Amplifying Migrant Voices and Struggles at Sea as a Radical Practice

Abstract

This article takes the encounters between migrant travelers at sea and Alarm Phone activists on land as a starting point to inquire into recent transformations in maritime migrant mobilities and EUropean and North African attempts to govern them, with a focus on the western Mediterranean Sea. The Alarm Phone, an activist hotline assisting migrants in distress at sea, has been involved in everyday struggles over movement in all three Mediterranean regions, so that tracing its interventions can provide insights into the complex interplay between enactments of the freedom of movement and the ways in which EUrope seeks to preempt and deter them. Situated right at the nexus of migrant movements conceived in a kinetic and a political sense, the Alarm Phone constitutes an analytic of the EUropean border regime, able to observe the interplay between disobedient movements and their policing at sea.