Rebel spirits at sea: Disrupting EUrope’s weaponizing of time in maritime migration governance

Abstract

In August 2020, a motor yacht formerly owned by French customs authorities set sail in the Mediterranean Sea in search of migrant boats in distress. Funded by the street artist Banksy, the search and rescue engagement of the Louise Michel was meant to prevent both the continuous loss of migrant lives at sea and mass interceptions to North Africa. Assessing her maiden voyage and strategic conception, as well as her operational and political impact, the article argues that the intervention of the Louise Michel and her activist crew can be regarded as an attempt to disrupt EUrope’s ‘weaponization’ of time in the governance of maritime migration. Over recent years, EU member states have sought to systematically decelerate rescues while accelerating interceptions of escaping migrant boats. With her speed, unprecedented in the ‘civil fleet’ and on a par with EUropean and Libyan naval assets, the activists have sought to disrupt the EUro–Libyan interception regime which has led to the forced return of over 120,000 people to Libya since 2016.

Introduction

Believing in the revolution ‘like others believe in God’ (Michel cited in Mullaney, 1990: 301), Louise Michel, French feminist, anarchist and internationalist, dedicated her life to the revolutionary cause, defending the Paris Commune in 1871 when French troops attacked and ultimately toppled the short-lived socialist government. Relentlessly engaging in radical politics both in France and in exile, Michel wrote, taught and campaigned throughout her life, setting up soup kitchens and schools or taking to arms and the streets when not imprisoned. Deported on a prison ship to a French colony in the Pacific, she joined anti-colonial uprisings. Though often overlooked, Michel also campaigned in her late London exile for ‘the protection of political refugees’ (Bantman, 2017: 1004). She died in Marseille in 1905. Over the following decades, streets, squares and schools were named after her. 115 years after her death, a 31-metre-long motor yacht formerly owned by French customs authorities would take her name. Sponsored by the street artist Banksy and chartered by a crew of activists, the Louise Michel took to the Mediterranean in 2020 in search of migrant boats in distress.

This article follows the first search and rescue (SAR) operation of the Louise Michel in the central Mediterranean Sea, which led to the rescue of over 300 people at risk of drowning. Examining her maiden voyage and strategic conception, as well as the operational and political impact of this member of the ‘civil fleet’, ¹ I argue that her intervention can be regarded as an attempt to disrupt EUrope’s ² ‘weaponization’ of time in the governance of maritime migration. As the article will show, engagement of EU member states in SAR activities concerning distressed migrant boats has shifted over the past decade, from a short-lived ‘humanitarian turn’ (Cuttitta, 2017, 2018) to increasingly restrictive border security practices. While such restrictive practices include EUropean pushback operations that forcibly return migrants to spaces deemed outside of EU territory and responsibility, they more commonly manifest in forms of delay, avoidance and non-assistance at sea. Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCCs), coastguards and navies of EU member states have faced sustained allegations of slowing down rescue operations or of avoiding boats in distress altogether (OHCHR, 2021). These practices have coincided with attempts to speed up migrant interception operations by third-country authorities, as documented by civil rescuers and international organizations (Amnesty International, 2020). By decelerating rescue operations while accelerating interceptions, EUropean actors have weaponized time in the governing of precarious forms of maritime migration. However, they have not been unopposed. Able to sail at 28 knots, on a par with EUropean and Libyan naval assets, the crew of the Louise Michel has sought to use her speed to both rescue distressed migrants and prevent interceptions to Libya.

This article draws on interviews conducted with three members of the Louise Michel, indeed the very first interviews provided on the project. The activists were interviewed shortly before and after their first rescue operation, which took place between 18 August and 2 September 2020. ³ The activists also provided me with log entries documenting their operation and have given me permission to draw from these. Insights gained in exchanges with Banksy’s team, which initiated the purchase of the fast asset, will not be actively discussed but featured as useful background knowledge in the process of writing this article. In addition, and in order to assess the wider operational and political impact of the Louise Michel, interviews were conducted with members of four other civil rescue NGOs in 2022 and 2023.

Organized into five main parts, the article first explores the role of time in migration governance and scholarship that has critically interrogated its weaponization. The second part highlights the shifting temporalities in the central Mediterranean over the past decade before turning to the impact this development has had on the civil fleet. Part four assesses the strategic conception and first operation of the Louise Michel. In the final section, the article shows how the intervention of this ‘rebel crew’ has opened up new possibilities for the civil fleet to disrupt EUrope’s weaponizing of time in Mediterranean migration governance.

Temporalities of migration governance

Without doubt, the speed of rescue operations is essential when lives are at stake at sea. The process of drowning is not only cruel but also rapid. The World Health Organization (2014: viii) notes that the survival of people at risk of drowning ‘depends on two highly variable factors: how quickly the person is removed from the water, and how swiftly proper resuscitation is performed’. Speed in rescue operations and what Redfield (2008: 150) calls ‘vital mobility’ in humanitarian action thus matter in the most obvious sense, to avert human injury and loss. Yet, EUropean engagement in the Mediterranean Sea is not primarily underwritten by an ethos of care that would compel authorities to react to distress situations in the fastest possible ways. As widely documented, the predominance of border security rationales and the determination to avoid migrant disembarkations in the EU have led to systematic delays in rescue procedures or forms of outright non-assistance (Amnesty International, 2020; Human Rights Watch, 2017). In a 2021 report entitled ‘Lethal Disregard’, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR, 2021: 2, 10) states that ‘the damage and death along the central Mediterranean route [. . .] is the result of a failed system of migration governance’, emblematic of which are the ‘significant delays and failures to render assistance to migrant boats’, with ‘calls about migrants in distress either [being] ignored or unanswered for extended periods’. Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, notes: ‘Every year, people drown because help comes too late, or never comes at all. Those who are rescued are sometimes forced to wait for days or weeks to be safely disembarked or, as has increasingly been the case, are returned to Libya which [. . .] is not a safe harbour due to the cycle of violence’ (ReliefWeb, 2021).

Considering the temporal dimension of migration governance is thus crucial when accounting for both the ongoing loss of life in the Mediterranean as well as the mass returns to places of escape. As this article shows, EUrope’s maritime migration governance is driven by attempts to decelerate migrant rescues while accelerating migrant interceptions. ⁴ This interplay has not only made Mediterranean journeys more dangerous and deadly but has also led to a rising number of migrant interceptions to Libya as well as Tunisia. In the case of Libya, where devastating human rights violations have long been documented (Amnesty International, 2018; Médecins Sans Frontières, 2019), about 124,000 people have been returned from the sea since 2016 (IOM, 2022).

In order to assess the ‘[s]hifting border temporalities’ (Rozakou, 2021: 23) in the Mediterranean, this article builds on a body of scholarship concerning precarious forms of migration to EUrope and EU border security that has expanded significantly since 2015, the year in which over one million people crossed maritime borders to the EU (Crawley et al., 2017; Dijstelbloem et al., 2017; Mazzara, 2019; Vaughan-Williams, 2015). Scholars situated across the interrelated fields of migration, mobility, border, citizenship, legal and security studies as well as in political and carceral geography have scrutinized intensifying efforts by EU member states to deter unauthorized migration (Jumbert, 2018; Moreno-Lax, 2018; Mountz, 2020; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022; Vives, 2021), efforts that have become reinforced once more since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic (Tazzioli and Stierl, 2021). Such scholarship has demonstrated how the Mediterranean Sea has not only turned into a violent and often deadly space, but also into a carceral one, where migrants’ capture and their containment ‘elsewhere’ have become EUrope’s priority (Maillet et al., 2018; Stierl, 2021). While the spatiality of migration and border regimes has been closely scrutinized, scholars have criticized what they regard as insufficient attention paid to their temporalities.

Donnan et al. (2017: 3) speak of a ‘classic analytical pre-eminence of “space” in the study of borders’, noting: ‘It is not so much that time has been ignored in border studies, it is rather that, where it does feature, it is less privileged analytically or is assimilated to “history”’. Bhatia and Canning (2021: xix) call for a more analytical focus on the temporal exclusions performed by border regimes, suggesting that in contrast to spatial ones, ‘the temporal aspects of migration have received much less attention’. Similarly, Jacobsen and Karlsen (2021: 1) ‘insist on a thoroughgoing temporal gaze as necessary to destabilising the dominance of spatial understandings of migration’. The pre-eminence of space over time has also been observed by scholars in international relations and other disciplines (Hutchings, 2008), traced back to the ‘spatial turn’ in the 1970s when scholars closely scrutinized how processes of globalization supposedly ‘shrunk the world’ and created a ‘global village’ (Hom et al, 2016). In reaction to such spatial dominance, concern with the temporal aspects of globalization began to grow, with some scholars dating a ‘temporal turn’ to as far back as the 1990s (Hassan, 2010), while others view such a turn as a more recent development (Hom, 2018).

Whether we want to partake in the scholarly production of ‘turns’ or not, it is clear that scholars in migration and border studies have recently begun to engage more deeply with questions of time and temporality (Baas and Yeoh, 2019). Attention has been paid to the differential and hierarchical speeds of global migration and mobility governance (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) and the injustices inscribed in contemporary mobility regimes (Sheller, 2018). For example, McNevin and Missbach (2018: 15–16) have juxtaposed ‘fast-track’ procedures ‘used to expedite the movement of desirable border crossers’ with slow administrative procedures which, as ‘stalling techniques [. . .] prevent would-be migrants from reaching desired destinations or achieving status determinacy’. Related to this, by assessing governmental attempts to slow down certain migration movements while accelerating identification procedures, Tazzioli (2018: 14) has shown how ‘temporality is used as a technology of government in the EU border regime’.

In the time and temporality literature, forms of waiting have been of considerable scholarly concern (Ilcan, 2022; Jacobsen and Karlsen, 2021; Khosravi, 2017; Rozakou, 2021). Research into forms of enforced waiting has highlighted how ‘migrant time’ is stolen not only by states and their migration policies but also by supranational actors such as the EU as well as by corporations, thus through ‘a micro, meso and macro web of actors and affiliates who collectively and individually seeks to determine the path that many people can go down, or not’ (Bhatia and Canning, 2021: xvi). Importantly, examining the ‘stolen time’ of deportees, who often experience deportation as the act of ‘being sent back in time’, Khosravi (2018) has noted how forced expulsions do not end cross-border mobility but instead keep those subjected to them ‘in circulation [which] is a way to slow down, to defer, to deny future plans and to create disruption in the stages of the life cycle’.

The temporal governing of migration and its punitive aspects – what could be described as the ‘doing time’ of migration – has repeatedly been described as the ‘weaponization’ of time. Donnan et al. (2017: 18) allude to the ways in which time can feature as ‘another “weapon” of migration management with its stops and starts and moments of transit and waiting that generate an “endless, anxious present”’. Andersson (2014: 796) highlights how, ‘from the Arizona desert to Australian coasts and European shores’, time delays are built into migration experiences, and thus feature as ‘a weapon of sorts [. . .] in the “fight against illegal migration”’. Moreover, Tofighian and Boochani (2021) show how Australia has weaponized time in its indefinite detention system by turning time into an instrument of torture.

With its focus on the shifting temporalities of migration governance in the Mediterranean context, this article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on time and temporality, paying ‘attention to the accelerated rhythm of the border and the reconfigurations of the temporal regimes of power’ (Rozakou 2021: 23). While the following two parts highlight the weaponization of time in maritime migration governance and its devastating effects for people ‘on the move’, the remainder of the article shows how EUrope’s temporal border regime is far from omnipotent but susceptible to disruption and resistance.

Shifting border temporalities in the central Mediterranean

Since 2011, the central Mediterranean Sea has become a particularly contested space of precarious migration and its governance. The turmoil of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings and especially the fall of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Libya ushered in a new phase of maritime migration. Whereas an annual average of 23,000 individuals crossed the central Mediterranean and reached EUrope between 1997 and 2010, numbers rose to approximately 64,000 in 2011 (McMahon and Sigona, 2016). With armed conflicts further escalating in Libya, crossings increased once more after 2014, leading to an annual average of 156,000 arrivals in EUrope between 2014 and 2017. This was followed by a considerable decline between 2018 and 2020, when annual average arrivals dropped to about 25,000, thus nearly to pre-Arab Spring levels. With 67,500 people reaching EUropean shores in 2021 and 105,000 in 2022, arrival numbers have risen once more (UNHCR, 2022). The human cost of Mediterranean migration has been exorbitant. Since 2011, about 23,000 deaths and disappearances have been recorded for the central Mediterranean region alone (IOM, 2022), with the real figure of migrant fatalities estimated to be much higher as many disappear without ever being accounted for.

While this past decade of central Mediterranean migration has seen many twists and turns, this section will outline three key phases that characterize shifting temporalities of migration governance: the humanitarian phase in (late) 2013 and 2014, the restrictive phase of 2015 and 2016 and the phase of strategic neglect from 2017 until today. Clearly, these phases overlap and are far ‘messier’ than such periodization may suggest. Nonetheless, organizing it in this way reveals larger political dynamics and evolving temporal (re)configurations in this period, showing how time has become increasingly weaponized in EUrope’s maritime migration governance, with delays and non-assistance in distress situations becoming increasingly routine and systematic while interception efforts have accelerated.

In response to a large-scale shipwreck on 3 October 2013, scholars observed a ‘humanitarian turn’ (Cuttitta, 2017, 2018), characterized by increased EUropean efforts to rescue distressed migrants and disembark them in EUrope. This humanitarian phase in the central Mediterranean, though certainly not free of border ‘protection’ and security rationales (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022), was embodied by Operation Mare Nostrum. Launched by Italy in October 2013, it deployed up to 1000 navy personnel and involved a range of fast assets. While the infamous ‘left-to-die’ case in 2011 had highlighted the abandonment of migrant boats in distress (Forensic Oceanography, 2012), Mare Nostrum conducted proactive searches. This meant that rescue operations sped up, not least given the presence of naval assets close to Libya’s coast, which prompted the operation to be described as a ‘halfway bridge to Europe’ (Afrique-Europe-Interact, 2014). Mare Nostrum ended, however, a year later. Portrayed as a ‘pull-factor’ for migrant crossings, the operation was not ‘EUropeanized’ as Italy had requested and was instead concluded in late 2014. Mare Nostrum is credited with the rescue of about 150,000 people and their swift disembarkation in EUrope (Ministero della Difesa, 2018). Nonetheless, over 3100 people were not rescued and died or went missing in the central Mediterranean in 2014, highlighting the inherent danger of precarious sea journeys (IOM, 2022).

The brief humanitarian phase gave way to a restrictive phase in 2015–2016. Despite noting that rescue would remain ‘a priority’, the EU border agency Frontex (2016) launched Operation Triton in November 2014 with its ‘primary focus [on] border control and surveillance’. Operation Triton deployed not only fewer naval assets than Mare Nostrum but also reduced its operational area, withdrawing further north and away from the most lethal area off the Libyan coast. In this way, delays in rescue operations increased. Operation Triton’s assets were ‘deliberately patrolling in the wrong area’ and would ‘almost certainly arrive late, if at all’ (Campbell, 2017). Fears that this would lead to increased shipwrecks were shared even by Frontex at the time: ‘the withdrawal of naval assets from the area, if not properly planned and announced well in advance, would likely result in a higher number of fatalities’ (Frontex, 2014: 6). In this ‘deadly rescue gap’ (Heller and Pezzani, 2016), over 1400 people drowned in April 2015 alone. In view of this spike in drownings, the EU naval operation Eunavfor Med operation Sophia (ENFM Sophia) was launched in May 2015. Though characterized as a response to deaths at sea, the operation’s primary goal was ‘to disrupt the business model of migrant smugglers and human traffickers’ (Council of the European Union, 2019).

Clearly, by widening the rescue gap following Mare Nostrum, both Triton and ENFM Sophia symbolized EUrope’s (re)turn to a more restrictive phase of intensified border security in 2015–2016, in which about 7500 people are documented as having died or disappeared (UNHCR, 2022). Cusumano (2019a: 5) speaks of ‘organized hypocrisy’ due to the ‘clear mismatch [. . .] between the rhetorical prominence placed on the commitment to save migrants and the behaviour of both missions’. Overall, compared to Mare Nostrum and relative to their considerable operational capacity and resources, assets of these EU operations have indeed conducted ‘a relatively limited number of search and rescue operations’, with Triton carrying out ‘24 per cent of total rescues in 2015, decreasing to only 13 per cent in 2016’, and ENFM Sophia’s share of total rescues standing at 16 per cent in 2015 and 13 per cent in 2016 (Cusumano, 2019a: 3, 10, 13).

