Description
Irregular migration’s political prominence has led to profound shifts in the governance of mobility and the rapid evolution in state border security efforts, particularly in the use of technology in the governance of migration. In response to the precarity of irregular migrant journeys through the Mediterranean Sea, there has been a rise in civil society Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) committed to providing humanitarian assistance for migrants in transit. This creates contested spaces: states aim to exclude those migrating through violent bordering practices, while NGOs’ acts of solidarity offer support to traverse the harsh environment of the sea and increasingly, through their work in the skies above. Both the sea and sky are utilized as spaces of migration control while simultaneously being transformed into sites of resistance by NGOs through their counter-surveillance and human rights monitoring. Importantly for SAR activists, the Mediterranean airspace serves as a valuable site to employ a “disobedient gaze” (Heller et al. 2017) to observe, document and publicize human rights violations being perpetrated by the EU, in concert with the Libyan Coast Guard. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of technology in NGO SAR operations, with a particular focus on airborne operations. Airborne operations rely on several high and low tech capabilities in their work, from satellite-based imagery, radar surveillance and increasingly, drones. In response to the continued persistence of boat migration at sea, examining airborne SAR operations provide an opportunity to see how they enact a disobedient gaze through the use of various technological tools, serve as a form of counter-mapping the Mediterranean surveillance landscape and challenge the spatio-political governance of the sea.
