Migration Studies Advance Access published January 24, 2016

MIGRATION STUDIES

2016

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Border displacements.
Challenging the politics of rescue
between Mare Nostrum and
Triton
Martina Tazzioli!
University Aix-Marseille, LabexMed, LAMES, MMSH, 5, Rue du Chateau de lHorloge, Aix-en-Provence, France. Email:

martinatazzioli@yahoo.it

Abstract
This article deals with this ongoing spatial and political recrafting of the Mediterranean
sea as a space of migration governmentality. It retraces the recent political and spatial
transformations occurred with the starting of the military-humanitarian operation Mare
Nostrum in the channel of Sicily and then the handover to the Triton operation coordinated by Frontex. The two specific angles from which it tackles this issue are the
politics of and over life that is at stake in the government of migration at sea and the
politics of visibility that underpins it. In the first section it analyses the politics and the
scene of rescue that has been put into place with the start of Mare Nostrum, tacking
stock of the re-articulation of military and humanitarian technologies for governing
and containing migrant movements. Then, it discusses the recent transformations
occurred with Triton operation and the effects on the level of political actions undertaken by activist migrant groups. The article moves on by taking into account the
peculiar politics of visibility that is at stake in the government of migration in the
Mediterranean.

1. Introduction
Over the last two years, the spotlights on the central Mediterranean switched on and off
according to a desultory rhythm. After years and years of migrants dying at sea and with the
alternation of moments of high visibility and others in which the island of Lampedusa
disappeared (Sossi 2005; Cuttitta 2012; Pezzani 2014), the two huge shipwrecks that
happened on the 3rd and on the 11th of October 2013 near the island of Lampedusa,
causing the death of 636 people in total, restaged the channel of Sicily and Lampedusa as
objects of focus. Indeed, a few days later Italy launched Mare Nostrum, the militaryhumanitarian operation,1 for rescuing migrants in distress at sea: the Italian Navy was

doi:10.1093/migration/mnv042
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in charge2 of monitoring and rescuing migrants in a sea-zone spanning from Italian waters
up to the beginning of Libyan waters. Mare Nostrum officially ended in November 2014,
but actually it was operative until the end of the year from which point Italy pushed the EU
to take charge of the operation in the frame of a burden sharing logic; it was replaced by
Triton, a EU operation coordinated by Frontex that, nevertheless, has been firmly criticized
by activists, human rights groups and even by some politicians for being primarily an
operation to intercept and block migrant vessels.3 Indeed, the vessels that patrol as part
of Triton should operate only up to 30 nautical miles from the European coasts.4 And its
principal activity consists in ensuring effective border control and not in rescuing migrants
at sea.5 However, the Italian Navy didnt stop its patrolling activity in central
Mediterranean, but it no longer operated within the framework of Mare Nostrum
operation.
Actually, more than a restaging of the same desultory visibility (Tazzioli 2015b), which
was already in place, the two deadly shipwrecks have triggered major transformations in the
mechanism of capturing migrants lives. The first one consisted in a spatial amplification of
the stage of rescue. Indeed, from the epicenter of Lampedusa, the scene of rescue6staged by
states, humanitarian agencies, migration agencies and journalistsimmediately reached
the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, including migrants points of departure
(Libya) and the sea-space of transit between Libya and Sicily. The second one concerned
salient re-assemblages in the politics of containment of migrant movements and in the
intertwining between humanitarian and military interventions. Therefore, the space of
governmentalityas a space of interventionwhich has been crafted in the last two
years in the central Mediterranean region, is the outcome of these two main displacements.
Moreover, the re-crafting of the Mediterranean Sea as a space of governmentality has also
been generated through the staging of what I call a humanitarian, real-time politics of
visibility that does not merely show how mechanisms of rescue and capture operate, but
rather contributes to the production of a border-stagethe Libya-Sicily sea-space as a space
of rescue. Humanitarian real-time politics of visibility indicates the real-time gaze (Walters
2014) that national authoritiesthe Coast Guard and the Navynon-governmental
actors, European agencies (Frontex) and media mobilize on the space of the sea to perform
the good border spectacle (De Genova 2013) that is the spectacle of migrant rescue.
Before moving on, some methodological clarifications are needed due to the changing
political dynamics that are repeatedly underway characterizing the space of crossing that
this article focuses onthe central Mediterranean as a migration space. While this article
was being written a series of transformationsboth at the level of institutional political
responses and of migrant movementshave occurred, undermining the possibility to have
a comprehensive analytical standpoint. Confronted with the frantic attempts by EU states
to reassess the politics of migration management, in this article I date the descriptions I
make of the ways in which practices of rescue and containment are simultaneously at stake.
In this sense, the article could appear in part outdated to readers. Nevertheless, the goal here
is not to make a chronology of the events but, starting from the specificity of events and the
data gathered during the research fieldwork, to propose an analysis about the border displacements that occurred in the military-humanitarian government of migration since the
launch of the Mare Nostrum operation. Building on Michel Foucaults approach to a
history of the present (Foucault 1984), the theoretical challenge of writing about events

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that are still underway consists in situating the analysis within the present by stressing the
effective way in which migration governmentality operates in response to the migration
turmoil, in order then to mark discontinuities and continuities with previous moments.
At the same time, writing while events are underway allows us to follow a cartography
in-the-making (Tazzioli 2015a: 3) about the internal transformations of migration governmentality. The article deals with the ongoing political re-crafting of the Mediterranean as a
space of migration governmentality, retracing the recent political and spatial transformations which occurred with the starting of the military-humanitarian operation Mare
Nostrum and then the handover to the Triton operation coordinated by Frontex.7 It is
structured around two temporal stages: the first from January 2014 to April 2015, and the
second starting the 18 April 2015, when a huge shipwreck occurred near Lampedusa,
triggering transformations in the EUs response to manage and contain the movements
of people coming to Europe in search of asylum. The two specific angles from which this
article tackles this issue are the politics of and over life that is at stake in the government of
migration at sea and the politics of visibility that underpins it. In the first section the article
analyses the politics and the scene of rescue that has been put into place with the start of
Mare Nostrum, tacking stock of the re-articulation of military and humanitarian technologies for governing and containing migrant movements, focusing on the specific politics of
life and over lives that sustains itnamely the peculiar biopolitics mobilized upon subjects
who have become shipwrecked persons.8 Then, the article discusses the recent transformations that have occurred with the Triton operation and the effects on the level of political
actions undertaken by activist migrant groups.
The article moves on by taking into account the peculiar politics of visibility that is at
stake in the government of migration in the Mediterranean. It concludes with an analysis
of the ongoing re-crafting of the EU politics of rescue and containment after the huge deadly
shipwreck of 18 April 2015, arguing that a critical understanding of the militaryhumanitarian government of migration at sea requires going beyond the scene of rescue.
This means refusing to engage in the same act of visualization performed by governmental
actors, highlighting humanitarianism at a distance and humanitarian spaces of containment
enforced at the borders of Europe. The expression humanitarianism at a distance refers to
the financial support given by EU member states to countries such as Turkey and Jordan to
host asylum seekers fleeing wars9instead of opening legal points of access for safe entry
into Europe. The expression humanitarian spaces of containment designates both the role
of pre-frontier played by Neighborhood Countries in blocking migrant departures and the
political project for externalizing the asylum in the so-called EU Neighborhood Countries.
What happens to those who do not even arrive in Europe and who, consequently, are not
detected by the radars and the patrols of Triton operation?
The main argument that sustains this analysis is that in order not to mobilize the same
gaze of military-humanitarian politics of rescue we should look at the humanitarian frontier in terms of mechanisms of capture, selection, and apprehension of migrants lives.
Finally, I suggest that in order to take stock of the series of border displacements that have
taken place since the start of Mare Nostrum, or that are still underway, it is important to
shift the attention away from the space of the sea and investigate the heterogeneous mechanisms of hold over migrants lives that the humanitarian regime puts into place (Agier
2011; Pallister-Wilkins 2015).

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2. Rescue-politics and humanitarian saturation of

political actions

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In place of humanitarianism, I deliberately use humanitarian (Fassin 2007a) in this

article, further articulating the adjective by adding technology of government, in order
to delimit a specific focus of the analysis, i.e. humanitarian politics as part of different
mechanisms of capture and regulation of migration governmentality. Thus, humanitarian
technology of government is used here to refer to a set of policies, discourses, and interventions whose purpose is to manage and channel migration movements. If, on the one
hand, humanitarian technology of government is situated in the broader field of a politics of
and over lives that find their measure in body counts, and the real or potential harms of
ordinary people (Redfield 2012: 452), on the other it designates a specific way that migration policies have a hold over migrant lives: channeling their mobility and differentiating between subjects of humanitarian concern, in all its degrees (refugees, asylum seekers,
beneficiaries of humanitarian protection, etc.) and its remnants (bogus asylum seekers,
rejected refugees, economic migrants). Moreover, if the term humanitarianism historically recalls interventions made in the name of the alleviation of human suffering (Wheeler,
2000; Barnett 2011; Ticktin 2011; Redfield 2012), the deliberate purpose of humanitarian
technology of migration government is to allocate people in space, leaving some of them
without a space to stay.
But far from being an autonomous domain of intervention, the humanitarian technology of government is taken here in its hybridizations with military forms of selection,
protection, and containment of peoples mobility. Actually, it is important to observe
that, as a broad field of literature has shown, the articulation between military and humanitarian interventions in the field of migration is far from being something new (Fassin
and Pandolfi 2010; Walters 2011). However, firstly, what matters here is not the entanglement between military and humanitarian per se but, rather, the peculiar way in which it has
been recently re-crafted with military forces in charge of performing a humanitarian task10.
At the same time, humanitarianism itself is reconfigured, I contend, as a politics of rescue.
Secondly, the point here not to reaffirm that humanitarianism is historically imbricated
with military and security issues, as many scholars have in fact already demonstrated
(Watson 2009; Jeandesboz 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2015; Vaughan-Williams 2015).
Instead, what this article intends to show is that humanitarian techniques work in themselves also as a way for containing and channeling mobility.
This involves stressing the protean nature of the humanitarian border, i.e. its ability to
transform into different mechanisms of government and to relate to other strategies and
tactics of governmentality, namely surveillance, securitization and militarization (William
2015: 13). Drawing on critical migration literature that mobilizes a Foucaultian perspective11 for conceptualizing the humanitarian in terms of reason (Fassin 2011) or frontier12
(Walters 2011), I focus on the government of migration at sea for bringing attention to the
forms of capture that humanitarian technologies put into place acting on migrants lives
and the spatial re-crafting they generated. Humanitarian forms of capture and humanitarian spaces are not self-standing objects but rather represent modulations of the migration