At the same time, the restrictive phase of 2015–2016 should be viewed as a transitional phase in which EU assets, while stationed further away from the busiest migration routes, were often unable to avoid being drawn into rescue operations. Though no longer patrolling as proactively as Mare Nostrum had done, naval assets of Triton and ENFM engaged in the rescue of ‘almost 120,000 migrants between 2014 and mid-2017’, which is, certainly, ‘far from negligible’ (Cusumano, 2019a: 15). In addition, assets of Italy’s coastguard and navy also continued to carry out large-scale rescue operations. Thus, while the overall rescue intensity by EU navies and coastguards decreased in this phase, especially if compared to Mare Nostrum, it was in the following years that EUrope’s neglect of the distressed became systematic.

The phase from 2017 signalled a shift toward increasingly ‘remote’ forms of EUropean migration governance, prompting the strategic neglect of those in distress at sea. What the restrictive phase in 2015–2016 had heralded became routinized. Triton, ENFM Sophia, as well as EU coastguard and navy assets withdrew even further from the busiest migration routes, thereby widening the rescue gap and slowing down rescue operations. ⁵ ENFM Sophia ‘significantly shifted its focus from undertaking its own maritime SAR operations to strengthening surveillance by air as well as reinforcing support to the LCG [Libyan coastguard]’ (OHCHR, 2021: 9). EUrope’s training, funding and equipping of the Libyan coastguard as well as the strengthening of political and operational ties to Libyan authorities were pivotal in the mass interceptions that occurred from 2017 onwards. ⁶ Italy, which signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Libyan Government of National Accord in February 2017, agreed on closer cooperation in border security. In June 2018, the International Maritime Organization acknowledged Libya’s official SAR zone, further legitimizing the Libyan coastguard as the responsible authority, regardless of considerable evidence that Libyan forces had engaged in a wide range of human rights abuses and smuggling activities (Human Rights Watch, 2017).

With EUropean naval assets vacating the deadliest regions of the sea, EUropean aerial presence increased and therewith a form of remote migration governance that would rely on EUropean ‘eyes in the sky’ and Libya’s improving interception capacities at sea. As Human Rights Watch and Border Forensics (2022) note: ‘Starting in earnest in 2017, Italy and Malta have increasingly abdicated their responsibilities to coordinate and operate rescues at sea in favor of Libyan authorities and obstructed in myriad ways the work of nongovernmental rescue groups both at sea and in the air.’ This ‘shift from a limited sea presence to aerial surveillance’ allowed EU actors to observe the central Mediterranean space without the ‘risk’ of being drawn into rescue operations (Human Rights Watch and Border Forensics, 2022). Guided by EUropean aircraft and drones, Libyan coastguard assets intercepted about 15,400 escaping migrants in 2017. Even though the overall number of arrivals in Italy via the central Mediterranean dropped to 23,370 in 2018, down from 119,369 in 2017, the number of overall interceptions remained at approximately 15,000 individuals in 2018, highlighting improving Libyan interception capacities. In 2019, with fewer than 15,000 people arriving in Italy and Malta, the Libyan coastguard intercepted over 9200 people, the largest interception ratio compared to arrivals (UNHCR, 2022). In 2020 and 2021, a total of 44,400 people were intercepted and returned to Libya (IOM, 2022).

During the humanitarian phase of 2013–2014, speedy rescues of distressed migrant boats were a central characteristic. In the aftermath of Mare Nostrum, during the restrictive phase of 2015–2016, EUropean rescue efforts slowed down and shifted to forms of neglect which, in the phase from 2017 until today, have become strategic and systematic. By decelerating rescue activities and accelerating interceptions, EUropean actors have instrumentalized time in deterring Mediterranean migration, with far-reaching consequences. As the following section shows, civil rescuers have been caught up in EUrope’s weaponization of time, often trying to reach distressed migrant boats as quickly as possible but regularly losing the ‘race’ with Libyan patrol boats.

Slowing down the civil fleet

When the civil fleet first began to operate in the mid-2010s, NGO assets were welcomed by the Italian authorities, regarded ‘as an important multiplier of their SAR capabilities’ (Cusumano, 2019b: 107), and strategically deployed in coordinated rescue operations. MRCC Rome, as noted by Ruben Neugebauer, co-founder of the NGO Sea-Watch (Interview 1), would instruct state and non-state assets according to need, speed and capacity. The fast EUropean navy and coastguard assets were sent to rescue in urgent and distant distress situations while the slow NGO assets, such as the Sea-Watch1 with a cruising speed of only 7 knots, were sent to assist distressed boats in their vicinity. As Neugebauer recalled: ‘at that time it was not so important for us to have “the speed” as nobody was coming from the Libyan side and EU military assets were bringing the speed with frigates going up to 30 knots’. Moreover, given the high number of departures from Libya, ‘even if you were slow, you would be full in no time’.

