Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the humanitarian imagination of the Mediterranean Sea as a spatial technology. In the humanitarian borderscape, existing borders are transcended in the name of humanity, and in- and exclusion takes place on the basis of compassion, making the ‘human’ a contested concept.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2015, over one million people have crossed the Mediterranean Sea. While the majority made it to the European shores, over two thousand people drowned along the Central Mediterranean route. Arrival and death have become intertwined in what has been named Europe's 'refugee crisis'. While the arrival of 'refugees' resulted in tightening the EU's regime of border control; non-governmental organizations intervened as well, moved by the moral appeal to 'save lives at sea'. This paper analyzes the response as a spatial technology that translates humanitarian imaginations into border control strategies. The research question is: How is the Mediterranean Sea imagined as a humanitarian space? The analysis focuses on four actors operating in, and thereby on, the sea, including the EU's border patrol agency FRONTEX; the non-governmental humanitarian organization Médicins sans Frontières (MSF); and two private rescue initiatives, including the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), and SeaWatch. Based on a visual and content analysis of the online activities, or 'digital space' through which these actors present themselves and their interventions, it is shown how a humanitarian imagination is effectively mobilized not only as a politics of life, but also as a claim to space. The humanitarian borderscape draws upon saving lives as the highest moral imperative, opening up a space that transcends and dismisses existing borders in the name of humanity. In doing so, a regime of border control is performed, in which in- and exclusion takes place on the basis of compassion, and the 'human' becomes a contested concept.