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regime characterized by the dislodging of peoples freedom channeling their movements

and transforming subjects into lives to rescue or into remnants in excess.
Over the last two years the duty of saving migrant lives at sea has been put on the agenda
of many EU meetings and documents. On the one hand, the two huge shipwrecks that
happened near Lampedusa in October 2013 marked a turning point in the EU discourse
and practice of migration management, since the image of a massive number of dead bodies
on the beach of Lampedusa appeared as the limits of tolerability. However, on the other
hand, the restructuring that occurred in the government of migration at sea is not merely
the effect of a prompt, responsive strategy in the wake of those two shipwrecks; rather, due
to the escalation of wars and conflicts in many parts of the worldSyria, Eritrea, and Libya,
to name only a fewthe number of people who were escaping to seek protection in Europe
had already become massive at the end of 2012. Indeed, given the tough restrictions
imposed on peoples mobility by the Visa regime13, which prevented those people from
coming to Europe safely, many of them decided to cross the Mediterranean. Thus, the
readjustments in the strategies of intervention of EU countries regarding migration at sea
were in part already about to be put into place.
However, saving migrant lives at sea has also become the main discursive tenet of nonstate actors and of activist groups, tracing in some way the boundaries of their field of
action: what I call here rescue-politics designates an humanitarian approach to migration
that puts the rescue of migrants at the core both of discourses and of effective interventions
made by governmental and non-governmental actors. In August 2014 the first Migrant
Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) rescue operation started. MOAS was put in place by a
Maltese couple and consists of a private rescue operation to support vessels in need of
assistance, coordinating its efforts with other search and rescue authorities around the
Mediterranean.14 Equipped with vessels and drones, the MOAS team started as a mission
alternative to state rescue operationswith the idea that saving migrant lives at sea should
also be an issue that involves civic responsibility; then, in a second stage, it worked in
collaboration with the Italian Navy, assisting them during rescue operations and detecting
migrants in distress at sea. In autumn 2014 a transnational group of activists based in
France, Germany, Italy, and Tunisia set up Alarm Phone, an alarm number that migrants at
sea can call in case of distress. However, different from MOAS, the Alarm Phone group is
not equipped with vessels and thus it is not a rescue service; rather, it acts according to a
watching the watchdogs strategy, calling national coast guards to put pressure on them and
following up on the rescue operation on their response, making known to them that we are
informed and watching them15. The idea behind the project is to intervene in spaces that
are usually restricted to state authorities, controlling and demanding that they operate in a
prompt and adequate way for rescuing migrants at sea.
The duty to rescue, which represents the technical and specific way of saving migrant
lives at sea, is currently the landmark of activist groups, human rights campaigns, and
national authorities involved in maritime patrolling. In fact, in the face of the deadly effects
of borders, the humanitarian rationale has absorbed and redefined all forms of engagement
in supporting migrant movements. Far from being the other pole of the mechanisms of
containment and control, the humanitarian rationale (Fassin 2011) is one among the most
effective technologies for governing, selecting, and containing migrant livesand indeed,
we can call it the humanitarian technology of government.16 As far as the government of

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refugees at sea is concerned, in the face of massive migrant deaths the humanitarian logic
grounded on the duty of rescuing lives in danger has also permeated activist groups,
saturating the space of the critical discourse.

3. The protean borders of humanitarian

governmentality

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The success and the pervasive character of the humanitarian rationale in the context of
migration at sea is partly given by the difficulty both in opposing such a discourse and in
building an alternative way of preventing deaths, to the extent that one does not step out of
the discourse on the deadly effects of borders and stop to accept the exceptionalization of
migrant movements. Indeed, to focus exclusively on a politics of rescue involves taking for
granted, or at least accepting, that in order to escape wars and seek protection certain
people have to put their lives in dangerby crossing the sea and risking death. It could
be argued that what is dislodged from the beginning in the humanitarian government is
subjects freedom (of movement). Similarly, the emphasis on the deadly effects of borders
and on the necessity to provide assistance to the migrants contributes to upstaging the
regime of mobility containment that is actively supported by the same EU countries that
engage in rescuing migrants. In order to step outside of rescue politics, I suggest looking at
the humanitarian technology of government as a mechanism of capture and apprehension
exercised on migrant lives: not only is it very often difficult to distinguish between rescue
operations and patrolling operations for intercepting migrant vessels17; it should also be
observed that the operation of rescue and the humanitarian regulation of migration at sea
have a two-fold effect: to make migrants safe and to capture them for channeling their
mobility (Kasparek et al., 2015). As detected and rescued, migrants become shipwrecked
persons whereas the recent rescue and patrolling operationsMare Nostrum and Triton
have contributed to opening new spaces of governmentality (Tazzioli 2015a). The twosided function of the rescue and, more broadly, of humanitarian governmentsaving and
capturing migrantsactually results in what William Walters calls the humanitarian frontier (Walters 2011). This frontier, I contend, on the one hand produces an enlargement of
the border-linesa borderization of spacesand on the other makes drowning migrants
the targets of border activities and mechanisms of detection. In fact, in order to be saved,
migrants have to be one of the primary objects of border surveillance; and in turn, border
surveillance is broadened to rescue activities. Indeed, as Sergio Carrera and Leonard den
Hertog explain, in the recent EU Regulation for the surveillance of its external borders, the
notion of border surveillance has operationally widened to include search and rescue
operations:
Border surveillance is not limited to the detection of attempts at unauthorized border
crossings, but equally extends to steps such as intercepting vessels suspected of trying to
gain entry to the Union, as well as arrangements intended to address situations such as
search and rescue that may arise during a border surveillance operation.18
However, at the same time this means that humanitarian migrations become objects and
targets of border activities. Moreover, the distinction between rescue operations and