However, things began to change in the phase of strategic neglect from 2017 onwards, with EU naval assets withdrawing and the Libyan coastguard becoming increasingly active, guided by EU aerial assets. Shouldering the greatest share of rescues in 2017, the civil fleet came to be regarded as a ‘pull-factor’ and an obstacle to EUropean efforts to limit migrant arrivals. Thus, besides slowing down their own rescue operations, EUropean authorities also sought to slow down the civil fleet. Previously directed to migrant boats in distress, MRCC Rome began to bypass NGO assets even if they were closest to distressed migrant boats – an information blackout intending to ‘blind’ the civil fleet. In addition, whereas previously the NGOs would routinely trans-ship rescued migrants to EU military assets and remain operational at sea, they were now forced to disembark them at EU harbours where they had to undergo cumbersome inspections, often facing lengthy detention. Spending more time shuttling back and forth, or stuck at harbours, the NGOs were forced to cut down their time at sea. This ‘stealing’ of operational time was amplified by the ‘closed harbour policies’ of Italy and Malta in 2018, which translated into NGO assets stranded at EUropean harbours for days or weeks, waiting to receive permission to disembark (Mann and Permoser, 2022). These mounting obstacles, as well as the criminalization of members of the civil fleet, prompted several NGOs to end their SAR engagement altogether (Cusumano and Villa, 2021).

It is in this harshening political climate that the relative slowness of civil fleet ships became increasingly problematic. In comparison to Libyan patrol boats, mainly former military vessels donated by Italy and able to move at speeds of up to 30 knots, the much slower NGO assets were at a significant disadvantage. ‘Lost races’ became frequent, as experienced in June 2020 by the crew of Mare Jonio of the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans:

At 1:27 p.m., Mare Jonio’s radar picked up a signal coming from a vessel that was moving westwards at high speed (over 20 knots), possibly coming from Tripoli, and crossing our patrol route at northwest. Our radar showed us that this vessel was directed at another vessel that was almost stationary, and in obvious distress, on 33 38N 13 35E. [. . .] Unfortunately, at 2:04 p.m., the speed boat had reached its target, just 10 nautical miles away from us. When they left, 20 minutes later, we were just 6 miles away from the location, close enough to see who it was very clearly, with our binoculars. Powerless, we witnessed the intervention of the Libyan militiamen on speed boats donated by our own country, perhaps remotely directed from the Frontex call-sign Osprey3 plane, departed at 5:22 a.m. this morning from Malta’s Luqa Airport: in violation of every international convention, they pushed [. . .] dozens of refugees back to the bombs and torture they were trying to escape. (Mediterranea Saving Humans, 2020)

The weaponization of time in the central Mediterranean and the growing political opposition in Italy and EUrope more generally have significantly hampered the rescue operations of the civil fleet. Between 2018 and 2020, the NGOs that decided to remain operative were forced to limit their rescue operations. While, at its peak, the civil fleet had rescued about 41 per cent out of the total number of migrants arriving via the central Mediterranean in 2017, this share decreased to 27 per cent in 2018, further to 17 per cent in 2019 and down to 12 per cent in 2020. ⁷

Louise Michel’s conception and maiden voyage

In September 2019, Pia Klemp, previous captain of rescue ships operated by the German NGOs Jugend Rettet and Sea-Watch, received an email from the street artist Banksy:

Hello Pia, I’ve read about your story in the papers. You sound like a badass. I am an artist from the UK and I’ve made some work about the migrant crisis, obviously I can’t keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something? Please let me know. Well done. Banksy. ⁸

After verifying its sincerity, Klemp accepted the offer. Banksy chose her ‘out of the large Search and Rescue community because of my clear political stance. I have made clear that I don’t see sea rescue as a humanitarian action but as part of an anti-fascist fight’ (Interview 2). Besides providing financial support and raising awareness about the project, the artist would not play an active role in the rescue operation. It was agreed from the beginning, Klemp noted, ‘that we will stick to our guns – Banksy won’t pretend that he knows better than us how to run a ship and we won’t pretend to be artists’. Klemp gathered a group of experienced SAR activists around her who came upon an unused motor yacht, manufactured in 1988 and previously deployed by French customs authorities. After its purchase, the ship was repurposed at the Spanish port of Burriana for the task of rescuing, a process that took nearly a year. Given her ‘rebel spirit’ (Maclellan, 2004: 1), the French revolutionary Louise Michel was the ideal eponym for the ship, noted Klemp: ‘There is no better person to represent this project. She fought for women’s rights, she fought for the education of girls, and many, many other things. While doing all that she was beautifully poetic in her barbarian love for the revolution.’

The activists of the Louise Michel realized that the withdrawal of European rescue assets and the build-up of Libyan interception capacities had dramatically altered the situation in the central Mediterranean. As experienced by several of the activists, whereas the Italian MRCC had frequently directed them to boats in distress before 2017, the civil fleet had become increasingly sidelined. According to Klemp (Interview 2), the civil fleet’s ‘lack of speed is quite a big issue in the Mediterranean at the moment, especially as the EU finances militias to conduct brutal and illegal pullbacks. So, we want to bring another element to the SAR fleet and to complete the picture of the assets we have there’. With her top speed of 28 knots, nearly twice as fast as the second-fastest NGO vessel at the time, Klemp hoped that the vessel would be able ‘to outrun the so-called Libyan coastguard before they get to boats with refugees and migrants and pull them back to detention camps in Libya’. Speed was thus the determining factor in purchasing the Louise Michel.

