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Abstract
In October 2014, on the anniversary of a large migrant shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea, activists in Europe and Africa commemorated the victims and protested their deaths by launching the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone. The Alarm Phone functions as a ‘hotline’ for travellers who find themselves in emergency situations when crossing maritime borders towards EUrope. Its shift-teams offer information, advice and the possibility of raising public alarm, also in order to pressurise (state) rescue services to act. Based on my own engagement in the project, I portray an activist network that acted on the desire to intervene more directly in a deadly space that is often considered a ‘maritime void’ or as ‘reserved’ for state and EU (border) authorities. I argue that the Alarm Phone’s transformative political potentiality arises precisely from its capacity to connect its constitutive engagement in (under the surface) mobile commons that facilitate ‘unauthorised’ human movement with public campaigns that call for and (thereby) perform international citizenship.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kim Rygiel, Ilker Ataç, Glenda Garelli and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1. This paper speaks of ‘EUrope’ throughout. In this way it seeks to problematise frequently employed usages that equate the EU with Europe and Europe with the EU and suggests, at the same time, that EUrope is not reducible to the institutions of the EU.
2. I have been involved in the Alarm Phone project from the outset. As an active member I have been, and continue to be, involved in phone shifts, public protest campaigns as well as the writing and translation of reports and political statements, some of which I will refer to in this article. As a proponent of ‘militant research’ practices in ‘migration/border studies’, I regard this engagement, inter alia, as an attempt ‘to scrutinize and counteract the paradigm of an all-encompassing governance of mobility and to unpack the fantasies this paradigm entails and engenders’ (Garelli and Tazzioli Citation2013, 247).
3. Groups that formed the Alarm Phone collective included: WatchTheMed, Boats4People, Welcome2Europe, Afrique-Europe-Interact, Borderline-Europe, No Borders Morocco, Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration, and Voix des Migrants.