Charles Heller schreibt in seinem englischsprachigen Beitrag im HANDBUCH NEUE SCHWEIZ zum europäischen Grenzregime: «In dem Versuch, das Mittelmeer zu kontrollieren, haben die europäischen Küstenstaaten, zu denen sich später Frontex (die europäische Grenzschutzagentur) und eine wachsende Zahl internationaler Militäroperationen gesellten, ein breites Spektrum an militärischen Grenzdurchsetzungspraktiken und -techniken eingesetzt, um die Bewegungen der Migranten einzudämmen und zu kanalisieren, wodurch das Meer zu einer riesigen Grenzzone wurde.»

Zusammenfassende Vorbemerkung des Autors auf Deutsch

Der folgende Artikel ist auf Englisch im HANDBUCH NEUE SCHWEIZ erschienen. Der Autor Charles Heller schreibt dazu zusammenfassend: «Der Kampf für die Freizügigkeit beginnt mit der Erkenntnis, dass Migrant*innen durch ihre unerlaubten Bewegungen die Rechte, die ihnen verweigert werden, in Anspruch nehmen und teilweise verwirklichen. Es ist daher notwendig, alle Praktiken anzufechten, zu blockieren und zu untergraben, die eingesetzt werden, um den gesamten Lebensweg der Migrant*innen zu kontrollieren. Durch diese Sichtweise können wir deutlicher sehen, dass illegalisierte Migrant*en die Gewalt staatlicher Grenzen erfahren können. Aber vor der Grenze haben sie die Gewalt autoritärer Herrschaft oder extraktiver neokolonialer Beziehungen erlebt. Und nach der Grenze sind sie der ständigen Bedrohung durch Racial Profiling in unseren Städten ausgesetzt, unterliegen diskriminierenden Einbürgerungsbestimmungen und leiden unter den direkten Auswirkungen des flexiblen Arbeitsmarktes des neoliberalen Kapitalismus.

Aus dieser Perspektive «können die Kämpfe um die Staatsgrenzen nur mit einer breiten Palette von Praktiken und Forderungen auf anderen Ebenen artikuliert werden. Dies ist eine der Lehren, die wir aus der intersektionalen Politik ziehen können, die von Schwarzen Feminist*innen entwickelt wurde. Damit wurde anerkannt, dass die Formen der Unterdrückung aufgrund von Rasse, Klasse, Geschlecht und Sexualität 'in unseren Körpern nicht getrennt sind', wie Angela Davis es ausdrückt, und dass sie als solche in den Kämpfen nicht getrennt werden können. Ebenso verlangen die verflochtenen Formen der Unterdrückung, die sich auf die Erfahrungen von Migrant*innen auswirken, dass wir verflochtene Kämpfe führen, um sie anzufechten.»

Beginn des Artikels auf Englisch

For Fernand Braudel, the Mediterranean was not reduced to the sea, or even to the limits marked by the growth of olive trees. The Mediterranean was rather a «wide zone, extending well beyond the shores of the sea in all directions. We might compare it to an electric or magnetic field, or more simply to a radiant centre whose light grows less as one moves away from it, without one’s being able to define the exact boundary between light and shade. For what boundaries can be marked when we are dealing not with plants and animals, relief and climate, but men, whom no barriers or frontiers can stop?» No barriers or borders can stop the movement of men and women, and yet states and the owners of capital have constantly attempted to limit and channel human mobility according to their interests and the social hierarchies of class, race, and gender.

In recent years I have been analyzing and contesting the violence of borders across the Mediterranean frontier through research, activism and aesthetic practice. I have also sought to conceptualize approaches and develop activist tools to support illegalized migrants in the exercise of their freedom to move despite legal denial. In this article, foregrounding my own experience and position, I reflect on the transformations of the Mediterranean border regimes in the last two decades and the new activist practices that have transformed the sea into a laboratory of transnational non-governmental politics. From this vantage point I ask what strategic political perspectives might enable us not only to oppose the violent attempts by states to seal off the Mediterranean frontier at all and any cost, but also to further embed struggles surrounding migration and borders within a process of emancipatory transformation.

The Mediterranean Mobility Conflict

The regime of uneven mobility that we are currently witnessing has emerged in tandem with European imperial expansion and the consequent transformation of the Mediterranean into a colonial sea. While European settlers migrated in great numbers to North African colonized territories, the northbound movement of colonized populations to European metropolitan space (for example France) was subject to successive moments of partial opening and closure of borders. Following the First World War these restrictions on the mobility of the colonized people resulted in early cases of deaths at sea. While after the Second World War European countries established countless programs for recruiting cheap labor from former colonies, the 1960s saw the rise of discriminatory migration policies across Europe. The consolidation of freedom of movement for European citizens within the EU through the Schengen Agreement as of the mid-1980s has gone hand in hand with the denial of access to the EU for most citizens of the global South. The standardization of European migration policies, which also entailed the establishment of a common European border at the external edges of the EU, has thus entailed the institution of a truly European «color line» cutting across the Mediterranean.

However, the systemic conditions that underpin migrants’ movements towards Europe continued - in particular the need for highly qualified but also dequalified migrant labor, global inequalities, and existing migrant networks. Hence the illegalization of the mobility of certain migrants only forced them to move in clandestine ways - frequently by crossing the sea on overcrowded and illsuited vessels. As a result of illegalized migrants’ refusal to accept their geographical exclusion, and of European states’ attempts to prevent and police their mobility, the Mediterranean has become the liquid terrain of an enduring mobility conflict, in which postcolonial inequalities manifest themselves. The sight of overcrowded migrants’ boats being intercepted at sea or migrants’ bodies washing up on European shores has become tragically common since the early 1990s. In an attempt to control the Mediterranean, European coastal states, later joined by Frontex (the European border-management agency) and a growing number of international military operations, have deployed a vast array of militarized border-enforcement practices and techniques to contain and channel migrants’ movements, turning the sea into a vast frontier zone. Crucially, since the early 2000s the EU has increasingly outsourced border control to authoritarian regimes in North Africa so that they might contain migrants on their shores. This task has been undertaken in exchange for funding, military equipment and advantages at other levels of political and economic cooperation with Europe. These policies have never more than temporarily succeeded in stemming migrants’ crossings, and for every route that was sealed off, several new ones - often longer and more dangerous - were opened. Migrant populations have paid a heavy price for their persistence: since the end of the 1980s more than 40,000 migrant deaths at sea have been recorded, turning the Mediterranean into a liquid grave. Those who succeed in arriving safely on EU territory face precarious legal conditions, waiting in the limbo of the asylum process, or being driven into an illegalized labor force and thus existentially absorbed into Europe’s economy through their very exclusion.

Over time, the Mediterranean has seen the trajectories of illegalized migrants continuously evolve in response to the increasingly militarized means deployed by states to police them. By using the concept of trajectory I want to underline the way illegalized migrants’ persistence and precarious mobilities have no predetermined destination, and nor do they follow a fixed path. As opposed to a route from A to B that might be drawn on a map, a trajectory is not an abstract line but rather the embodied path that is the product of the encounter between the movement of the mobile subject and the friction of the real world - including the limits imposed by bordering practices. Likewise, my practice as a researcher, aesthetic producer, and human rights activist evolves as a trajectory. Its development takes the shape of bifurcated paths and ruptures, which are the product of encounters with outside forces, which force me to think and reposition myself.

In what follows I will start by narrating my own trajectory into struggles surrounding borders and migration, which began nearly twenty years ago, before discussing current activist practices at sea. If I mix the academic, the biographical and the political, it is because I believe that if we wish to bring the recognition of the migratory and postcolonial reality of Switzerland into existence, we should start from a place of recognizing and locating ourselves within historical and political realities - and address the ambivalences that come with it.

Entangled Trajectories

I was born in the United States, but have lived in francophone Switzerland for most of my life. My family’s migration history was the product of meandering paths of migration and exile. Jewish members of my family fled to the US from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, some later migrating back again to the old continent. As a result of the tangled routes of my family’s history, I will never belong to any essentialized nation (including of the Zionist sort). Among many other things I might characterize myself as a «non-Jewish Jew» - in the sense that I am not part of any religious community but cannot help feel targeted by banal and not so banal expressions of antisemitism. At the same time I have benefited from the privilege of being born as the citizen of two powerful countries, Switzerland and the USA, and my appearance, name, or accent do not result in my constantly being marked as un-belonging. Mostly, rather than something that I lived adversely, I experienced dimensions of my difference positively and affirmatively. As an adolescent at least I would rather foreground my Americanness (through adherence to music, sport, clothes, food, and so on), which I took to be «cool». I could also pass as Swiss, or overplay my role as the American. In all this, my non-Jewish Jewishness remained rather a taboo for a long time.

As a privileged citizen with a migrants’ history myself, it was only in 2003 that I really connected with migrants with precarious conditions and status. Then, after refusing to serve in the Swiss military, I took up voluntary service at the Agora, an ecumenical organization in Geneva that offered different activities for asylum seekers. It was quite an encounter for the twenty-two-year-old I was at the time. Many of the people who joined the activities were about as young as I was, and had only recently arrived in Switzerland. In this sense, even if it was from a very different and unequal position, all of us were «discovering» at the same time what it means to be a migrant or an asylum seeker and more broadly diasporic conditions. Faced with the discrimination and precarity that this condition implies, together we began exploring the history of migration and migration policies in Switzerland within a history workshop, reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) or Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le Colonialisme (1950). We were trying to understand what this condition was about and how it had historically emerged. It was also a time when regular cases of police violence against Black citizens and asylum seekers alike were being reported, some concerning my own friends, and so questions of race had gained an urgency for us. It is in the aim of making the Swiss population aware of and protesting the condition of foreigners and racialized people in Switzerland that I picked up a camera for the first time, and we began organizing street-theatre interventions in demonstrations together. Part of this material would be brought together in my film Home Sweet Home (2009).

This first encounter with precarized migrants in Switzerland within an activist context was transformative for me. On the one hand it shaped the focus of my work on migration, race, and borders to this day, as well as the particular form it took: research, aesthetic production, and activism have since then been inextricably bound together in my work. On a more intimate level I partly discovered my own migration and racialized past and present - a condition that, apart from rare antisemitic jokes, I am not assigned to on a daily basis, but that is nonetheless part of my self. The reasons that shape our political commitments are always multiple and messy. There is no doubt however that in order to be faithful to my family history, I had to contest the present manifestations of the violence of borders and social boundaries, as these present a continuity with the past. I felt that, despite my privilege, my own being and condition resonated with that of precarized migrants from the global South and allowed a specific form of solidarity.

So far, I have rarely brought up my family history in relation to my research and activism, for it raises a number of challenging questions: Can one foreground one’s location and identity without being reduced and assigned to it? Does this risk to self-legitimize my work in relation to the incommensurable experience of those who today cannot escape their racialization? I have no definite answers to these questions. But in the context of the political project of a «New Switzerland» I think it’s important to recognize my positionality in order to affirm our postmigrant and postcolonial reality, so that it may be further culturally and politically recognized. Also, in order to build strong emancipatory alliances, we need to subvert the old binaries of supposedly clear-cut categories such as citizen/foreigner, white/of Color, victim/helper that structure both domination based on status and race, as well as opposition to it.

Ruptures at the EU's Maritime Frontiers

I began to focus my work on the Mediterranean frontier in the wake of the 2011 Arab uprisings. For me, this was a time of opening new horizons on different levels. The then emerging Forensic Architecture research project was forging new conceptual and technical tools for documenting and contesting violence in its multiple guises. These new tools allowed me to engage differently with political upheavals in the Mediterranean region. The «delayed defiance” of the Arab uprisings, which constituted a moment of rebellion against «domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike,» kicked off a sequence of unprecedented defiance against the European border regime itself. By toppling or destabilizing the authoritarian regimes in North Africa that had served as the pillars of Europe’s policy of externalized border control, these popular uprisings (and the foreign military interventions that accompanied them in the case of Libya) also caused the European border regime to vacillate. In Tunisia, migrants took advantage of the power vacuum to seize their freedom to move, which the Ben Ali regime had denied them in tandem with the EU. The counter-revolutionary turmoil that spread in Libya and Syria further triggered the large-scale movement of populations across the region.

In the wake of the Arab uprisings it was not only migrants who decided to take to the sea. They were followed by a multitude of non-governmental actors who deployed highly innovative strategies to support the migrants’ freedom to move as well as block the violence of borders. Together, they have turned the in-between space of the «Mediterranean» into a transnational space of experimental resistance and solidarity, and into a domain of politics in its own right. In 2011, families of the disappeared in Tunisia mobilized, with the support of Italian activists, to demand truth and accountability for the disappearance of their loved ones. My colleague Lorenzo Pezzani and I contributed to this renewed phase of activism at sea by initiating a research project called Forensic Oceanography in the same year, deploying surveillance technologies against the grain as a way to document and litigate the violations of migrants’ rights at sea.

Since 2013, we have shared these tools by making them available via the WatchTheMed platform. The Alarm Phone project emerged from this process in 2014, extending the underground networks of solidarity of No Border activists across the sea through a civilian emergency phone line to support migrants during the crossing. These initiatives challenged the boundaries of what and who can be seen and heard across the Mediterranean frontier, and particularly who has the power to represent and define and police this reality.

From the Summer to the Autumn of Migration

2015 marks a watershed moment for the European border regime. During what has been referred to as the «Long Summer of Migration» by Bernd Kasparek and Mark Speer, migrants’ capacity to overcome European borders reached its peak as Syrians crossed the Aegean in great numbers to reach the Greek shores and make their arduous passage across European territory. It showed the agency and the will to free movement of tens of thousands of people. It also mobilized scores of activists across Europe to develop new forms of solidarity. In the central Mediterranean, where the Italian Mare Nostrum rescue operation had been terminated, resulting in a lethal rescue gap, 2015 saw the deployment of rescue vessels, which soon numbered a rescue flotilla. Their operators took it upon themselves to make up for the EU’s policies of illegalization and abandonment.

At the same time, the year 2015 also signalled the beginning of a violent rollback of the European border regime. In the name of preserving a neoliberal peace in Europe against further infighting and the rise of the far-right that has threatened the «extreme center» governments in several European states, EU institutions and member states have desperately attempted to reimpose policies of control on mi- grants’ entire trajectories. New practices of externalized border control have reached far beyond the Mediterranean frontier, and subjected those already within EU territory to new and more draconian regimes of control. In the process, the EU has once again banked on those authoritarian regimes along the North African Mediterranean that have survived the revolutionary turmoil.

After successfully sealing off the Aegean sea, thanks to the EU-Turkey deal in March 2016, the policymakers returned their attention to the central Mediterranean, where the only available partner facing Italian shores was the shattered Libyan state, and particularly its abusive coastguard units. Outsourcing border control once again to these Libyan partners - as had been the case in 2009—required the sidelining of NGOs. After all, if the newly equipped Libyan units were to intercept migrants leaving their shores effectively, the same migrants could not be rescued by NGOs that would bring them to European soil. Furthermore, to permit the Libyan coastguard to intercept migrants at gunpoint with impunity, the monopoly of states over the regime of (in) visibility operating at the maritime frontier had to be restored. For all purposes, then, the humanitarian and human rights actors had to be expelled from the Mediterranean. Since the summer of 2016, with the full support of the EU, Italy has stepped up its collaboration with the Libyan coast guard, and at the same time led a virulent campaign of delegitimization and criminalization of NGOs - a two-pronged policy we have called Mare Clausum. Despite the extraordinary persistence and inventiveness of both migrants and non-governmental actors since 2011, the Mediterranean frontier is closing down once again.

Re-Inventing the Politics of Freedom of Movement in a Closing Sea

As I write in January 2021, Europe has managed to outsource the task of its border control to its neighbors, and with it the human rights violations that always accompany it. The few NGOs that strenuously continue to conduct search-and-rescue operations are being criminalized and the at-risk passengers they take on board are denied disembarkation. The situation has only been made worse in the context of the COVID -19 pandemic, in which «the war on the virus» fuels the «war on migrants.» Reopened in 2011 in the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Mediterranean frontier is being violently sealed off once again - even though illegalized migrants persist in slipping through the cracks that remain open.

In this moment of violent rollback, which is hardening state borders and social boundaries alike, I am convinced that forms of immediate resistance should be accompanied by renewed strategic thinking and geared towards a broader horizon of transformation. How do we define and even prefigure our political horizon at this particular historical juncture? How can we create the necessary alliances to advance towards it? Under what conditions can migration struggles become an engine of a broader project of political transformation operating across different boundaries of class, gender, race, and citizenship? These are some of the questions that several colleagues and myself have been asking.

In the migrant-solidarity movement the urgent need to resist state violence is often foregrounded, and for a good reason. Yet this focus means that alternative visions to the current exclusionary migration regime are too often left undefined—or defined negatively as the absence of state-sanctioned violence imposed through border controls. The focus on state borders and policies in turn risks ignoring the role borders play as a political technology used to govern racialized populations and labor for postcolonial European capitalism. An absence of border violence would leave the very system of domination and exploitation embedded in borders unchallenged. Abolishing state borders or border control would be insufficient to enable migrants to fully exercise their freedom of movement and life aspirations as long as their bodies also continue to be channeled towards capitalist regimes of exploitation, and as long as they encounter discrimination along race and gender lines. Furthermore, the focus on state borders risks unwillingly reinforcing the split between different subject positions (such as citizen vs. illegal migrant), and thus making it even more difficult to see commonalities and forge alliances across those divisions. As a contribution to working through these difficulties - in terms of practical realization, with all the ambivalences and contradictions that forging an alternative horizon entails - I have begun to reflect, with my colleagues Lorenzo Pezzani and Maurice Stierl, on what we call the politics of freedom of movement.

While certainly not discarding the focus on state violence at state borders - the effects of which are all too observable—this approach involves taking as its starting point the multiform constraints encountered by migrants along their trajectories as a potential site of struggle. The struggle towards freedom of movement starts with the recognition that, through their unauthorized movements, migrants seize and partly realize the rights that are denied to them. It then demands that one contest, block, and undermine all the practices that are deployed to police migrants’ entire trajectories. Through this lens we can see more clearly that illegalized migrants may experience the violence of state borders. But before the border they have experienced the violence of authoritarian rule or extractive neocolonial relations. And after the border they face the constant threat of racial profiling within our cities, are subject to discriminatory naturalization regulations, and suffer the direct effects of neoliberal capitalism’s flexible labor market. From this perspective, struggles surrounding state borders can only be articulated with a broad range of practices and demands at other levels. This is one of the lessons we may learn from the intersectional politics pioneered by Black feminists. This acknowledged that the forms of oppression based on race, class, gender, and sexuality «weren’t separate in our bodies,» as Angela Davis puts it, and that as such they could not be separated in terms of struggles. Likewise, the entangled forms of oppression impacting migrants’ experiences demand that we weave entangled struggles to contest them.

In the summer of 2018, in collaboration with Simon Noori, I convened a workshop aimed at exploring the potentials and challenges of this approach as part of an INES forum in Bern. It brought together several activists, scholars, and journalists in order to assemble various voices and perspectives to decipher both the multitude of constraints encountered by migrants and the many forms of resistance these generate. From the global scale of the uneven relations linking Europe and Africa and within which migration is embedded (Etonam Akakpo-Ahianyo) to the internal boundaries and constraints on asylum seekers’ mobility within Switzerland (Saule Yerkebayeva and Jennifer Steiner), from the struggles of the Alarm Phone across the EU’s maritime frontier (Simon Noori) to the fight against the racialized subjects’ everyday experience through racial profiling (Vanessa E. Thompson), we dis- cussed and highlighted different interlinked forms of boundary-making and struggles. While we acknowledged the unresolved tensions, divisions, and contradictions that make the forging of alliances difficult (Kijan Espahangizi), we also recalled Marx’s comments in thinking through the necessity of overcoming multiple social boundaries within our political organization. Considering the divisions into «hostile camps» between competing English and Irish workers in nineteenth-century England, which he considered to be «much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.,» Marx concluded that «this antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.» This divide- and-rule strategy remains as effective today as it was in the past. Acknowledging the stark realities of our divisions and hierarchies—as I sought to do earlier in relation to my own position and social location - yet seeking to find points of commonality to work through and ultimately overcome them, may be a good place to start to break this spell of impotence.

This text is based on a talk held by Charles Heller at the Forum #NeueSchweiz on September 22, 2018, in Bern.

Zum Autor

Charles Heller ist Wissenschaftler und Filmemacher. Seine Arbeit hat einen langjährigen Fokus auf die Politik der Migration an den Grenzen Europas. Derzeit ist er Research Associate am Graduate Institute in Genf. Gemeinsam mit Lorenzo Pezzani gründete Heller 2011 Forensic Oceanography, ein Gemeinschaftsprojekt am Goldsmiths College in London. Dort wurden innovative Methoden ent- wickelt, um die Bedingungen zu dokumentieren, die zum Tod von Migrant:innen im Mittelmeer führen. Forensic Oceanography veröffentlicht Menschenrechtsberichte, Artikel und Videos, die international vor Gerichten als Beweise genutzt sowie ihn Ausstellungen präsentiert wurden. www. watchthemed.net.

Referenzen

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Dabashi, Hamid. The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London: Zed Books, 2012). Davis, Angela. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).

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Heller, Charles, Lorenzo Pezzani and Maurice Stierl. «Towards a Politics of Freedom of Movement,» Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, Reece Jones, ed (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

Hinger, Sophie. «Transformative Trajectories—The Shifting Mediterranean Border Regime and The Challenges of Critical Knowledge Production. An Interview with Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani.» Movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies 4 (2018).

Kasparek, Bernd and Marc Speer. «Of Hope. Hungary and the long Summer of Migration,» Borderminitoring.eu, September 9, 2015, https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/ of-hope-en/ (accessed March 24, 2021).

Marx, Karl. «Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870.» Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 220–224, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm#ireland (accessed March 24, 2021).

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