Median Line: A Century Of Border Violence and The Alluvial Geopolitics Of The Evros/Meriç/Maritsa River Border

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Duncan, Ifor and Levidis, Stefanos. 2024. Median Line: A Century Of Border Violence and The Alluvial Geopolitics Of The Evros/Meriç/Maritsa River Border. Area, ISSN 0004-0894 [Article] (Forthcoming)

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Official URL: https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14...

Abstract or Description

The border river of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa has been shaped during the century since its demarcation by the Lausanne peace treaty. Over this period a dense overlap of environmental, geopolitical, legal, and cultural actors have turned it into both a riverised border and a borderised river. The border regime appropriates the riverine characteristics of flow, erosion, mud, turbulence, and fog as much as it is founded on military technology, international law, agricultural and conservation practices, resource logistics, border crossing and the denial thereof. Here the river’s movement of sand and alluvium has become an agent in the policing of the river border.

Drawing on interviews with asylum seekers, locals, forensic pathologists, legal scholars and fish scientists, this paper weaves field research, primarily undertaken on the Greek side, with a historic and ecosystemic perspective of a century-old border that has become a hot-spot for violent practices. These practices themselves harness the uncertain physical conditions that the riverscape affords. In this article we argue that the disjunctures of the river’s dynamic geomorphology and the history of demarcation of the median line frame the contemporary politics of mobility of those illegalized by the border regime. In the ambiguous territorial pockets produced by the movement of the river away from the median line of 1926, islands of hyperlegality have been produced where state violence takes place with impunity.

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

Rivers as Borders Special Issue, edited by Eva McGrath (University of Plymouth), Rebekka Kanesu (Trier University),Vanessa Lamb (Melbourne University) Area Journal

Keywords:

Greece / Turkey; weaponizing nature; border knowledge; border ecosystem; islands; push backs

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Visual Cultures > Centre for Research Architecture
Visual Cultures

Dates: