward Europe (AI 2017, 49). Some of these militia groups were later integrated into the Government of National Accord, which the LCG is a part of (AI 2017, 50). The recreation of the LCG (after its collapse following the fall of the Kaddafi regime) was “funded and coordinated by the EU through the EU Trust Fund for Africa and by Italy through its bilateral relationship with the Libyan GNA” (CSDM 2020, 36). While being implementers of the EU’s border externalization project, at the same time, these groups are opportunistic actors who target transit migrants as resources and reproduce historical racial violence patterns against Black Africans in the Middle East. When addressing migrants, Libyan militias often use racial slurs in Arabic whose etymologies are found in the history of black slavery and anti-black racism in the region (Brown 2019, 230). Complementing migrants’ experiences cited on page 8, Ishag (from Sudan) explained, “When I was in Libya, I was like in 17^th century, not the present; because the minds and the people there and the way they are looking at you.” He further added, “Libya is not an option to stay there. Specifically, as African if you are black, it is not an option.” Mawael said, “Because we are Eritrean . . . because who we are they just do the things they do on us.” Sugaal from Somalia had a similar perception of Libyan militias. He elaborated, “they are very ignorant, and we couldn’t communicate because we don’t know the language.”

Migrants exercise agency even under these bio/necropolitical conditions. They practice various communicational, spiritual, psychological, and mental tactics of evasion as described on pages 8–11. They talk with each other to keep strong, and in the absence of verbal communication, they simply stare at each other to find the courage to survive. They also pray, think about their loved ones, and practice “dissociative defence mechanisms” to protect their agency. Some migrants even revolt against armed groups, despite the high likelihood of death. Some use “stealth” (Hartman 1997, 50) as a technique to organize their escape. They gather information about their surroundings, talk with friends, and calculate a good time to escape (such as at night or when armed groups fight with each other). Abadir said, “After three months, we managed to escape because they started a fight between them. One night someone opened the cell, and everyone was jumping and was escaping. Luckily, I was one of them.” Baxsan said: “We connected blankets, and we throw it, so we climbed through the blanket . . . It was midnight when two first jumped, and then they also give us their blanket and then we hold the blanket . . . Before I escaped there were people who escaped and were caught and brought back to the prison, I heard from them [how to not get caught] . . . In my mind there were two things: Either I survive, or I get caught and killed.” Still, escaping from the prison is extremely difficult to the extent that some migrants, such as Taban and Dawood (cited on pages 9–10), perceived even slavery as a lesser evil because the slavery work environment gave them greater opportunities to escape. Migrants can be recaptured by the same or different militia groups after escaping, returned to confinement, or killed or (re)sold. There are many checkpoints run by various militias migrants would have to navigate before reaching the seaside, and each poses the risk of recapture. Even when migrants travel with armed groups after payment, they can be captured by rival armed groups. Migrants rely on community connections to find reliable contacts in the smuggling world to get them to the seaside without being captured, underscoring the crucial role of “networks of affiliation” (Hartman 1997, 59) throughout the evasion process.

Bio/Necropolitical Capture and Evasion on the Mediterranean Sea

Echoing Gilroy’s (1993, 63) and Mbembe’s argument that even suicide can be considered an act of agency (Mbembe 2019, 91), many migrants (such as Baxsan quoted above) perceive the Mediterranean Sea crossing, which is often described as the deadliest migration route in the world, as an evasion act in itself. Indeed, migrants’ greatest fear is to be captured by the LCG and returned to captivity in Libya. The LCG has become a key partner of the EU since 2017, which is also the time when humanitarian search-and-rescue groups operating in the Mediterranean began to be criminalized (Topak 2019). The EU and Italy not only directed the recreation of the LCG and provided funding, training, and patrol/surveillance assets, but they also supplied specific aerial surveillance data about migrant boats’ locations so that the LCG can pull them back to Libya (Sunderland and Pezzani 2022; Topak 2023), thus turning the Libyan coast into a “necropolitical space” (Stierl and Dadusc 2022, 1466).

