Border and im/mobility entanglements in the Mediterranean: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

The material violence of borders and border control has turned the Mediterranean Sea into a ‘border spectacle’ (De Genova, 2002) – a nodal spectacularized meeting point between the North and the South; EUrope and ‘non-EUrope’ (Cuttitta, 2018; van Reekum, 2019). Advanced technologies of surveillance, calculation, communication, coordination and inter-ception (e.g. Andersson, 2012; Follis, 2017; _ Is¸leyen, 2021; Pallister-Wilkins, 2017; Stierl, 2021), empowered by narratives of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins, 2016), statistics (e.g. Tazzioli, 2015; van Reekum, 2019), mediatic images (Ibrahim, 2018) and cartography (Cobarrubias, 2019), have contributed to the construction of understandings of the Mediterranean as a site of violence, death, and disappearance, rather than of circulation. Furthermore, these narratives and images rely on racialized oppositions (Mainwaring and DeBono, 2021) which draw and redraw the Mediterranean as a demarcation separating EUrope from its ‘Others.’ In contrast to these dominant perceptions of the Mediterranean as a borderzone constituted by EUrope and policed in cooperation with a co-opted (or enlisted) “South”, 1 a plethora of academic work has shown that the Mediterranean has historically been shaped by multiple forms of connectivity.