Vessels of Solidarity: The Material Politics of Civil Sea Rescue Ships

This article theorises ships as material carriers of transversal solidarity, based on the specific case of civil sea rescue vessels in the Mediterranean. My argument derives from eight months of fieldwork as an engaged activist-ethnographer amongst civil sea rescue actors in Europe. Bringing empirical findings in conversation with scholarship of maritime resistance, the article adopts a conceptual focus that centres the ship's materiality to expand our understanding of (transversal) solidarity in two ways. Firstly, I demonstrate how the ship's materiality facilitates transversal relations across different backgrounds (trans-positional), organisations (trans-organisational), and the borders of nation-states (trans-spatial). Secondly, the article argues that a conceptual focus on the vessel's materiality reveals a fourth, temporal dimension, that is how solidarity is maintained across time. In theorising the vessel as a carrier of (transversal) solidarity, the article advances our understanding of how solidarity may be materially sustained across categorical, spatial, and temporal boundaries.