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interceptions is finally blurred into the broad definition of border surveillance that includes
humanitarian and securitarian tasks. Therefore, looking at the politics of rescue as a
double-sided hold over migrant lives (Basaran 2015)which makes migrants safe and,
at once, captures and channels their movementsenables us to grasp the weaving between
military and humanitarian tasks that have been at play in the Mare Nostrum operation and
in Triton, too. Indeed, it is important to remark that Mare Nostrum was presented as a
military and humanitarian operation, in which the Italian Navy was in charge of rescuing
migrants in distress at sea. In this light, the handover to Triton, which with respect to Mare
Nostrum marked a further border displacement in the government of migration at sea
towards a renewed strategy of not letting people arrive, should not be seen as a form of
drifting away from the humanitarian concern. Indeed, humanitarian techniques of intervention are among the heterogeneous mechanisms for governing migration, exercising a
hold over migrants lives.
Thus, both the intertwinement between military and humanitarian (Mare Nostrum) and
the handover to an operation whose primary tasks are border control and the withdrawal
from rescue duties19 shed light on the protean borders of migration governmentality: migrant movement is actually selected, hampered, and monitored by different regulative
mechanisms that become holds over the lives of migrants, and the humanitarian technology of government is one of them.
If on the one hand I have highlighted how humanitarian techniques, far from being the
other pole of mechanisms of control and containment, work inside the politics of monitoring and channeling migration, on the other I would like to dwell now upon the specific
functioning of humanitarian politics. I look at the recent re-assemblages of humanitarian
and military interventions in the field of migration from the point of view of the subject that
they shape and postulate. Indeed, as Didier Fassin illustrates, the humanitarian government
can be conceived first of all as a politics of life (Fassin 2007b): in particular, what is at stake in
the humanitarian way of governing, according to Fassin, is the right to live as such more
than human rights (Fassin 2014: 31). Thus, a politics of life postulates a specific meaning of
life any time that it addresses certain subjects. What I suggest is that together with a politics
of life, the government of migration at sea involves also a politics over lives: through that
expression I aim to stress, first, that the fact of becoming a shipwrecked person is the result
of specific migration policiesthe visa regime, which does not allow people to move
freelyand second, how borders impact people (differently). Indeed, beyond postulating
a specific meaning of life and concretely shaping migrants livesfor instance treating
them as shipwrecked persons or as bogus asylum seekersthe humanitarian technology
of government also acts upon (migrant) lives mobilizing mechanisms of capture
(Jeandesboz 2015). In this sense, I build on Foucaults definition of biopower as regulatory
political technologythat brings life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations (Foucault 1998: 143)and at the same time as a dispositif capture of livesa power
over life (139) that takes hold over the bodies and life at large (Lemke 2012). It is important
to stress this twofold engagement with life enacted by humanitarian techniques, I suggest,
to the extent that we want to draw attention both to the implicit meaning of life such
techniques presuppose in addressing migrants and the effort in taming and channeling
troubling subjectivities or unexpected movements.

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4. Humanitarian visibility and the government of

migrant multiplicities

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Hence, focusing on rescue politics in the Mediterranean from such a standpoint, we can
interrogate the kind of subject that is produced and posited as the target of militaryhumanitarian intervention, going beyond legal categories. A first thing to notice is that a
considerable border restructuring has occurred since the starting of Mare Nostrum in the
way of addressing the people on boats that are rescued by the Navy or by the Coast Guard:
indeed, despite the mixed use of different denominations in the European and the Italian
media (migrants, refugees, profughi), I contend that the referent of life, which is the object
of rescue politics, ultimately corresponds to the image of the shipwrecked person. Actually,
in the moment of the rescue operations at sea, migrants are saved as people about to drown
who could not arrive in Europe other than through rescue by military forces: from being
people escaping wars, once at sea they become shipwrecked persons to rescue. In a nutshell,
it could be stated that from being asylum seekers they turn out to be shipwrecked lives, i.e.
from being subjects who should benefit from protection, migrants at sea become people to
rescue. In this regard, the politics of life that is at stake in the government of migration at sea
works not only by defining who is worthy of rescue and who is not (Basaran 2015: 3), but
also through a more radical operation that consists in presenting migrants at sea as shipwrecked personsand not as subjects in need of protection.
Appearing in political discourses and in the media as lives to saveand to be saved in the
technical sense of being rescued at seais the result of a humanitarization of migrants
insofar as their presence cannot be overshadowed because they try to be detected at sea as a
means of being rescued and because, as people fleeing wars, they cannot be depicted by
states as merely bogus refugees. Indeed, being aware of the Mare Nostrum operation,
migrants started to equip themselves with Turaya satellite phones making sure in this
way of being traceable and seen. In fact, migrants from Libya facilitated their traceability
by national authorities and monitoring systems, anticipating in space and time border
patrols by sending an SOS as soon as they entered international waters. Since for people
in distress at sea being visualized on the map by real-time monitoring tools means opening
and highlighting a space of rescue intervention, migrants staged their own capture by the
mapping gaze and demanded to be rescued. In this way, the humanitarian visibility has
been in part yielded by migrants exposure and traceability that demanded their being seen
and saved. At the same time, riding on the humanitarian visibility that governs their
movements, and becoming traceable to monitoring eyes, they promptly made themselves
visible as objects of the humanitarian and of the good border spectacle: the capacity to
detect was turned into an inescapable duty of rescue. By speaking of humanitarization of
migrants I want to highlight, on the one hand, the unquestioned exceptional mobility of
certain people who, in order to escape wars and find a safe space to stay, must redouble their
risky condition as escapees by risking death at sea; on the other hand, humanitarization
refers to a broader trend that is underway in the politics of asylum and that consists in the
degradation of international protection and refugee status into temporary humanitarian
protection. More than people deserving protection, they are subjects whose right to live can
be assured only by becoming lives rescued by military actors.

