Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Port of Piraeus as an (il)licit maritime space where the logics of logistics, infrastructure, and supply-chain routines produce grey zones between legality and illegality that are difficult to disentangle.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the Port of Piraeus as an (il)licit maritime space in which logistical practices and infrastructural arrangements produce grey zones between legality and illegality. Rather than approaching illegality as an exceptional breach of regulation, the paper argues that the ways in which contemporary ports and global supply chains organize administrative, labour, and customs procedures routinely rework the boundaries of what counts as licit.

Empirically, the paper brings together two domains that are usually analyzed separately: labour regimes and commodity circulation. First, drawing on long-term ethnographic research on labour relations in the Port of Piraeus following its transformation into a gateway to European markets under the ownership of the Chinese company COSCO, the paper examines how contemporary logistical infrastructures and modes of operation mould dockworkers into the broader category of supply-chain workers, enabling the semi- legal misclassification of their labour. Second, introducing a developing research strand in Piraeus, the paper analyses a large-scale customs and VAT fraud case linked to the port, which lead to the largest VAT-related seizure in the European Union (investigation Calypso). The case concerns goods that entered Piraeus under legal transit and VAT-suspension regimes and were subsequently absorbed into domestic and foreign markets without taxation.

Mobilising the concept of para-crime (Vigh & Sausdal 2025), the analysis shows how illicit outcomes emerge through hegemonic material and political routines that are intrinsic in the mantra of seamless operation of global supply chains.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in the Black Sea port city of Poti, this paper examines how contemporary maritime governance actively produces shifting boundaries between licit circulation and illegality through processes of infrastructural enclosure and privatisation.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research in the Black Sea port city of Poti, this paper examines how contemporary maritime governance actively produces shifting boundaries between licit circulation and illegality through processes of infrastructural enclosure and privatisation. Over the past decade, port expansion and foreign-led logistics development have reconfigured access to the shoreline, transforming formerly open maritime spaces into securitised and fenced zones of extraction and transit.

While these projects are promoted as legal modernisation and integration into global trade networks, they simultaneously displace long-standing coastal livelihoods and recast everyday practices as informal, tolerated, or criminal. The paper traces how locals engaged in small-scale fishing, fish-smoking, and scrap-metal collection tied to port infrastructures navigate ambiguous regulatory regimes in which legality is unevenly enforced and continuously reinterpreted.

Rather than treating informality as marginal or deviant, I show how it emerges from the encounter between transnational logistics regimes, national sovereignty claims, and local survival strategies. By foregrounding the shoreline as a key site where global circulation meets exclusionary governance, the paper conceptualises the port as a paradigmatic instance of the "(il)licit sea": a space where legality is not fixed but produced through infrastructural design, selective enforcement, and everyday negotiation.

Paper short abstract

In this paper, I examine how policies aimed at maritime sustainable transport and disposal of waste occur on the ground, and with what implications for environmental harm and social inequalities.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I examine how policies aimed at maritime sustainable transport and disposal of waste occur on the ground, and with what implications for environmental harm and social inequalities. I focus on the case of Fincantieri, one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the world, now allegedly at the forefront of maritime sustainability and green transition. Anthropological studies have pointed to the relevance of the concept of intreccio (interweaving), to grasp the entanglements between crime and the social contexts in which it operates.

