"The Rescue Plot" examines the battles surrounding the rescue of migrants at sea in the long aftermath of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis. Challenging the prevailing view of the border as a “field of struggle” between Europe and its outsides, this dissertation proposes the scene of maritime distress in the Mediterranean as a theater for playing out the internal contradictions of Europe itself: the fiscal crisis of the Eurozone; the wavering hegemony of liberal democracy; the radical Left’s search for a revolutionary subject, and migrants’ own elaboration of Europe between the experience of violence and the fantasy of fulfillment.
Combining ethnography conducted on board the ships and aircraft of activist collectives rescuing migrants in the sea passage with literary criticism of nautical fiction and archival research into the histories of policing maritime mobility, the chapters of this dissertation develop an alternative history of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean: not one of humanitarian mass disaster and unbridled state violence, but one of fierce battle waged among states, global capital and the alliances of border-crossers, activists and workers who meet at sea, each in search of their own form of emancipation as it shimmers on the horizon.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/neq9-2534 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Howe Haralambous, Chloe |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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