Institutional Abandonment: Health, Harm, and Civil-Society Responses

This edited book examines how institutional abandonment-states' knowing or deliberate neglect of moral or legal obligations-harms population health and undermines democratic accountability. In this international volume for sociologists of health and illness as well as scholars of public health and bioethics, migration studies, political sciences, citizenship studies, critical border studies and psychology, the chapters show how abandonment is intensified by Othering and produces patterned harms, including legal insecurity, chronic uncertainty, injury, untreated illness and psychological distress.

Conceptual chapters develop institutional abandonment as a political determinant of health and theorise the ethical critique and reform of concrete borders and boundary-making practices. Using interdisciplinary lenses, empirical case studies range from arbitrary expatriations under the Nazi dictatorship and 'civic death' in post-2016 Türkiye to wartime Ukraine, Gaza's water and sanitation crisis, exclusionary psychosocial healthcare for refugees in Germany and the longer after-effects of Othering for Nigerian returnees. A final section analyses how civil-society organisations, grassroots initiatives and artistic practices expose abandonment, mitigate harm and press institutions to meet their obligations, while arguing for liberal-democratic repair rather than institutional dismantling.