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Coming back to the humanitarian technology of government as a politics of life and over
lives, it is necessary to analyze how the twofold level at which migrants are addressed as lives
to be rescued, i.e. as part of a temporary multiplicitythe group of the rescued persons
and as singular individuals. Imagine the harbor of Pozzallo, Sicily, on 24 July 2014. A day
like many others in Pozzallo, one of the main harbors in Sicily at which the vessels which are
part of the Triton operation disembark migrants rescued at sea. Before being identified and
sorted into different reception centers, among the group of the migrants rescued at sea, two
of them are arrested by the police as supposed smugglers. Before the arrival of the vessel of
the Coast Guard, the presence of the migrants rescued on the vessels is announced by the
personnel of the Coast Guard in terms of an approximate number, about 600, among
which about 30 [are] women.20 What matters, at that stage, is not who they are, and not
even how many they are exactly. They do not form a coherent group, in terms of nationalities or of migration experience, but while on the boat what is important is their number,
rough as it may be. Ultimately, for the military-humanitarian actors that go and rescue
them, the governability of that temporary multiplicity depends on the approximate
number of people on the boat. This focus on approximate multiplicities to govern is not
a secondary matter: the politics of rescue in the Mediterranean save migrants in groups
an undefined number of people on a vesseland once disembarked, they will be partitioned between those who will enter the slow channels of the asylum system, and those who
will be put in the fast channels of deportation.21 It could be argued that the rescuing power
saves and acts on migrants as multiplicities and stops with rescue operations at sea, while
singular individuals are then governed not as lives to save but as possible fake refugees.
Singular migrants at sea are saved as part of the x number of shipwrecked persons on a
vessel in distress; but once migrants are identified and disembarked, it is not the logic of
rescue that they are governed by, but rather the exclusionary channels of the asylum together with mechanisms of fast deportation. Thus, the humanitarian government sloughs its
skin: from rescue politics that act on x number of migrants on a vessel in distress, to the
selective sorting criteria of the asylum articulated with non-humanitarian mechanisms of
deportation. Ultimately, as Pallister-Wilkins incisively argues, those categorized as at risk
become a risk when they enter the space marked by the border and policed by the border
police (Pallister-Wilkins 2015: 54). In this sense, it could be suggested that in the government of migration at sea, we witness a displacement of the pastoral paradigm described by
Foucault: the politics of saving lives at sea is exercised only at the level of migrant multiplicities; differently from the pastorate that acts upon omnes and singulatim and that,
although the population is its main object of government, it is an individualizing
power (Foucault 1979: 227) for which the salvation of a single sheep calls for as much
care from the pastor as does the whole flock (Foucault 2009: 256).22 Moreover, the verb to
rescue nicely captures the distinction between the rescue politics that act on migrants at sea
and the salvific power of the pastorate: indeed, migrant lives are saved at sea in the
technical sense of being rescued, i.e. not left to die, but once brought to safety they are
subject to the exclusionary channels of the asylum system or even treated as irregular
migrants.
Nevertheless, shifting the gaze beyond the sea is necessary so as not to narrow the humanitarian government to a specific figure of a humanitarian subject (in this case the
shipwrecked person). Indeed, not only is the humanitarian government, in its different

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5. The humanitarian border beyond the scene of rescue

So let us imagine Milan, June 2014, central rail station, almost any day since autumn 2013.
Dozens of Syrians, sometimes even hundreds, stop temporarily in Milan, coming by train
from Sicily, where the Italian Navy disembarks migrants rescued at sea. When they arrive at
the train station Garibaldi, the police in Milan, who are regularly informed by Polfer (the
Italian railway police) of the arrival of groups of Syrians, takes them to the central railway
station where they are given food by the municipality of Milan and where they wait before
being sent to one of the temporary hosting centers in the city. This tacit free railway
channel, through which Italy de facto allowed Syrian refugees to move northward, was
the result of a temporary sync between Italys disobedience to the Dublin III regulation and
Syrians strategy of movement. Actually, for about one year Syrians were allowed to escape
by the Italian police and not fingerprinted, since the great majority among the Syrians aim
to reach Northern Europe (Germany, but also Sweden, France, and the UK). And in this
way, by not sending fingerprint data to EURODAC, Italy was not legally responsible for
processing Syrians asylum claims. Indeed, after stopping a few days in Milan, all Syrians
were used to trying to cross the Swiss border in order to continue their journeys. However,
not only were many of them blocked by Swiss authorities and pushed back to Italy25: in
September 2014, after being admonished by the European Union for its repeated disobedience of the Dublin III regulation, Italy adopted new regulations that required personnel in
the hosting center to take fingerprints also by force.26
And what happens to those who have not even arrived in Europe? Or, to put it differently, what happens at the borders of Europe, at the edges of the scene of rescue staged by
military-humanitarian operations at sea? First of all, it should be observed that deaths at sea

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forms, far from being a uniform political technology and, rather, takes into account and
produces different subjectivitiesrefugees, rejected refugees, shipwrecked persons, etc.
but also the same individuals are often subjected to various mechanisms of capture, selection and labeling during their migrant journeys, as objects of humanitarian concern or as
targets of military and securitarian measures. Therefore, what characterizes humanitarian
regulatory mechanisms is their heterogeneity and their hybridization with military measures, as well as the transformative nature of these techniques of government, which clearly
emerges in the handover from Mare Nostrum to Triton and the coexistence of rescue
operations like Mare Nostrum with EU Police Joint Operations against migrants in the
European territory, such as Mos Maiorum.23 More importantly, in order to grasp this
heterogeneous functioning of humanitarian techniques and the protean character of the
mechanisms of migration governmentality,24 we must bring attention to the identity
reshuffling to which migrants are subjected: migrants escaping wars, to shipwrecked persons on a boat, to asylum seekers on national land, and finally to rejected refugees or people
who are granted temporary protection. To this purpose it is important to go beyond the
scene of the rescue at seawhere migrants are depicted as lives to be rescuedand take
into account the border effects on migrants lives, building on a longer temporality that
looks at what happens to shipwrecked persons both before and after the moment of the
rescue.

