I recently published an auto-ethnographic field reflection in International Migration Review titled “When a Child Dies Abroad: A Mother’s Reflections on the Bureaucracy of Transnational Loss.” The article examines the death of my four-year-old son in Kenya after an emergency medical evacuation from Rwanda, and the legal, medical, and bureaucratic systems my family was forced to navigate across three countries in the span of six days. What began as a private tragedy quickly became an encounter with institutional power, fragmented consular governance, and opaque medical and legal regimes that exerted control over my child’s body and my parental authority at the most vulnerable moment of my life. Drawing on my therapy journals, archival documents, and personal correspondence, the article analyzes how grief became entangled in what I conceptualize as administrative violence, using Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to understand how institutions regulate life, death, and the postmortem governance of bodies across borders. The piece interrogates how my son’s terminal diagnosis was withheld from me, how repeated resuscitations were conducted without my consent, how consular systems failed during crisis, and how his remains were repatriated through a global regime that treats dead bodies as bureaucratic objects rather than sites of human meaning. Although my family occupied a position of relative legal and economic privilege as American citizens, the article demonstrates how even resource-secure migrants can be rendered powerless in the face of fragmented international procedures and institutional authority.
This article matters far beyond my own loss because it exposes a largely unexamined dimension of migration: the governance of death. In a world defined by unprecedented human mobility, millions of families experience illness, injury, and death outside their countries of origin every year, yet migration scholarship and humanitarian policy rarely address what happens when life ends across borders. The bureaucratic obstacles I encountered—restricted access to medical information, divergent legal standards of consent, abandoned emergency consular services, and the costly repatriation of remains—are not anomalies. They are structural features of a global system that prioritizes institutional protocol over human vulnerability. My reflection situates these experiences within a broader landscape of migration governance, showing how grief, mourning, and care are mediated through legal pluralism and administrative control. It argues that when death occurs transnationally, bodies become subject to state and institutional micro-sovereignties that decide how they are handled, stored, transported, and returned, often without transparency or family agency. These dynamics, I contend, are only magnified for forcibly displaced families navigating refugee camps, detention centers, and asylum systems—spaces that Giorgio Agamben describes as “zones of exception,” where surveillance, bureaucratic opacity, and institutional abandonment strip people of agency at their most vulnerable moments. If my family encountered such systemic failures with embassy access, legal documentation, and financial resources, the hardships facing undocumented migrants, stateless persons, and refugees experiencing cross-border death are exponentially greater.
In the context of today’s global migration crises, in Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Gaza, Ukraine, and across sub-Saharan Africa, this article offers a framework for understanding how loss itself becomes governed. It argues that the management of death must be recognized as integral to migration governance rather than peripheral to it. The piece does not offer policy solutions, but it provides testimony that reveals critical gaps in global support systems at precisely the moments when human beings are most fragile. It challenges humanitarian and migration regimes to reckon with the ethical implications of biopower and necropolitics in cross-border care, end-of-life decision-making, and bodily repatriation. Ultimately, the article insists that transnational grief is not merely personal; it is political. It is shaped by institutional logics, global legal hierarchies, and uneven infrastructures of care that determine whose suffering is acknowledged, whose death is administratively legible, and whose mourning is supported. In a world where displacement, mobility, and forced migration continue to intensify, the bureaucratization of grief must be seen as one of the hidden violences of globalization. My hope is that this work contributes to a deeper scholarly and ethical reckoning with what it means to live and die within an interconnected world governed by borders, paperwork, and unequal regimes of care.
African Society and Conflict 