Description
This paper examines the 2020 Nave Andromeda incident, in which the discovery of seven stowaway migrants aboard an oil tanker passing through the English Channel prompted a military intervention by the UK’s Special Boat Service. Although all charges were later dropped, the episode was initially understood and represented as an attempted hijacking prevented by a specialised military response. Situating this incident within the spectacle of maritime border policing and the broader context of the policing of stowaways, I suggest that this is a largely overlooked site for the politics of in/visibility that define maritime bordering. The stowaway is a paradigmatically invisible figure, hidden within the ship’s infrastructure and absent from humanitarian and security discourses, yet here becomes the focus of a performative assertion of the racialised UK sea-border.
Engaging with critical border studies, postcolonial theory and border aesthetics, the paper shows how the stowaway functions as a “body out of place” that unsettles the spatial, legal and racial order of the border. The military spectacle of the Nave Andromeda incident illuminates how the policing of stowaway migrants mobilises colonial imaginaries of maritime disorder and operates through an affective and visual economy of control and exception.