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actually have not stopped at all, as the many shipwrecks that have occurred in the last year
confirm,27 despite the hyper-visibility of Mediterranean migrations after the patrolling of
Mare Nostrum and the political focus on migrants at sea (Sossi 2015). Moreover, there have
also been deadly ghost shipwrecks that have not even been detected by national authorities
and of which I, together with other people, have been informed by friends of the victims
situated on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.28 However, at the same time that
shipwrecks and ghost shipwrecks continued to happen, political and institutional reassemblages of the border regime were also under way at the frontiers of Europe.
Indeed, in spring and summer of 2014 the Tunisian Coast Guard intercepted and rescued
many migrant vessels and disembarked the migrants on board in Tunisia.29 Once in Tunisia
some of them were transferred into provisional hosting centers and others put in jail,
in the prison of Whardia in Tunis, where migrants are told to pay for a return flight
ticket to their country of origin and, if they do not, threatened with deportation to
Algeria (Garelli et al., 2015). In October 2014 the push-backs of Syrian refugees made by
Greek authorities toward Turkey started to be quite frequent,30 and in the following
months Turkish authorities started to block migrant vessels before they could reach
Greek waters.31 The construction of different pre-frontiers of Europe is certainly not a
new political project, since bilateral agreements of EU member states with Neighborhood
Countries that also include the engagement of third countries in patrolling maritime frontiers for blocking migrants and the outsourcing of migration controls date back to the 90s32
(Boswell 2003; Cassarino 2010; Bialasiewicz 2012; Casas-Cortes et al., 2013).Yet, one year
after the start of Mare Nostrum, the enforcement of the Mediterranean pre-frontiers of
Europe has become the main EU strategy for containing migration movements and to
decrease the number of asylum seekers arriving in Italy and Greece. Moreover, what characterizes this planned enforcement of the pre-frontiers of Europe is that it would involve an
externalization both of border controls and of humanitarian protection. In Rome, on 28
November 2014, the Ministers of EU member states and the Ministers of some African
statesamong them Eritrea, currently governed by a dictatorshipsign the Karthoum
process,33 which establishes the engagement of non-European signatories states in activities
of migration control and migration management (Morone 2015).
To sum up, the EU politics of containment on the one hand, formed by the ongoing
restructuring of the pre-frontiers of Europe, and the staging of the scene of rescue in the
Mediterranean on the other hand, have been played out simultaneously. Yet, from the
northern shore of the Mediterranean the latter was much more visible than the outcomes of
the bilateral agreements with North African countries involved in blocking migrants departures. In the aftermath of the huge shipwreck that happened on 18 April 2015, this twofold politics of rescuing and containing migrants at the same time, has been reshaped in the
direction of a more and more prominent politics of containment, enacted, however, in the
name of the need to protect migrant lives. Actually, soon after the deadly migrant shipwreck
of 18 April, that caused an un-presented and still uncertain number of deathsbetween
700 and 900, the EU reacted by tripling Frontexs annual budget34 and by extending the
Triton operational zone up to 138 nautical miles south of Lampedusa. Thus, the space of
rescue expanded again, covering a stretch of sea similar to which the Navy had under Mare
Nostrum. This decision was welcomed by media and humanitarian actors as a restoring of
the politics of rescue and in fact no more deadly shipwrecks have been attested in the central

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6. Conclusion
Saved from the risk of dying at seathrough military-humanitarian convoys migrants
escaping wars are not envisaged to freely move, with no visa restrictions, as a condition
for moving safely and not becoming lives to rescue. If we concur with Nicholas De Genova
saying that if there were no borders, however, there would indeed be neither citizens nor
migrants (De Genova 2015: 13), it is simultaneously true that borders not only produce
migrants and citizens, they also act on subjects freedom in order to govern it by activating a

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Mediterranean over two months. Yet, the European Migration Agenda established by the
European Council in April 2015 includes the decision to extend the Triton operation and,
at the same time, pushes for the strengthening of bilateral agreements with third countries
for tackling migration upstream,35 namely, preventing people fleeing wars from arriving
in Europe to seek asylum.
In summer 2015 the vessels operating under Triton again started to reduce patrolling
activities, although this retreat was not an object of political attention. Moreover, precisely
at the same time that Tritons range of action was officially extended, the EU politics of
containment was reframed by the launch in June of EUNAVFOR, the EU war on smugglers,
officially conceived to save migrants from smuggling networks identifying, seizing and
destroying suspect vessels.36 Actually, the politics of targeting (Chamayou 2015) envisaged
by EUNAVFOR that consists in fighting smugglers to protect migrants, reveals a refashioning of the military-humanitarian rationale: would-be refugees are protected by hampering them from leaving by boat. The attack to the logistic of migrant crossing (Garelli
and Tazzioli 2016)by diverting and seizing migrant vesselsis a way to decrease the
number of potential refugees reaching the scene of rescue and becoming shipwrecked lives
to save.
In this regard, it is important to remark that the EUs fight against smugglers is certainly
not something new in EU migration politics and in fact it has represented, since the early
2000s, one of the main tenets for legitimizing practices of arbitrary detention and deportation, as well as interception of migrant vessels on the high sea. Ultimately, also when Mare
Nostrum was in place, the chase against mother-ships used by traffickers before transferring
migrants to smaller boats has been one of the main activities done by the Navy beyond
rescuing migrants (Cuttitta 2015).37 Nevertheless, without presenting EUNAVFOR Med as
a radical rupture within the EU politics of control, it is important to stress the partial
discontinuities and to read the declared EU war against smugglers in the context of the
current military-humanitarian approach to migration in the Mediterranean. Indeed, as I
illustrated above, the politics of rescue and containmentproducing shipwrecked lives to
save and blocking migrant departures at the same timeis at the core of the present
military-humanitarian government of migration. The launch of EUNAVFOR signals a
further twist in the politics of containment that consists in encapsulating the humanitarian
discourse on protection inside warfare: migrants will be saved not as they are rescued at sea
but rather, because they will be taken away from smugglers. More concretely, this entails
that by targeting smugglers, migrants themselves are actually hampered from the possibility
of leaving.

