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Abstract
The debate on migration-related border controls has greatly expanded during the past decade. Special attention has been given to processes of contestation and of rights-claims enacted by migrants, drawing greatly on Isin’s work on acts of citizenship and Rancière’s articulation of the ‘uncounted’ and the political. Within this broad debate little attention has been devoted to the acts of common people in contesting current border management and especially in refusing the policing and the bordering of their own territory. By focusing on the Lampedusa borderland, this paper will explore and interrogate the verbal protests made by the people of Lampedusa in response to the drowning of some 366 African migrants on 3 October 2013. The protests were mostly against current border patrolling and its politics of (non-)life, which prioritise border protection against (migrants’) life protection. The call to protecting all human life, equally worthy of being protected, transformed these protests into political acts. Using and extending the work of Rancière, I explore the extent to which the people of Lampedusa have highlighted a ‘wrong’ and enacted ‘dissensus’ by contesting the (natural) securitised order of EU border management.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi for all the work done to put this volume together. Special thanks go to Anna for all the constructive comments and suggestions made on earlier versions of my paper, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers whose reflections provided me with great insights.
Notes
1. Geddes, Immigration and European Integration.
2. See Bigo and Guild, Controlling Frontiers; de Genova and Peutz, The Deportation Regime; Neal, “Securitization and Risk”; di Pascale, “Migration Control at Sea”; and Wolff, “Border Management.”
3. FRONTEX is the short name for the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the EU, created by Council Regulation EC 2007/2004 of 26 October 2004.
4. Spijkerboer, “The Human Costs,” 127.
5. Migreurop, Guerre aux Migrants.
6. Marin, “Protecting the EU’s Borders.”
7. Ibid., 76.
8. Weber and Pickering, Globalization and Borders.
9. Ibid.
10. See Carling, “Migration Control”; Hamood, “EU–Libya Cooperation”; Klepp, “Contested Asylum System”; and Lutterbeck, “Policing Migration.”
11. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Article 3, which also reflects customary international law.
12. MPC, Migrants Smuggled by Sea, 4.
13. IOM, Fatal Journeys, 18–20.
14. MPC, Migrants Smuggled by Sea.
15. Amnesty International, Lives Adrift.
16. Rygiel, “In Life through Death.”
17. Heller et al., Forensic Oceanography.
18. Weber and Pickering, Globalization and Borders.
19. Monforte and Dufour, “Mobilizing in Borderline Citizenship Regimes,” 203–232.
20. Isin, “Citizenship in Flux.”
21. Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago,” 118.
22. Rancière, “Politics, Identification and Subjectivization,” 58.
23. Ibid, 60.
24. Amnesty International, Lives Adrift, 23.
25. Monzini, “Sea-border Crossings.”
26. CENSIS, Integrazione in una terra.
27. See Decree-law no. 60, March 20, 1997, Gazzetta Ufficiale 66, March 20, 1997;
and Dpcm, March 19, 1997, Gazzetta Ufficiale 66, March 20, 1997.
28. Intergovernmental agreement with the Albanian Ministry of Defence, signed on 24 March.
29. de Guttry and Pagani, La crisi albanese.
30. Act no. 7, February 6, 2008, Gazzetta Ufficiale 40, February 18, 2009.
31. Application no. 27765/09.
32. Ibid., paras 129, 131. See also Sharifi and Others v. Italy and Greece, application no. 16643/09.
33. Fischer-Lescano et al., “Border Controls at Sea,” 284.
34. Act no. 189, July 30, 2002, Gazzetta Ufficiale 199, August 26, 2002;
and Act no. 94, July 15, 2009, Gazzetta Ufficiale 170, July 24, 2009.
35. Cuttitta,‘“Borderizing’ the Island,” 199.
36. Ibid., 197–199.
37. Dines et al., “Thinking Lampedusa.”
38. UNHCR, Refugee Protection; IOM, New Migrant Arrivals; and Council of Europe, Report on the Visit in Lampedusa. See also Andrijasevic, “Lampedusa in Focus”; Andrijasevic, ‘DEPORTED’; and Coluccello and Massey, “Out of Africa.”
39. All the messages of protest and all the quotations from the interviews are drawn from newspaper articles.
40. See Bailey, “Up Against the Wall”; Bosworth, “Deportation, Detention”; Coutin, “Illegality, Borderlands”; and Rygiel, “Bordering Solidarities.”
41. Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago.”
42. Author’s translation. The original wording ‘prossimo’ refers to ‘neighbours’ in its broadest sense, ie people close/next to us.
43. It was the local priest who used this definition, stating: ‘those babies buried in the sea bottom […] are our sons’. La Repubblica, October 5, 2013.
44. See also Hoover and Bahçecik, in this volume.
45. Arditi, “Disagreement without Reconciliation.”
46. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 30.
47. Rygiel, “In Life through Death.”
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” thesis 1.
51. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 28, emphasis in original.
52. Ibid., 29–30.
53. de Genova, “The Queer Politics,” 107–108.
54. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 177.
55. Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” 35.
56. Schaap, “Enacting the Right,” 22.
57. Ibid.
58. Rancière, Dis-agreement, 36.
59. Rigby and Schlembach, “Impossible Protest.”
60. Ibid., 158.
61. See Beltrán, “Going Public.”
62. Rigby and Schlembach, “Impossible Protest,” 158.
63. Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship.
64. Rigby and Schlembach, “Impossible Protest,” 158–159.
65. Act no. 189; and Act no. 94.
66. Rancière, Dis-agreement, x.
67. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” para 24.
68. Rancière, Dis-agreement, ix.
69. Ibid., 30.
70. Ibid., 23–24, 89.
71. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” para 22.
72. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2.
73. See McGregor, “Contestations and Consequences”; McNevin, Contesting Citizenship; Nyers, “In Solitary, in Solidarity”; Puggioni, “Speaking through the Body”; and Puggioni, “Against Camps’ Violence.”
74. See de Genova, “The Queer Politics”; Krause, “Undocumented Migrants”; Selmeczi, ‘“We are being Left’”; and Shachar, “Introduction.”
75. Rancière, “What does it Mean?,” 560.