Since the 1990s, Greece generally and the island of Lesvos specifically have been important gates for unauthorized border crossers who are fleeing violence, conflict, war and persecution. Since then, bodies of dead people have washed ashore – whole or in parts – at the threshold of Europe. Although represented as new, random, unforeseen, unpreventable events and ‘tragic’ accidents, border deaths are the outcome of lethal political decisions which have been enforced since the 1985 Schengen Agreement and have greatly proliferated in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. This chapter focuses on the continuum of politics of closed borders and the human consequences of the thanatopolitical border regime upon lives which are apprehended ‘unlivable’ (Butler, 2004, p xv). It explores the continuum of border violence and deaths which occur off the coasts of Lesvos – as people cross the Aegean Sea – as well as inside the refugee camps on Lesvos. This chapter also addresses the temporal continuum of violence and the state-and policy-facilitated stealing of border crossers’ time. It explores stealing time as a form of institutional and structural violence which is inflicted upon the living, the dead and whole communities by producing multiple forms of harm and/or new types of harm.

The IOM estimates that in 2015 alone more than 5,400 border crossers have died or been rendered missing globally (Brian and Laczko, 2016). And over the course of the last two decades, ‘more than 60,000 migrants have embarked on fatal journeys around the world, never to return to their loved ones’ (Brian and Laczko, 2016, p iii). These numbers are a minimum estimates given that deaths are not always recorded by the national authorities and many bodies are never identified or recovered (Singleton et al, 2017). Although represented as random, unforeseen, unpreventable events and ‘tragic’ accidents, border-related deaths are the outcome of political decisions and the fatal policies surrounding the EU border regime (Canning, 2017; Iliadou, 2019a). For the EU border regime, enforced since the 1985 Schengen Agreement and proliferated following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, some lives –mainly of the poorest – have been rendered ‘unliveable’ (Butler, 2004, p xv) and, therefore, can easily be sacrificed on the altar of Fortress Europe.

This chapter is about (temporal) violence and state and policy facilitated stealing of time.