In Dying Abroad, Osman Balkan presents an exceptional and deeply thought-provoking analysis of what happens when migrants die “out of place.” Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Muslim funeral homes and cemeteries, alongside interviews with religious leaders, migrant families, and state officials, Balkan turns our attention to a crucial but often ignored aspect of migration: The end-of-life practices and decisions. For anyone who experiences migration personally or through their loved ones, this book is also a reminder that their struggle over claiming membership and identity extends beyond the limits of biological life. Balkan’s notion of the “political afterlife” thus acts as a conceptual extension of lived citizenship, capturing how claims to recognition, respect, and inclusion are made posthumously through the rituals, infrastructures, and geographies of death. The emotional and moral decision of where and how to be buried when they die or bury a loved one is deeply intertwined with migrants’ perceptions of whether they truly belong to the political community of the host state. This focus on death and postmortem practices foregrounds the embodied, affective, and material dimensions of citizenship in ways that are often overlooked in legal or rights-based accounts.
The book engages with a range of scholarly debates in political ethnography, including those concerning migration, transnationalism, and citizenship. It offers significant empirical insights and conceptual contributions to each of these domains while also contributing to critical discussions in the fields of necropolitics and migrant integration. The first part of the book focuses on the role of institutions and the material conditions that shape end-of-life practices in migratory contexts. Chapter 1 provides a rigorous examination of two Islamic funeral funds that play a pivotal role in organizing and financing the repatriation of deceased migrants. By institutionalizing cross-border funerary practices, these funds formalize transnational engagements with death. These funds promote repatriation based on the notion of Turkish migrants belonging to Turkey and actively foster necropatriotism. This chapter illustrates how both state and non-state actors make claims over dead bodies, turning them into contested sites through which political membership, national belonging, and collective identity are negotiated. Chapter 2 examines the mediating role of Muslim undertakers, emphasizing their dual function as cultural and bureaucratic intermediaries who also challenge dominant state narratives and stereotypes. Through an ethnographic analysis of their involvement in funerary processes, the chapter reveals how death rituals become sites where broader issues, such as integration, migrants’ perception of their own status and place in society, bureaucratization, and commodification of death. As Balkan shows, even in death, migrants encounter bureaucratic hurdles and spatial marginalization, and the funeral industry is a space of power relations and cultural socialization. In this first part of the book, Balkan also offers a thoughtful and reflexive account of his own positionality as a male Muslim migrant of Turkish descent. He critically engages with how his social identity shaped his access to the field by acknowledging both the challenges and advantages that his positionality entailed. Balkan enhances the transparency and depth of his ethnographic practice, allowing readers to better understand the situated nature of knowledge production and the context in which his analysis emerges.
The second part of the book delves into the symbolic and cultural dimensions of death, uncovering how funerary rituals and ceremonies function as processes of place-making and identity construction. In doing so, it broadens the temporal and spatial boundaries of citizenship. Migrants’ burial choices are framed not merely as cultural or religious acts, but as affective and political expressions of attachment to multiple communities and states. Chapter 3 centers on memorial practices, examining how graveyards emerge as politicized spaces where cultural expression and identity negotiation take place. Balkan conceptualizes the cemetery as a politically charged site in which diasporic memory and collective identity are actively constructed. Here, contested understandings of territory and the boundaries of political community are materially inscribed and symbolically enacted. Extending these insights, Chapter 4 explores the determinants of end-of-life decisions among migrant communities. Drawing on personal interviews, Balkan argues that choices between local burial and repatriation are shaped more by family ties, migrants’ understanding of national territory, and experiences of exclusion than by formal legal frameworks. Balkan further highlights an important end-of-life dilemma that encapsulates broader tensions around membership and national belonging. While experiences of social exclusion in Germany may lead some Turkish and Kurdish migrants to opt for burial in Turkey, others choose to be buried in Germany as a deliberate assertion of belonging and a symbolic affirmation of their presence and membership in the German national space. Through these discussions, the chapter contributes to the developing understanding of lived citizenship by illustrating how migrants’ transnational experiences of belonging and coexistence inform not only their everyday practices but also their end-of-life decisions.
The core of the book reminds us that the existential questions of “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” shape not only the trajectory of life but also the meaning and practice of death in migratory settings. Dying Abroad offers a rich account of how burial practices are embedded within broader dynamics of racialization, exclusion, and transnational attachment. It makes a significant contribution by shifting the analytical focus of migration studies to the political life of death, challenging conventional understandings of migration, transnationalism, and citizenship. One of the book’s central contributions lies in its expansion of how citizenship is conceptualized and practiced. Balkan powerfully demonstrates that the negotiation of belonging does not end with life, but extends into death. The book’s key insights build on the work of scholars such as Rygiel (Reference Rygiel2016), Mavelli (Reference Mavelli and Zambernardi2024), and Zambernardi (2024), contributing to discussions on posthumous citizenship by framing end-of-life choices and rituals as acts of citizenship through which claims to rights, recognition, and belonging persist beyond the death of the individual. In doing so, the book opens new theoretical and methodological directions for examining the entanglements of death, mobility, and state power.
By treating death as a site of political meaning, Dying Abroad invites interdisciplinary engagement and sets the stage for further comparative research. How do such faith institutions and practices function outside Western Europe or in different religious and migratory contexts, including Muslim-majority countries? Are there parallel mechanisms for other faith communities or non-religious individuals, and how do Turkish citizens of diverse ethno-religious backgrounds engage with them and the idea of death out of place? These questions underscore the originality of Balkan’s intervention while pointing to valuable avenues for extending the geographical and institutional reach of his framework. Overall, this meticulously researched and theoretically innovative book is a vital addition that will be of interest to scholars across disciplines as well as policymakers and broader audiences.
