Eurosur, Humanitarian Visibility and (nearly) Real-Time Mapping in the Mediterranean.

Abstract

This article analyses the ongoing transformations occurring in the regime of visibility of migration governmentality in the Mediterranean sea, investigating two complementary politics of visibility: on the one hand, humanitarian visibility, that is the threshold of visibility fixed by humanitarian actors, and in this specific case the visibility at stake with the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum, that produced a sort of good border spectacle of the rescue; on the other, the (nearly) real-time visibility envisaged by monitoring systems like Eurosur, that articulates temporality (the real-time one) with a specific look situational awareness. The articles interrogates how humanitarian visibility and real-time visualization are articulated in the current Mediterranean context for producing migratory events, tracing maps of future risks and opening new spaces of governmental intervention. I conclude by drawing attention to strategies through which both activists and migrants have appropriated and utilized visibility in their own ways by demanding that people in distress at sea are promptly rescued.