Graves in the Borderscape: Burial Practices and Local Responses to Migrant Deaths

What is the meaning of migrants’ graves in securitised borderscapes, and how do local communities respond to migrants’ deaths and their material presence in cemeteries? This paper examines burial practices for deceased migrants at the Polish-Belarusian border as acts of grassroots solidarity and as spatial-material interventions in the borderscape that shape how the so-called “migration crisis” is perceived, lived, and known. While the border is commonly materialised through fences, border guards, and surveillance infrastructures, I approach cemeteries – often seen as symbolic or cultural spaces outside the border regime, as counter- or liminal spaces within the borderscape. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Poland, the paper advances three interconnected arguments. First, burial practices constitute acts of quiet solidarity in conditions of state dehumanisation and erasure. Often despite previously held anti-immigrant attitudes, local residents and clergy, together with activists organise or attend religious ceremonies, attempt to name the dead, and care for graves by sponsoring tombstones or maintaining their burial sites. I conceptualise these practices as expressions of an ethics of care within a necropolitical border regime. Second, cemeteries rework the borderscape by making migrants permanently visible even as living migrants are pushed out of sight. Graves embed migrant presence, often inadvertently, into local spatial imaginaries of rootedness and belonging, disrupting the framing of the border as a transient and temporal “crisis zone.” Hence, migrants graves recalibrate how the border is perceived, remembered, and morally inhabited by local residents. Third, I analyse the temporal politics of burial. As death exceeds the temporality of emergency, graves anchor the border crisis in time and space, constituting material testimony to “history in the making", resisting the normalisation and invisibilisation of border violence. Through burial, migrant presence is inscribed into local landscapes of memory and moral responsibility, challenging militarised and exclusionary bordering practices.