Paper short abstract:

With the pandemic, the “confine-to-protect” paradigm has introduced new hygienic-sanitary logics of bordering that have transformed the humanitarian-securitarian nexus. This paper analyses how the category of vulnerability has been redrawn under this new offshoring of the border.

Paper long abstract:

With the pandemic, the “confine-to-protect” paradigm has introduced new hygienic-sanitary logics of bordering that have transformed the humanitarian-securitarian nexus. The Italian case is, in this sense, paradigmatic: for the past two years, the Italian government has rented formerly private ferries to quarantine people arriving via boat in the Central Mediterranean and contracted the Red Cross to take care of them. This paper analyses how the category of vulnerability has been redrawn under this new offshoring of the border.

Having access to quarantine ships has been almost impossible for activists and researchers. I thus elaborate a double-entrance ethnographic perspective, one focused on the space and the other on the people. First, I accessed these boats as a “passenger” when they were used as normal ferries. Being on board of the ships as a “normal passenger” I became familiar with the spatialisation of the device. Second, I met people that were confined in those spaces (as well as people who worked there) when they were transformed by the quarantine device. At the port and in the city of Catania I listened to their stories, supported them and understood how vulnerability assessment is hampered by the complex legal-sanitary violences happening on these ships.

The analysis will discuss how this new extended temporality in a humanitarian space articulates with the securitarian surveillance of migrants’ possibility to imagine futures. Developing a militant anthropology approach, I will shed light on how the sea confinement sites re-shape the possibilities of commoning among migrants themselves, and with activists.