While migrants face many dangers in attempting to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea—from drowning to dying of dehydration—they also confront an elaborate legal system that is designed to return them to their countries of origin. In The Borders of Responsibility, Kiri Olivia Santer outlines the architecture of these legal systems and how they help Europe evade legal responsibility for rescuing migrants. Focusing on legal agreements between Italy and Libya that have resulted in the systematic interception of migrants, Santer shows how Europe’s liberal identity is belied by legal agreements that let migrants die at sea or that send them back to dangerous, exploitative situations in post-Gaddafi Libya or their home countries. Law, she argues, is the tool that enables states to affect control beyond territory, whilst disappearing their responsibility for violence across border assemblages. Through ethnographic fieldwork with migrants, lawyers, policy makers, and humanitarian workers, Santer shows how the law is too often used as an instrument of violence against migrants, who fall outside of conventional structures of legal rights.

Kiri Olivia Santer is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern.