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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.