Description
Since 2015, the European Union has accelerated its efforts to ‘control migration’ through a rapid process of militarization and ever-more violent spectacles at its external borders. In response, people have engaged in new and old forms of solidarity activism in order to resist this violence and imagine a different Europe. In our paper, we explore the violent governing of racialised bodies in the EU and the possibilities of acts of resistance. We focus on the Mediterranean and the island-state of Malta to explore resistance to violent bordering practices in a post-colonial state and how it intersects with resistance to bordering at sea. We wonder: Does operating on the high sea, outside state borders, lend itself to more radical action than on land? Does activist and humanitarian work in the Mediterranean transgress state borders and categories, possibly gesturing toward another politics beyond division? Certainly, resistance at sea doesn’t occur in isolation: people need to be disembarked, legal battles must be fought, and activists at sea return to the land and often face legal and other consequences of their actions at sea. In order to examine these intersections, we analyse activist and humanitarian interventions at sea over rescue and disembarkation and the ways in which they relate to forms of political organising on land.
