Description
This paper is a consideration of boat migration, placing our contemporary responses and practices within a longer historical context and considering what is revealed about the fundamental building blocks of the international order, namely borders, states, and people on the move or kept still. I orient the discussion around the question of Search and Rescue (SAR) on the high seas, asking how imaginations and practices of ‘rescue’ are manifest against the mobility of people crossing borders, how rescue situates and emplaces individuals and states in relation to one another, and what actions have been taken to re-imagine these relations. There are two key arguments I wish to advance here: first, that questions of SAR and their enmeshing with migration turn on contestations over responsibility and sovereignty; and second that it is not rescue, but rather search that is the mobilising concept.