In addition to the LCG, migrants are targeted by other bio/necropolitical forces throughout their sea journey. Many arrive at the seaside already weak and sick and wait in makeshift camps before embarking. During this period, they are provided too little food and water. Several interlocutors stated that armed groups strategically used malnutrition to make migrants lose weight while they wait (which can be several weeks if not longer), so that they can stuff as many of them in ships as possible. Later, during boarding, armed groups use disciplinary violence to organize migrant bodies in ship space. Many boats start sinking shortly after departure due to their poor condition and overcrowding. Many drift for days, even weeks, because of engine failure or lack of fuel. In addition to drowning, migrants face the great risks of dehydration, starvation, and asphyxia during their journeys and experience bio/necropolitical effects. Baxsan said, “I lost my sight; I couldn’t see well because of dehydration. I was vomiting but nothing was coming from my mouth.” Magan said, “I felt dehydration, and I was sick. It was very narrow. They were sitting on me. Then, half day when we were in the sea, I went to coma . . . first I lost feeling of my legs and then I became unconscious.” The bottom section of the ship has very little oxygen. Tekle explained that he had to force his way up to survive, even if this included fighting with fellow migrants (who were concerned that moving around would capsize the ship, or they could lose their own space). However, his friend, who was sitting next to him, died due to a lack of oxygen. Tekle said, “He was kind of like shy person, so he cannot speak . . . he cannot say, ‘I’m feeling bad so I can go out’.” Migrants’ psychologies also deteriorate during the journey. Baxsan said: “Every one of us is thinking [. . .] to die. We are all ready to die. We never thought that we will survive.”

Migrants use various evasion strategies throughout their journeys. They struggle to fix the leaking boats and remove water. Sugaal said, “It was a plastic boat and the water coming in the boat, some of shoveling the water out.” Baxsan said, “We took off all our clothes, and we put it down where the water was leaking.” Similar to Tekle, Fikru also experienced oxygen deprivations, but unlike Tekle’s group, his group organized themselves to carry those in need to the deck. He said, “There is a lot of people [that] can’t breathe, then you carry them, take them up.” Mebratu said he used to slap people to prevent them from sleeping and dying from lack of oxygen. He explained: “When you are under, you have no oxygen. So people used to sleep . . . And I used to slap them. I’m slapping them not because I want to hurt them . . . If I slap you for that time, you might get pain, but you wouldn’t die.” Migrants also exercise various psychological, communicational, and spiritual evasion strategies, such as hoping for rescue, communicating to calm each other, and praying. Taban said that he used to calm his panicking group with prayers. He explained: “I used to recite Quran a lot . . . I used to calm people . . . I was advising the people.” Semere said that turning to religion helped him: “I wasn’t, you know, like, very religious. But, you know, I really appreciated and liked . . . Oh, thank you God.”

Conclusion

This study examined bio/necropolitical capture and evasion during migrants’ long journeys from East/Horn of Africa to Europe. It demonstrated that migrants were targeted for capture by various armed groups (for purposes including recruitment, torture, extortion, and slavery) and examined the ways in which they engaged in various bodily, psychological, communicational, and spiritual acts of evasion. The study demonstrated how Europe’s borders externalize inside the African continent through delegated and opportunistic actors (such as the Libyan armed groups), and reproduce racism at both the macrolevel (maintaining global racist borders) and the microlevel (through racialized practices of capture, torture, surveillance, discipline, and spectacle targeting black bodies). The paper highlighted the key role of non-state actors (such as the LCG and various militias, trafficking, and mafia groups) in acts of bio/necropolitical capture, therefore moving away from the state-centrism of the literature. The paper demonstrated how migrants exercise agency even under extreme conditions of violence and emphasized the diverse expressions of their agency, including through subterranean, fragmentary, transient, precarious, dissociative, calculative, contemplative, courageous, bold, heroic, pious, wise, skillful, verbal, and nonverbal ways. While many migrants continue to experience bio/necropolitical after-effects in Europe because of what they experienced during their journeys, many also find a deep value in their long struggles against capture and see them as a foundation for a stronger future life in Europe. Kidane explained: “What happened has happened already. But I also see in a different way . . . It made me the person I am, to be a strong person to be very, very challenging person . . . You can say many things . . . what happened in the past, but I say, okay, it made me the person I am . . . if I don’t see those struggles, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. So, what I’m trying to say is that’s me, I pass through that situation, it makes me who I am. So, it’s like a learning experience. It was not losing something, but I learned something in there.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to express gratitude to migrants who shared their stories with me, without whom this paper would not have been possible. I am thankful for the Platform for Migration at the University of Malta for hosting me as a visiting professor during my sabbatical leave, during which time I conducted this research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Migration Research Center at Koç University, Turkey (MIREKOC) where I am an affliated researcher, and received valuable feedback. I am also grateful for the careful and constructive comments of the external reviewers and the IPS editorial team. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support of York University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.

Footnotes

References