For activist Lea Reisner, Head of Mission during the first operation, the launch of the Louise Michel should be regarded as an act of non-compliance and disobedience, challenging also what she described as ‘anticipatory obedience’ within the civil fleet (Interview 3). In anticipation of lengthy stand-offs at EUropean harbours, with the permission to land being withheld for days or weeks, some of the NGOs had adjusted their assets to endure lengthier periods at sea. For Reisner, there should simply be ‘no fucking reason why a ship should be prepared to host people for weeks’, especially if such required adjustments would lead to a loss of speed and operational time. The small size of the ship, 30.8 metres long and 5.6 metres wide, would rule out lengthy stand-offs, offering too little space to accommodate the rescued and the ten crew members for longer periods of time. The disembarkation of the rescued at EUropean harbours would thus have to be swift; a stand-off would not be tolerated.

On 18 August 2020, the Louise Michel left the Spanish port and set sail to the central Mediterranean where she arrived three days later. Painted in bright pink and carrying the word ‘RESCUE’ in large letters to distinguish her from regular military assets, she also featured Banksy artwork on her side, a girl wearing a life vest lifting a heart-shaped safety buoy. Shortly after reaching the contested Libyan SAR zone, the activist crew detected two migrant boats in distress, first a small fibreglass boat carrying seven people and, a day later, a rubber boat with about 100 people on board. Sheltered and safeguarded by the Louise Michel, the distressed were eventually embarked onto the Sea-Watch4, allowing the crew to continue. A few days later, on 26 August, after overhearing radio communications between an Italy-flagged offshore supply ship and the Libyan coastguard concerning a rubber boat, the Louise Michel rushed to the scene of distress but arrived too late. A Libyan patrol boat had reached the migrant boat already – the first race with the Libyan coastguard was lost.

Following a second lost race the morning after, the activist crew was alerted by the civil aircraft Moonbird to two distressed boats. Reaching one of them with 89 people on board, the crew decided to embark them, not only as the boat was taking in water but also as a Libyan patrol boat was quickly approaching. After the operation, the activists sent a request to the Italian authorities, asking for a trans-shipment: ‘Our vessel is not suitable to host and shelter distressed people and especially looking into the upcoming weather over the next days, we will not be able to keep everyone on board safe’. With the request swiftly denied, the Louise Michel remained with 89 survivors on board when receiving a mayday relay from Moonbird in the afternoon of 28 August. The aircraft had spotted an overcrowded rubber boat in the Maltese SAR zone, carrying over 100 people, some of whom were shovelling water out of the boat. Considering the possibility of an Armed Forces of Malta intervention as highly unlikely, and fearing an interception by the Libyan coastguard, the activist crew decided to speed to the distressed group.

With nearly 100 people on board, and thus heavier and slower, the Louise Michel moved to the scene of distress at 18 knots and established a visual with the migrant boat in the evening. On a rigid-hulled inflatable boat, members of the crew made a first assessment of the situation –about 130 people on board, at sea for three days, no life vests, pregnant women and children. Sending out a mayday relay on behalf of the rubber boat, the activists made clear that the distressed could not be taken onto the boat without risking their safety as well as the safety of those already onboard. At 20.32 hours, the Louise Michel sent another email to the Italian and Maltese authorities:

Dear duty officer, we just got informed that there is also 1 dead person on board the vessel in distress. We are still waiting for an acknowledgement by your side. For transparency, we have NOT received any kind of acknowledgement from you for this case at all, RCC Malta. To our knowledge this SAR case is happening in the Maltese SAR zone. Therefore we expect you as the competent authority to act in accordance with international law of the sea and takeover the coordination of this SAR case. We formally demand collaboration from you under the obligation to protect the life at sea as required by international conventions. ⁹

Despite their pleas to the EUropean authorities ‘to end this disgraceful and inhuman situation without any further delay’, no support was offered, and the crew proceeded to deploy a life raft, placed the deceased person in a body bag, and embarked women and children.

During the night, the situation became increasingly dramatic, with RCC Malta refusing to send out a vessel to assist. Besides taking an additional 49 people on board, Louise Michel’s crew deployed a second life raft and transferred the remaining people from the rubber boat onto the raft. Now with 165 people on board and dozens beside her in a raft, the crew sent out a Pan Pan, an international standard urgency signal at 14.45 hours: ‘We have now 32 women, 13 children and 120 men on board. The other 28 remain in the life raft. The majority is suffering from bad fuel burns. Please send a naval asset now.’

Finally, in the afternoon, the Italian coastguard vessel CP319 emerged and agreed to trans-ship 39 individuals. The remaining 126 individuals were transferred onto the Sea-Watch4 and later disembarked in Sicily. After about two weeks at sea, the Louise Michel ended her first operation and moved to the harbour of Palma in Spain, where she docked on 2 September.

Search and resistance

Activist Claire Faggianelli, who had helped to turn the Louise Michel into a rescue asset, told me before her first operation that

what we do with this little boat is to try to bring some love and joy where there is no hope, where there is just sadness and despair. We really want to try to awaken the consciousness of Europe and say: ‘Look, we have been yelling at you for years now. There is something that shouldn’t be happening at the very borders of Europe, and you close your eyes to it. Wake up!’ (Interview 4)

The first operation of this ‘little boat’ generated worldwide attention, prompting renewed interest and concern about precarious migrant crossings, EUropean practices of non-assistance and the effects of EUropean–Libyan collaborations in mass interceptions. In a video released during the first operation, Banksy (2020) stated that ‘EU authorities’ would ‘deliberately ignore distress calls from “non-Europeans”’, necessitating the intervention of the Louise Michel – ‘all black lives matter’. The involvement of a world-famous street artist guaranteed news coverage, boosting the campaign and its political messaging beyond humanitarian narratives so common among the civil fleet. ‘Humanitarian aid alone is not the answer’, the activists noted on their website; they would seek, instead, ‘to combine lifeguarding with the principles of feminism, anti-racism and anti-fascism’ (MV Louise Michel, 2023).

