Giving volume to aerial bordering contestations

Keywords: air, volume, Mediterranean, migration, border policing, surveillance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

Contestations between state and civilian actors over migration governance across the Mediterranean has been ongoing for decades. Since 2017, as EU and civil society actors have taken to aerial surveillance, the airspace has become more prominent in the struggles between states, NGOs and activists, and the autonomous movements of migrants. While a body of literature has theorised contested Mediterranean rescue politics through the lenses of securitisation and humanitarianism, this paper seeks to politicise the volume space of the air by considering the ways in which air is political, material, and relational. The specific technologies of the plane, its regulation, the form of seeing it enables, its capacity for speed and movement within three-dimensional space is generative of scopic relationships and particular subjectivities produced through aerial acts of moving, looking and being seen. Relationships are formed – in the air between the EU pilots and those activist pilots who seek to challenge the state’s monopoly on the airspace, and between the air and sea as pilots contact migrants, fisherfolk, and other boats below. The plane is located within an elemental volume space filled with rich circulations, casting the pilots not only in human relationships, but also in relations with the more-than-human – including fish, petrol, smuggled goods, surveillance technology, and a raft of media signal moving across the airwaves. This paper seeks to explore the types of relations and contestations that emerge within the rich volume of the Mediterranean airspace as states seek to contain circulations and movement via the skies.