Presentation short abstract

Across Aegean islands, from Makronisos to Lesvos, exile and migration create plural Mediterranean worlds through human–nonhuman entanglements. The paper connects these ecologies of displacement with Cassano, Black Mediterranean critiques and pluriversal ecology.

Presentation long abstract

This paper responds to calls for a Mediterranean political ecology by reading the Aegean Archipelago not only as a space of violence, but as a plural, more-than-human Mediterranean remade through ecologies of displacement. Focusing on Greek Civil War exile (mid-20th century) and contemporary migration on Aegean islands, I trace how human and non-human actors co-produce multiple “Mediterraneans” on islands such as Makronisos, Giaros, Lesvos and Chios. In both periods, the Aegean is a infrastructure of carceral power: winds, sea currents, vermin, livestock and companion species are mobilised as instruments of torture, abandonment and border control. Yet these same more-than-human assemblages are also reworked from below. Political prisoners and refugees cultivate comradely relations with dogs and cats, re-signify sun and daylight as allies against nocturnal terror, improvise fishing and foraging practices for survival, and transform shells and stones into objects of craft and beauty. These practices constitute “plural ecologies of displacement” that cannot be reduced to either Mediterranean conviviality or to purely necropolitical accounts of the sea. Theoretically, the paper places Franco Cassano’s thought into conversation with Black Mediterranean scholarship and pluriversal political ecology. I argue for a “more-than-human Southern Thought” that enriches Cassano’s inter-cultural Mediterranean by embedding it in the racialised and carceral histories of the Aegean, while foregrounding the plural ways humans and non-humans co-construct livable worlds in conditions of dispossession. The paper repositions the Mediterranean as a critical site for rethinking political ecology beyond Latin American paradigms, and for imagining environmental futures grounded in Mediterranean ecologies of displacement.