Voice and Memory Bordering: Externalisation, Unpublic Death, and the Counter-Archives That Re-Politicise Loss

European border externalisation is typically analysed as a spatial–legal strategy: shifting enforcement and “processing” outward to dilute jurisdiction and evade responsibility. This paper argues that externalisation is also a communicative regime that produces unpublic death, in which migrant deaths and disappearances fail to become publicly recordable wrongs—nameable, evidentiary, attributable events capable of grounding recognition and accountability. This occurs through two sequential and mutually reinforcing forms of bordering; voice and memory. The argument begins by tracing how externalisation displaces decisive judgment from formal asylum adjudication into pre-adjudicative infrastructures: interception and containment, third-country “partnership” screenings, informal removals, outsourced detention and patrol corridors, and fragmented humanitarian-security interfaces that governs not only movement, but the very conditions under which speech can appear as a claim, creating a process of gatekeeping as voice bordering. The systematic denial of testimonial and interpretive standing through which displaced persons are rendered inadmissible speakers. The paper’s next move is to show that voice bordering in turn generates memory bordering. When displaced persons are denied standing as speakers, the harms they endure are simultaneously denied standing as recordable wrongs. Externalisation therefore functions as an archival biopower technology that blocks the passage from death to public death. It does so through three interlocking mechanisms: (1) infrastructural absence—limited rescue, tracing, and identification capacities, with deserts and seas functioning as evidentiary sinks; (2) jurisdictional dispersion—outsourcing and “safe third country” logics that fragment duty-bearers and frustrate causal attribution; and (3) narrative management—humanitarian framings that admit suffering while insulating policy from liability, alongside security framings that normalise loss as the cost of sovereignty. The outcome is disappearability, a condition of loss without leaving a political trace. Finally, the paper turns to practices that interrupt voice and memory bordering. Migrant-led and solidarity networks assemble counter-archives—distress-call infrastructures, lists and naming projects, route testimonies, and diasporic oral histories—that reconstitute both voice and memory. These archives do not simply ‘fill gaps’; they generate alternative forums of address and alternative standards of evidence, preserving names, last contacts, and causal narratives that official systems fail, or refuse, to hold. Counter-mapping, here, appears as a subset of counter-archiving, as it charts ‘Europe’ as a moving assemblage of border choke points and administrative traps, rendering visible the topologies through which responsibility is engineered to evaporate. In conclusion I argue for counter-archiving as a communicative ethics of migrant-led and migrant-solidarity research and dissemination, sites treating of co-produced normative insight through which loss is re-politicised into claims for recognition, accountability, and repair.