NECROPOLIS UNITED: A Social and Digital Research Infrastructure for Witnessing Border Violence
NECROPOLIS UNITED is an interdisciplinary research infrastructure dedicated to documenting, understanding and publicly witnessing the violence produced by European border regimes. Developed through a collaboration between Ghent University, researchers, artists, migrant-led organisations and civil society partners, the project combines digital technologies with collaborative research methodologies to investigate migrant deaths, disappearances and the political conditions that produce them.
At the core of the project is SHU-HA-DA, an open, multilingual research platform that integrates complementary tools for documenting border violence, collective memory and political action. Rather than functioning as a single database, the platform connects four evolving research environments: the List of Lists, bringing together existing datasets documenting migrant deaths and disappearances; the Inventory of Commemorations, mapping commemorative practices and initiatives across Europe; ITCH, a collaborative lexicon investigating the political language of migration and borders; and the Organigramme de la Violence, which visualises institutional relationships, systems of responsibility and networks of resistance.
The infrastructure has been developed through an extensive programme of Multilingual Encounters, recurring collaborative assemblies bringing together researchers, artists, technologists, migrant-led organisations, trade unions, NGOs and cultural institutions. These encounters function simultaneously as research laboratories, editorial spaces, public forums and governance structures, ensuring that the technical development of the platform remains grounded in ethical reflection, lived experience and collective decision-making.
NECROPOLIS UNITED builds upon existing initiatives documenting migrant deaths, including the UNITED List of Refugee Deaths, the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the Deaths at the Borders Database, while extending this work beyond documentation alone. By connecting data with practices of commemoration, artistic research, critical cartography and collaborative knowledge production, the project proposes new ways of understanding, remembering and responding to the human consequences of contemporary border regimes.
As an open-source and publicly accessible research infrastructure, NECROPOLIS UNITED aims not only to support future research in migration studies, digital humanities and human rights, but also to foster sustained collaboration between academia, cultural institutions and migrant-led organisations in the ongoing development of shared infrastructures for memory, accountability and collective action.