Criminalizing solidarity: Search and rescue in a neo-colonial sea

Cetta Mainwaring, Daniela DeBono*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescued over 110,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2015 and 2017. From 2017, EU member states and agencies increasingly criminalized these organizations, accusing them of ?colluding with smugglers? and acting as a pull factor. In this climate, as Italy, Malta and the EU increased cooperation with Libya to stop people from taking to the seas, many suspended their operations. This article explores the search and rescue efforts of NGOs in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2014 and 2018. We examine the criminalization of this NGO activity and argue that it is made possible through an oscillating neo-colonial imagination of the sea as mare nostrum and mare nullius, our sea and nobody?s sea, respectively. We build on the work of other scholars who have pointed to the activation of the Mediterranean as ?empty? in response to migration flows, erasing the historical connections of colonialism, empire, trade, and exchange in the Mediterranean as well as the contemporary legal geographies that govern the space. Here, we go further to develop the idea of a neo-colonial sea, which is alternately imagined as empty and ?European?. We explore how NGOs disrupt these depictions, as well as the disappearing figures of the migrant and refugee amidst the contestations between NGOs and states.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1030-1048
Number of pages19
JournalEnvironment and Planning C: Politics and Space
Volume39
Issue number5
Early online date12 Jan 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • solidarity
  • Mediterranean Sea
  • migration
  • neo-colonialism
  • non-governmental organisations
  • search and rescue

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