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complex regime of capture. Hence, it shows that one should focus on the productive
dimension of borders, in shaping and governing subjects as migrants and as citizens, and
at the same time that borders are apparatuses of capture activated for taming the recalcitrance of subjectivities. In this way, freedomthe freedom to move and to safely find a space
for livingis not even contemplated in the narrative of the rescue politics. Migrants at sea are
not saved in the perspective of being then free to move without risking their lives: on the
contrary, once rescued they are put in the juridical channels of the asylum and the luckiest
among them will be granted humanitarian protection. Thus, the channeling and containment of migrants movements appear as the only way to make migrants safe. The handover
from Mare Nostrum to Triton has been critically described as a comeback strategy towards
a reinforced securitarian approach to the government of migration at sea. Corroborating
such a view, human rights associations are demanding the activation of an effective
European system of rescue,38 criticizing Triton as an operation of border control and
pushing for a kind of Europeanization of Mare Nostrum. In this article I have argued
that rescue politics and the humanitarian-military way of governing peoples movements
have also saturated the political horizon of the criticism and actions that challenge migration policies and the deadly effects of borders. Against a linear border narrative that considers Triton merely as re-establishment of border control and a push-back strategy after
the stage of a politics of rescue, I highlighted the dismissal of migrants freedom that
humanitarian (and military-humanitarian) politics entails, producing them as shipwrecked
persons that can move only at the price of their lives and if demanding to be rescued. Thus,
instead of pushing for a disentanglement of humanitarian politics from securitarian and
military measures (Anderson 2014) I illustrated the common basis upon which they are
predicated in terms of containing and selecting (certain forms of) mobility. And, together, I
challenged a conception of humanitarian government as the opposite pole of the politics of
control and containment, showing rather the constitutive hybridization of heterogeneous
forms of governmentality and the protean character of the humanitarian borders.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that nothing has changed with the end of Mare
Nostrum and the start of Triton. On the contrary, I suggest that the indisputably different
tasks of Triton and Mare Nostrumborder control as the primary task instead of rescue
operations39and the different sea area officially covered by the two missions, should lead
us to interrogate what Triton and the changes that have occurred in the scene of rescue
mean. In other words, instead of comparing Mare Nostrum and Triton as such, it is important to look through the spatial and political transformations in the government of
migration at sea and beyond the sea that the handover to Triton enables us to grasp by
gesturing toward the pre-frontiers of Europe.40 Indeed, the scene opened after the huge
shipwreck of the 18th of April, with a twist towards a politics of containment done in name
of protecting migrants should be read in the light of the attempt by the EU to build
humanitarian spaces of containment in third-countries according to a strategy of not letting
people leave.

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Acknowledgments
This work has been produced within the framework of the Unit of Excellence LabexMedSocial Sciences and Humanities at the heart of multidisciplinary research for the
Mediterranean - which holds the following reference 10-LABX-0090. This work has benefited from a state grant by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche for the project
Investissement dAvenire A MIDEX which holds the reference n ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02.

Notes
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1. It was launched 18 October 2013 by the Italian government and it officially ended in
November 2014. <http://www.marina.difesa.it/cosa-facciamo/operazioni-concluse/
Pagine/mare-nostrum.aspx> accessed January 12, 2016.
2. With the collaboration of Guardia di Finanza and Guardia Costiera.
3. Triton officially started in November 2014 but actually the Italian Navy continued to be
the main actor and was in the proximity of Libyan waters until the end of December
2014.
<http://ecre.org/component/content/article/70-weekly-bulletin-articles/855operation-mare-nostrum-to-end-frontex-triton-operation-will-not-ensure-rescue-atsea-of-migrants-in-international-waters.html> accessed January 12, 2016.
4. While the boats of the Italian Navy under Mare Nostrum patrolled also very close to the
Libyan waters.
5. <http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-14-566_it.htm> accessed January 12,
2016. This implicates that, actually, instead of ongoing patrolling operations for preventing migrant drowning, vessels operating under Triton operation go to rescue migrants only when they receive a distress call.
6. By scene of rescue I mean the political and media attention staged on the rescue operations made by the Italian Navy, reversing in some way the border spectacle of migrant invasion (De Genova 2013) by focusing rather on the humanitarian task of
military forces.
7. This article is the result of a series of interviews conducted between January 2014 and
May 2015 with the Italian Navyat the headquarters in Rome (January 2014; June, July
2014) and at the Sicilian harbor of Augusta (August 2014) and Pozzallo (July 2015)
with the Coast Guard in Rome (April 2015) and in Lampedusa (February 2014), with
the Italian Home Office (July 2014; January 2015) and of the fieldwork conducted in the
city of Milan and Bologna between March 2014 and November 2014.
8. Indeed, as William Walters points out, if the humanitarian can be situated in relation
to the analytics of government, it can also be contextualized in relation to the biopolitical (Walters 2011: 142).
9. To date (December 2014) the European Union has supported Turkey with 28.5 million
euros for managing Syrian refugees displaced in the country: <http://ec.europa.eu/echo/
files/aid/countries/factsheets/turkey_en.pdf>; 350 million euros have been given to
Jordan; <http://ec.europa.eu/echo/files/aid/countries/factsheets/jordan_syrian_crisis_
en.pdf>; 450 million euros to Lebanon; <http://ec.europa.eu/echo/files/aid/countries/
factsheets/lebanon_syrian_crisis_en.pdf>; and the total amount mobilized by the EU

BORDER DISPLACEMENTS

10.
11.
12.

14.
15.

16.
17.

18.
19.

20.

21.

