Kekstaite, J. and Vukotić, V. (2025) ‘Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route’, Geopolitics, pp. 1–25. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2562293.
Abstract: The EU’s external border restricts the movement of unwanted individuals and subjects them to necropolitical governance. Such governance is sustained by epistemic and affective borders, determining whose lives and deaths are deemed meaningful. Maurice Stierl has proposed the concept of ‘grief activism’ as a form of transformative politics that can subvert such borders. In this paper, we further develop this framework in the specific context of Eastern EUrope, using Lithuania as a case in point. This research explores how the Lithuanian grassroots initiative Sienos Grupė (English: Border Group) engages with the lives and deaths of illegalised migrants and their relatives, invisibilised by the border regime. While research on grief activism has tended to focus on commemorations of migrant deaths, we argue that its scope should be expanded to engage with the entire ‘live-death continuum’ – including the ongoing erosion of conditions for a liveable life in an unequal world. This broader framing provides tools to situate violence against migrants historically and relationally, while seeking to foster alternative directions of affect and political engagement. Drawing on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), semi-structured interviews with members of Sienos Grupė, and an analysis of the group’s public communication, we examine how activists seek recognition for those excluded from dominant regimes of grievability.
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