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.

Oliver Razum is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Epidemiology & International Public Health at the School of Public Health, Bielefeld University, Germany. He served as Dean of the School for more than ten years. His research spans migration and refugee health, armed conflict and public health, social epidemiology, and equitable access to healthcare.

Diego S. Silva is Associate Professor of Bioethics at Sydney Health Ethics, University of Sydney, Australia. His work focuses on public health ethics, political theory and ethical decision-making in infectious disease control and health security.

Iryna Hubeladze is Acting Deputy Director for Research at the Institute for Social and Political Psychology, National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv School of Economics. A social psychologist, she researches social identity, resilience, migration and the psychosocial consequences of war.

Yudit Namer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Health and Technology at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Trained as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, she studies marginalisation and mental health, refugee and migrant health, and equitable access to care, including the role of technology.