In the aftermath of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’, Greece, and Lesvos especially, have attracted much attention due to the escalation of border violence and the infliction of social harm and suffering against forcibly displaced people. Since 2015, there has been a growing body of literature focusing on physical violence, pushback operations and left-to-die practices, which routinely take place at the Aegean Sea – the liquid border between Greece and Turkey. At the same time, activist work/research at the borders and the testimonies of border crossers themselves have unearthed a plethora of human rights abuses, torture and other violent acts of omission and commission by state officials, which either inflict death or increase the risk of death. This literature is significant as it highlights the way physical violence and deaths at the borders are operationalized in everyday migration governance by becoming the norm (see Chapter 6). However, despite the hypervisibility of border violence while people are en route, less attention has been given to the routinization and normalization of the necropolitical violence as a modus operandi of migration governance. Necropolitical violence routinely and silently unfolds within and beyond the borders. It creeps into detention centres, refugee camps, hotspots and even whole islands by intentionally inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering, violating human dignity and, therefore, implicitly killing/torturing those who traverse the EU borders without authorization.

The chapter explores the human consequences of the ‘necropolitical’ (Mbembe, 2003) border regime upon the lives which are apprehended ‘unliveable’ (Butler, 2004). It focuses on the manifold abandonments (leftto-die practices) of border crossers, inside and beyond the refugee camp, in appalling conditions that not only are tantamount to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but also inflict, normalize and naturalize disposability, humiliation, social death and suffering. This chapter builds on Achille Mbembe's (2003) work on necropolitics to explore the governance of migration through abandonment to death. The paper does not intend to bring a contribution to the theory of necropolitics as such rather it builds on and is situated in critical migration and border studies literature to understand the production of humiliation and degradation, racialized social death and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance (Cacho, 2012; Davies et al, 2017; Mayblin et al, 2019; Gordon and Larsen, 2021).