Poland-Belarus Borderlands: How a Forest Is Made Lethal

The Death Zone – The Making of a Lethal Pushback Regime Across the Polish–Belarusian Borderlands, a report published on September 8 by the investigative agency Border Forensics and two research projects, Circumference of Violence and Infrastructuring Nature, sets out to answer that question. Czarnota was one of its lead researchers. Drawing on testimonies, medical data, field research, maps and geostatistical analysis, the researchers examined 102 documented deaths linked to the Polish-Belarusian border area and 214 fragmentary reports of potential disappearances.

Their central allegation is stark: that policies, infrastructure and law-enforcement practices on both sides of the border “knowingly exposed” migrants to environmental conditions that had already proved lethal. The accumulation of harm The method comes from forensic architecture, a field developed at Goldsmiths, University of London, where the architect Eyal Weizman in 2010 pioneered using satellite imagery, 3D models, and the reconstruction of spaces and events to investigate state violence.