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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.