Applying the concept of interweaving to maritime crime, I argue that Fincantieri’s sustainable waste management policies are often enacted through interwoven relationships between state legal frameworks, business interests, and criminal organizations. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in the ports of Venice and Trieste, I show how an agreement between the shipbuilding company and the state on the ecological disposal of waste is reproducing illegal national and transnational transport and dumping of toxic materials both in the Mediterranean sea as well as off the coast of Somalia, while relying on the criminalization of Bangladeshi migrants. Mapping the logistical operations that make illegal waste dumping possible, I stress the ecological degradation underlying green energy transition and green management disposal policies.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in the Comoros, this paper examines how local actors navigate (il)licit maritime economies. It shows how legality, illegality, and oceanic materiality intersect, shaping translocal exchanges, subsistence strategies, and agency in peripheral maritime spaces.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Comoros, this paper examines the challenges, ambiguities, and materialities of (il)licit maritime circulations in the western Indian Ocean. Located at the margins of global maritime routes, the Comorian seascape is traversed by international trade flows, restrictive border regimes, and growing constraints on local maritime practices—from fishing to inter-island mobility—imposed in the name of environmental conservation and maritime security. Despite the dense regulation of maritime space, which often renders inter-island navigation legally dangerous and lethal, the ocean remains a vital medium for translocal exchanges that persist beyond, against, and through legality.

Informal and illegal maritime economies are not marginal anomalies but expressions of enduring global connections shaping peripheral maritime routes. Although frequently criminalised, these practices often constitute the only viable means of subsistence for communities marked by long-standing structural vulnerability.

Drawing on two ethnographic vignettes—marine turtle poaching and smuggling, and the “illegal yet licit” maritime route to the French island of Mayotte—the paper unsettles the legal/licit versus illegal/illicit dichotomy. It demonstrates how these categories are negotiated through oceanic materiality, embodied navigational knowledge, and situated moral economies rather than determined solely by international law. The sea itself, through its physical properties and uncertainties, enables circulations that evade regulation, opening interstices where illegality becomes licit and legality reveals its own illicit effects.

Adopting an oceanic perspective, the paper traces how local dynamics intersect with global regimes of border control, conservation, and capitalist extraction, foregrounding local agency in navigating—and contesting—the shifting boundaries of the (il)licit at sea.

Paper short abstract

This paper extends “illicit seas” to the Sea of Marmara, linking the erasure of artisanal fishing and industrial expansion on Istanbul’s shores to the paper’s focus on more-than-human displacement, where fish and fishers together archive imperial capture, racial extraction, and displaced memory.

Paper long abstract

The smallest sea in the world, the Sea of Marmara, is a site of extractivist practices, most notably through the erasure of artisanal fishing—an erasure that far exceeds what its small size might suggest. Such extraction is neither isolated nor ahistorical. It builds on the forced exodus of Ottoman Greek fishing communities from the shores of Marmara through successive waves of forced and involuntary migration, unfolding in tandem with the rise of state-sponsored illicit industrial fishing. Together, these processes formed a predatory capitalist mode of governance that forcibly displaced both fish and minorities from the shores of this crossroads between the Black Sea and the Aegean. This paper argues that state sovereign practices of human and more-than-human forced displacement must be read together in order to properly diagnose the condition of this dying sea today. In doing so, it extends the notion of “illicit seas” to attend to multiple temporalities and to the archival capacities through which imperial capture, racial extraction, and memory are jointly registered.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the sea as an (il)licit space through a focus on fishing, migration, and boat captains along West Africa-Europe routes. Drawing on anthropology and critical criminology, it shows how maritime knowledge, mobility, and criminalisation intersect and overlap.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the sea as an (il)licit space, drawing on anthropological approaches and critical criminology, and informed by long-term engagement with collectives and migrants communities operating in border and maritime contexts. It examines the intersections of mobility, extraction, and governance along maritime routes between West Africa and Europe, exploring how categories of legality, responsibility, and moral blame are negotiated and contested at sea and within coastal communities.

The paper focuses on "smugglers" and boat captains along Atlantic and Mediterranean routes, many of whom are current or former artisanal fishermen. Moving beyond dominant criminalising representations, the analysis examines the circulation of socio-technical knowledge linking artisanal fishing, migration, and facilitation practices within postcolonial border regimes marked by environmental degradation and foreign industrial overfishing. From this perspective, fishing, migration, and smuggling emerge as interconnected strategies of social reproduction, carrying material and symbolic meanings related to risk, success, responsibility, and social transition.

