No more "Medi-terranean". Border materialities in the central Mediterranean Sea and their effects on encounters and solidarities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21847654 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Enrico Fravega (0000-0001-9013-9484, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 16-40 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MONDI MIGRANTI (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1972-4888 • E-ISSN: 1972-4896 |
| Publisher | Franco Angeli (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3280/mm2025-003002 |
| OpenAlex | W4417492162 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 35 |
This article examines the materialities of the border assemblage in the central Mediterranean Sea and their impact on encounters and solidarities. By exploring the dynamics of maritime border securitisation, the study reveals how the Mediterranean, traditionally seen as a space of encounter, is increasingly depicted as a battleground. The research highlights the tension between practices of solidarity and border securitisation policies, which create friction among personal memories and social practices, public discourse and media narratives, legal devices, administrative measures, and policing practices. Through ethnographic fieldwork in key locations like Pantelleria, Lampedusa, and the Gulf of Gabès, the article uncovers the progressive racialisation of Mediterranean maritime spaces and the erosion of possibilities for spontaneous encounters and solidarities. The findings suggest that the material forms of the border assemblage contribute to the production of the migrant as a disturbing and threatening subject, transforming the Mediterranean from a space of encounter to one of suspicion and collision. This study calls for reconsidering the Mediterranean's cultural geographies and the potential futures of its histories, challenging the hegemonic narratives that shape public discourse on migration
Ethnography · Hegemony · Mediterranean climate · Narrative · Solidarity · Temporalities · Cross-Border Cooperation and Integration · Global Security and Public Health · Migration, Refugees, and Integration
Practical Mediterraneanism
Visibility and Social Theory
Mobile Lives
The Black Mediterranean
Introduction
Drawing the Global Colour Line
For and against the Mediterranean
Borders and Mobility Injustice in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Revisiting Al‐Idrissi
Border Lampedusa
The Great Sea
Navigating borders' multiplicity
Biopolitics of migration
The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis
White innocence in the Black Mediterranean
Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders
What Is New Materialism
Assemblage
Breaking hospitality apart
Border assemblages between surveillance and spectacle
Towards a new politics of migration
Thinking Lampedusa
Spectacles of migrant 'illegality
Transnational Political Cosmology
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |