Borders As Boats: Navigating Migration in the Central Mediterranean

Join us for our a talk on “Borders As Boats: Navigating Migration in the Central Mediterranean” by Isabella Trombetta, PhD candidate in Global Studies at the Universita’ per Stranieri Dante Alighieri, Reggio Calabria, Italy, and incoming Visiting Researcher at the Center for the Study of Europe.

Together with crisis, border has become one the most excessively used words in the European vocabulary of the past decade in relation to migration. Possibly because the so-called refugee or migration crisis in Europe is actually a crisis of traditionally intended borders. The act of tracing the border is the most powerful tool for a State to assert dominance, and consequently, recognizing where the border is traced becomes the best tool to comprehend power dynamics. That is even more true when the border is hidden, at its closest point, in a 290 miles expanse of water. With this perspective, in order to better comprehend migration flows in the Central Mediterranean, this talk poses the question: where are the borders for migrants in the Mediterranean Sea?