Reflecting on Louise Michel’s first SAR intervention less than a month after her return to port, Head of Mission Reisner was proud of the crew’s ability to assist in several severe distress situations despite adverse conditions, a lack of assistance by responsible authorities and the risk of encounters with Libyan patrol boats (Interview 5). Rescuing 193 people and safeguarding over 100 people until they were taken onboard another NGO vessel, Reisner suggested that the Louise Michel had proven her operational concept: ‘While she is not perfect to shower 30 women and children with fuel burns, she is a perfect asset for first response – the concept of a civil speed boat in the Mediterranean has worked’. Still, Reisner admitted that the project could face serious challenges over the following months. Given her registration as a sports boat, she anticipated that the ship would be blocked at the Spanish harbour, required to obtain a reregistration. Indeed, due to such registration issues, the rebel crew returned to the central Mediterranean only a year and a half later. The Louise Michel travelled to the central Mediterranean six times in 2022, rescuing about 600 people and assisting in the rescue of hundreds more.

It may be premature to fully assess the overall operational effectiveness of the Louise Michel, not least due to her long absence, and given also the more general difficulty of establishing beyond doubt whether her speed had been the decisive factor in rescue operations. Possibly, some of the rubber boats her crew rescued could have stayed afloat hours longer and, possibly, Libyan patrol boats were not close enough to intercept the boats that the Louise Michel eventually rescued. Given these speculative elements, the impact of the Louise Michel is assessed in terms of her impact on the wider operational concepts of the civil fleet, something the activist Reisner had hoped for. She noted before her launch that the Louise Michel should ‘get the larger SAR NGOs to rethink their strategy’ (Interview 3) and make them consider faster operational assets in order to disrupt the EUro–Libyan interception regime.

Asked about Louise Michel’s impact on the civil fleet, Neugebauer of Sea-Watch suggested that she had opened up new possibilities but had also allowed others to learn from mistakes made, for example concerning her registration. The Louise Michel should thus be situated in an ongoing learning process within the civil fleet:

In 2015, we started with cheap and old vessels that were not the fastest. Back then, we would not have had the personnel, knowledge or resources to operate a fast asset like the Louise. Over time, the civil fleet became more professional at sea, increasingly able to run complex missions and think about new operational concepts. (Interview 1)

Till Rummenhohl, SOS Humanity’s Head of Operation, noted that when searching for a new asset, ‘we realized that we needed a vessel such as the Louise but also something different’ (Interview 6). While recognizing ‘that speed was something really needed [. . .] it still needs to be a vessel that is able to operate independently. Vessels like her have problems when they have to take in 50 to 70 people’. In the end, due to financial reasons, SOS Humanity decided against buying a new fast asset, instead taking over the Sea-Watch4. Renamed Humanity1, the vessel rescued 855 people between September and December 2022. Still, Rummenhohl suggested in early 2023, ‘it would have been important to have a faster vessel during the last rescues – our plan for a fast asset is still in the drawer’ (Interview 7).

For Jana Ciernioch of Médecins Sans Frontières, fast assets like the Louise Michel have the advantage of operating closer to the Libyan coast than the larger NGO vessels, able to reach distressed boats more quickly and thereby reducing ‘the probability [of having] an incident of boats capsizing and people drowning’ (Interview 8). While Ciernioch considered the operational impact of fast assets as limited overall, given Louise Michel’s relatively few operations but also her dependency on the presence of larger rescue ships to which survivors could be transferred, she emphasized that the introduction of fast assets had prompted ‘a necessary diversification of ships and operational approaches’. The civil fleet would now be composed of diverse assets that could ‘feed into the operations of each other’, and were also able to better adapt to changing political and operational contexts. In view of the Italian government’s recent attempt to further slow down the operations of the civil fleet by sending large NGO assets to northern Italian ports to disembark, Ciernioch suggested that fast assets could play a more significant role in the years to come, standing better chances of being allowed to disembark at close ports in Lampedusa or Sicily, and also benefiting from lower operational costs.

The intervention of the Louise Michel has proven key in inspiring other fast-asset projects. In autumn 2021, the German rescue groups Sea Punks and Mission Lifeline sent out the SAR asset Rise Above, a torpedo recovery vessel formerly used by the German military with a top speed of 18 knots. While the Rise Above lost a race with the Libyan coastguard early on, reaching the scene of distress ‘fifteen minutes too late’, its crew assisted in the rescue of 847 people only hours later (Mission Lifeline, 2021). In May 2022, Sea-Watch (2022) sent out the Aurora, a 14-metre-long Trent-class lifeboat with a top speed of 25 knots, and therefore ‘one of the fastest vessels of the civil fleet’. After Aurora’s first operation, during which 80 people were rescued, the activists wrote: ‘The new rescue ship is our answer to people being left to die at the gates of Europe. Because every maritime emergency is a race against time, especially when states fail to fulfil their duty to rescue’. ¹⁰

Besides opening up new operational concepts and possibilities, Louise Michel represented a clear political response to the EUro–Libyan interception regime that had become increasingly potent in the phase of strategic neglect from 2017 onwards. As noted by Beppe Caccia of Mediterranea Saving Humans, she signified ‘a political shift in the aims and the political narrative of the civil fleet’ (Interview 9). Whereas before, ‘several actors among the big international rescue NGOs insisted on the narrative to exclusively save lives at sea’, the fast asset could be seen as a ‘broadening of the political discourse and narrative – from the crucial fact [of saving] lives at sea to how to support people escaping from the detention camps, the horrible conditions, and the permanent basic fundamental human rights violations in Libya’ (Interview 9).