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for the Syrian crisis, for supporting Syrian refugees out of Europe is 3.35 billion euros:
<https://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0
CCwQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fec.europa.eu%2Fecho%2Ffiles%2Faid
%2Fcountries%2Ffactsheets%2Fsyria_en.pdf&ei=I-EaVZWVN8raU-DTgZgM
&usg=AFQjCNEsXUh4fqGvQQwB31aLYpiycgugJg&sig2=dXqTDS2DV1dEkbQ
5r96deg> accessed January 12, 2016.
The Navy in charge of rescuing migrants at sea.
In particular using the notion of governmentality and its relationship to biopolitics, as a
political technology that acts over lives.
It is important to stress that, as William Walters also points out, in relation to humanitarian technology of government, border is conceived not as a frontier-line but rather
as a border-zone, a space of intervention in which humanitarian actors operate and that
is reshaped by those technologies of intervention.
Visa restrictions establish that people coming from certain countries must ask for an
authoritization (the Visa) in order to enter Europe. This is something relatively recent
as, for instance, in the case of people from Maghreb countries no Visa restrictions were
in place until the late 1980s.
<http://www.moas.eu/4/Our-Mission> accessed January 12, 2016.
<https://www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC
IQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.watchthemed.net%2Findex.php%2Fpage%2
Findex%2F12&ei=y0UdVevfGsX0ULb0gMgI&usg=AFQjCNHmMc1QSXQNzv2
whxHCMz8IoGm0gw&sig2=pANBJMicuIbbk1o6iZLlyw> accessed January 12, 2016.
<http://www.moas.eu/old_site/ourmission.html> accessed January 12, 2016.
This is particularly true in the context of Europes pre-frontiers, such as Tunisia or
Turkey, where the migrant vessels are often blockedand then migrants are taken on
the mainland, avoiding possible shipwrecks but also de facto hampering them from
reaching Europe.
Art. 2(2), Parliament and Council (2014), Regulation on Frontex sea border surveillance operations (cited in Carrera and Den Hertog 2015).
As the ex-Executive Director of Frontex declared: Triton is not a search and rescue
operation, but a border control operation. <http://www.euractiv.com/sections/
global-europe/gil-arias-fernandez-immigration-problem-calais-not-so-bad-310239>
accessed January 12, 2016.
<http://agrigento.blogsicilia.it/in-arrivo-in-sicilia-mille-migranti-recuperati-10-cada
veri-in-mare/289242/ http://palermo.repubblica.it/cronaca/2014/08/27/news/in_sici
lia_sbarcati_800_migranti_altri_seicento_in_arrivo_ad_augusta_i_24_morti_dell_
ultimo_naufragio-94505087/#gallery-slider=94525443
http://www.migreurop.org/
article1763.html?lang=fr http://www.unionesarda.it/articolo/cronaca_sardegna/2015/
02/16/migranti_nuovi_sbarchi_a_lampedusa_la_sardegna_ne_accoglie_una_pa-6408122.html> accessed January 12, 2016.
For instance, migrants coming from countries like Nigeria, Egypt or Tunisia are deported by Italian authorities without giving them the opportunity to claim asylum, due
to the bilateral repatriation agreements between Italy and those countries. Indeed,
concerning fast deportation procedures it could be argued that with the starting of
Mare Nostrum nothing has changed.

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22. In fact, according to Foucault pastoral power acts both at the level of singularities and of
populations, but what distinguishes pastoral power from other political technologies of
government is the care and control acted on individuals. Indeed, it is not by chance that
in the 1980s Foucault centers his analysis on the mechanisms of subjectivation and
individualization, and on the injunction to tell the truth about oneself, that subjects are
requested to perform (Foucault, 2013).
23. Mos Maiorum, a European joint police operation, was put into place between 13 and 26
October 2014 and its main aim was to apprehend and identify irregular migrants in
the European territory. <http://www.statewatch.org/news/2014/sep/eu-council-201407-10-11671-mos-maioum-jpo.pdf> accessed January 12, 2016.
24. Thus, not considering humanitarian, military and securitarian measures as opposite or
conflicting rationales for governing migration.
25. <http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/articoli/Immigrazione-sessanta-profughi-respinti-allafrontiera-svizzera-a16e5a2c-479c-46f8-ac56-75224e141401.html> accessed January 12,
2016.
26. <http://dirittiefrontiere.blogspot.it/2014/09/nuove-procedure-di-identificazione-ed.
html> accessed January 12, 2016.
27. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2014 more than
3,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean and the number of deaths is certainly underestimated due to the many migrants who left and disappeared at sea without even
being detected by national authorities.
28. Refugees who I met at Choucha camp during my fieldwork in Tunisia in 2011, 2012 and
2013 and who Im still in contact with.
29. According to IOM, between January 2014 and March 2015 the Tunisian Coast Guard
rescued 760 migrants (IOM Tunisia, informative note, April 2015).
30. As part of the Alarm Phone network, I was on shift when a push-back happened on 25
October 2014 from Greece to Turkey and Syrian refugees called the Alarm Phone.
<http://watchthemed.net/reports/view/84> accessed January 12, 2016.
31. <http://www.repubblica.it/solidarieta/profughi/2014/11/26/news/profughi_siriani101479714/> accessed January 12, 2016.
32. For instance, the first bilateral agreement between Tunisia and Italy dates back to 1998
and between Tunisia and France to 1988.
33. <http://italia2014.eu/media/3785/declaration-of-the-ministerial-conference-of-thekhartoum-process.pdf> accessed January 12, 2016.
34. Draft Amending Budget, COM(2015) 241 final.
35. European Agenda on Migration, COM(2015) 240 final.
36. <http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015/06/22-fac-navaloperation/> accessed January 12, 2016.
37. <http://catania.meridionews.it/articolo/10559/immigrazione-la-marina-spara-sugliscafisti-operazione-coordinata-da-procura-di-catania/> accessed January 12, 2016.
38. <http://www.proasyl.de/en/news/news-english/news/for_a_european_system_of_
rescue_at_sea/> accessed January 12, 2016.
39. <http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-14-566_it.htm> accessed January 12,
2016.

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40. <http://migrantsatsea.org/2015/04/23/text-of-draft-european-council-statement-viastatewatch/> accessed January 12, 2016.

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