The Sea in Sea Rescue: Conceptualising solidarity with maritime migrants

Abstract

This article conceptualises how the sea comes to matter for practicing solidarity with maritime migrants. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the article proposes that migration and border studies' critique of methodological nationalism (Anderson, 2020) and focus on mobility (Scheel and Tazzioli, 2022) can be fruitfully combined with the challenge that ocean studies makes towards modernity's “terracentric normative ideal” (Peters et al., 2018, p. 2) to advance conceptions of maritime solidarity. Consequently, the article asks what happens when you detach solidarity from the “national order of things” and conceptualise it, instead, starting from the sea's “more-than-wet ontology” (Peters & Steinberg, 2019) – a political geography that is constantly in motion. Our argument is empirically grounded in original ethnographic research conducted with civil sea rescue and migrant solidarity actors in the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. Drawing on these case studies, we demonstrate how the sea presents migrant solidarity action with both techno-material (wind and waves) and socio-legal (maritime zones and port state control) challenges which solidarity actors navigate through the application of seafaring knowledges and common seafaring practice. We argue that in prioritising seafaring over sedentary logics, the practices of seafaring activists open up new paths to conceptualising solidarity in and beyond maritime geographies.