As such, the Louise Michel needs to be situated within a more general political shift among activists and humanitarians present in the central Mediterranean, willing to engage in more disruptive acts at sea. Not merely in search and rescue operations, but in acts of search and resistance, as the rebel crew calls it, able to react to the weaponization of time in Mediterranean migration governance. For example, with EU aerial surveillance primarily directing Libyan forces towards escaping boats, Sea-Watch and Pilotes Volontaires reacted by sending out aerial assets from 2017 and 2018 respectively, informing the civil fleet about migrant boats in the Libyan and Maltese SAR zones. Moreover, facing an information blackout by EUropean MRCCs, civil fleet assets have become increasingly informed by the Alarm Phone (2022) to locations of distressed boats. This activist hotline, which is regularly called from migrant boats, has become a central node of information in (civil) rescue responses. While 24 boats had alerted Alarm Phone from the central Mediterranean in 2017, distress calls increased sharply from 2019 onwards, with 101 boats reaching out to the activist hotline that year, 173 boats in 2020, 407 in 2021 and as many as 673 the year after – over 100 of which were rescued by the civil fleet in 2022. In addition, a network of civil society actors launched the Civil Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (Civil MRCC) in 2019, in response to the failure of EUropean MRCCs to coordinate rescue operations effectively. Denouncing the central role of state MRCCs in the ‘practice of systematic omissions, delayed intervention and facilitation of forcible returns’, the Civil MRCC (2019, 2022) has significantly contributed to improving the civil ‘coordination of Search and Rescue events’.

Conclusion

Paul Virilio (2006), one of the foremost theorists of speed, argued that speed had become the central transformative force in the contemporary world. With his concept of ‘dromology’, or the science of speed, Virilio pointed to the implications of time’s compression through technological acceleration. Rather than an emancipatory force, however, the acceleration of speed would have detrimental consequences. Virilio assumed that through the automation of weapon technologies, ‘a global military state’ would emerge, ‘which controls and organizes civilian life through a generalized time of violence and fear’ (Glezos, 2012: 7). Consequently, as noted by Glezos (2012: 56), Virilio’s conception of political resistance to such an omnipotent military regime was dominated by practices of deceleration and braking – ‘[t]he strike, the barricade, popular defence’. By highlighting the political ‘possibilities which speed provides’, Glezos (2012: 186) countered Virilio’s rather apocalyptic view of the global war machine, pointing to the ‘unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari quoted in Glezos, 2012: 77). Speed, for Glezos (2012: 81), ‘can be a weapon against speed, just as surely as slowness can’.

The Louise Michel went out to sea to disrupt the weaponizing of time in maritime migration governance. A former military vessel, this mutant machine’s ability to accelerate to high speeds was the determining feature that prompted her deployment in the central Mediterranean where EUropean efforts to decelerate rescues and accelerate interceptions have become increasingly effective. Before her first operation, Head of Mission Reisner found the prospect of racing at sea daunting:

I prefer not to have races with the Libyans who get information via Frontex. I really do not like this male-cowboy mentality – who is faster, who has the bigger boats. I do not like races on the streets where people potentially die, and I prefer that we do not need those races at sea. But if it is necessary, we can engage, of course. (Interview 3)

As this article has shown, races at sea between the civil fleet and Libyan patrol boats have become increasingly common due to shifting temporalities of EUropean migration governance in the Mediterranean that have led to an ongoing situation of strategic neglect of migrant boats.

Realizing Louise Michel’s disruptive potential, other actors of the civil fleet have launched their own fast assets, thereby pluralizing attempts to counteract EUrope’s weaponizing of time. In turn, EUropean authorities have recently sought out new ways to slow down the operations of the civil fleet. A decree passed by the Italian government in January 2023 required NGO assets to sail to a EUropean harbour immediately after undertaking one rescue operation, thus prohibiting them from staying at sea in search of more boats in distress. Moreover, following recent rescues carried out by NGOs, the Italian authorities assigned harbours in central and northern Italy, thus considerably prolonging the disembarkation process and the civil fleet’s absence from the central Mediterranean Sea. As the civil fleet noted in a joint statement,

both factors are designed to keep SAR vessels out of the rescue area for prolonged periods and reduce their ability to assist people in distress. NGOs are already overstretched due to the absence of a state-run SAR operation, and the decreased presence of rescue ships will inevitably result in more people tragically drowning at sea. (Médecins Sans Frontières et al., 2023)

This article has highlighted the weaponization of time in migration governance in the central Mediterranean Sea as well as forms of contestation by the civil fleet. What has not been discussed, not least as it has been done elsewhere (Stierl, 2020), are the varied ways in which people ‘on the move’ on precarious boats themselves disrupt the EUro–Libyan interception regime. They, too, have adapted to the shifting border temporalities at sea, for instance by taking smaller boats, less prone to detection, by using multiple engines, allowing them to travel further and with greater speed, and by equipping themselves for longer journeys, knowing that rescue at sea cannot be expected. Indeed, many boats never have to wait for rescue at all, but reach EUropean shores independently, at times having ‘out-raced’ the Libyan coastguard themselves. It is due to these ‘unruly’ migrant movements that we see arrival figures increasing again, regardless of the consistent attempts by EUropean actors to accelerate interceptions to Libya. Thus, while time has become weaponized in the governance of maritime migration, acts of search and resistance, and spirits of rebellion, continue to contest the enforcement of the Mediterranean border.