Weaponising a river / Median Line: a century of border violence and the alluvial geopolitics of the Evros/Meric/Maritsa River border

This media lecture focuses on the case of the Evros, Meriç, Martisa river – ‘land’ border between Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria – and its production as a border technology. From its main course to its delta, this fluvial frontier is weighted with the crossings of asylum seekers and systematic pushbacks. The river-border technology incorporates the entire hydrology of the river ecosystem, from the deadly velocities of the central course, through its muds, fogs, and flood defence walls that mark the military buffer zone that surrounds it (Zoni Asfaleias Prokalypsis (ZAP)). State impunity is in part produced by the ZAP’s enfolding of the excess of floodwaters into the excesses of sovereign territorial power.

After a century of fluvio-geomorphological change since demarcation in 1926 the borderised river simultaneously riverises the border. In this way the river border is a dynamic archive of the military calculations and geopolitical decisions that make its properties treacherous as an increasingly perilous migration route. Here beatings are customary, mobile phones and official documentation are thrown into the river, and, after seasonal floods, bodies wash up in the delta. In its waters and in its sediments the river border is both a weapon and an archive of the reproduction of deadly exclusionary policies enacted at the watery edges of the EU.