A sea of struggle – activist border interventions in the Mediterranean Sea

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.