The paper shows how maritime knowledge and seafaring skills are frequently reconfigured in response to shrinking livelihoods, as former fishermen may, in some cases, mobilise these competencies either to facilitate maritime crossings or to migrate themselves. These knowledges shape the organisation of journeys, perceptions of risk, and locally grounded moral economies of mobility, while also conducting to processes of criminalisation upon arrival in Europe (where boat drivers are subjected to imprisonment). The paper therefore shows how the sea reworks and unsettles notions of “licit” and “illicit” as it is crossed between the Global South and the Global North.

Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork on Lampedusa, this paper shows how the extensive policing of migrant boats in the Strait of Sicily coexists with lenient enforcement of fishing fleets’ violations of maritime borders, producing fluid orders of (il)legality/(il)legibility and selective border enforcement at sea.

Paper long abstract

The Strait of Sicily—the 145 kilometers of water separating Italy and Tunisia—is one of the world’s most dangerous and contentious maritime border zones. A key stage for the deadly spectacle of the so‑called “refugee crisis,” it has attracted extraordinary political attention in Europe, concentrating policies, funding, and infrastructures on governing boats crossing from North Africa into European waters. This paper, however, offers an alternative account of maritime sovereignty and mobility governance in the Strait. Drawing on long‑term fieldwork with fishermen on the Italian island of Lampedusa—60 miles from Tunisia and a heavily militarized border management hub—it examines how cross‑border competition with Tunisian fishing fleets reveals co‑existing and, quite literally, fluid configurations of (il)legality, territoriality, and (il)legibility at sea. While the movement of Lampedusan fishing vessels is territorially restricted by Italian authorities and rendered hyper‑legible through licensing, satellite tracking, and surveillance, Tunisian fleets routinely encroach into Italy’s nominal territorial waters to extract from Lampedusan fishing grounds with apparent impunity. These dynamics have contributed to the near‑total collapse of the local mackerel industry, historically a key pillar of Lampedusa’s economic life and place‑identity. Such porous border enforcement—and the uneven orders of (il)legality and (il)legibility it produces—evokes a tenacious and historically deep‑seated interpretive frame among Lampedusans: that the Italian state is substantially unreliable and only selectively present for citizens inhabiting the southern maritime peripheries.

Paper short abstract

Canary waters contrast the Blue economy with deadly migration. Mapping the "stealth" of wooden migrant boats against hyper-visible cargo/cruise ships and ports, I argue that aquapelagic necropolitics are activated to render the Atlantic a technologically stratified sea & a moving, swallowing actant.

Paper long abstract

The Canary Islands are a vital node for the "licit" Blue Economy, characterized by high-frequency maritime traffic, digital tracking, and sophisticated port infrastructures. Yet, these same Atlantic waters constitute the most mortiferous "illicit" migration corridor globally. This paper explores the *(il)licit sea* not as a neutral void, but as a living space that is technologically stratified. It contrasts the hyper-visibility of commercial logistics — evident in Las Palmas's industrial port, massive cruise ships, or ferry routes, all governed by Automatic Identification System (AIS) — with the "stealth" materiality of migrant boats or *cayucos*. Usually made of wood or fibreglass, they are sometimes detected by Spain's border surveillance system but often simply discerned by larger ships and later rescued; or left to drift carrying mummified corpses. Since migrants aim at entering the EU's ultraperipheral, securitized territorial waters undetected to avoid early interceptions, this invisibility is strategic yet reflects the violence of borders.  

Drawing on insights from fieldwork, critical logistics and island studies, I expand Iranzo and Dupain's (2025) argument that the Atlantic Ocean is activated through *aquapelagic necropolitics*. While maritime infrastructures ensure the frictionless circulation of goods, seafarers, and tourists, they enact a form of infrastructural exclusion by being unable to salvage irregularized migrants. The cayuco is a digital blind spot in a sea of steel and data. I employ visual methods and AIS data to visualize this spatial (non-)overlap, where cruises and cargo ships traverse the same coordinates where migrant bodies are swallowed by a moving and living Atlantic cemetery.