Since the early 1990s, the ‘migration crisis’ has been high on Europe’s agenda and a main cause of concern for European citizens. In recent years, numerous activists and scholars have denounced how the militarisation of migration and border controls has been explicitly bound with notions of humanitarianism. As such, the current focus on both the securitarian and humanitarian sides of the phenomenon supports a more complex logic of threat and benevolence that allows for a security-humanitarian response. Assuming the launch of Mare Nostrum – the military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean targeted at both rescuing migrants and arresting smugglers – as a transformative moment in the communication strategies of Italy, this article examines the narratives produced by the Italian Navy during the operation, and how these invite us to witness them. Pivoting on the interrelated notions of ‘war imaginary’ and ‘emergency imaginary’, this article investigates how photographs and videos produced by Italian soldiers have contributed to represent the Mediterranean as a ‘humanitarian battlefield’. Thus, exploring the visual politics of Mare Nostrum within the broader framework of the new mediated warfare, it indicates how the bio-political imperative of managing lives is visually expressed through an aesthetic of trauma, where ‘war’ (on migrants) is represented both as an intimate experience of sorrow and as a public act of peacemaking.

Taking as a starting point studies on the biopolitics of bordering, as well as media studies, this article explores how information campaigns deter potential migrants and refugees from leaving their countries depict them in very specific ways, operating as ‘new bordering practices’ that are in conjunction with extraterritorial border policies. This article probes this question through the example of a specific information campaign – Aware Migrants (2016) – funded by the Italian Government and managed by International Organization for Migration (IOM) to dissuade potential newcomers from attempting the journey across the Mediterranean Sea. As the analysis of Aware Migrants makes clear, it contributes to normalizing a transnational imaginary into a militarized borderscape comprising places of violence and death, exploitation and detention, which is part of the complex dichotomies of care and control, proper of contemporary border regimes. Finally, the article sheds light on how these symbolic bordering practices contribute to nurturing a ‘compassionate repression’ that increasingly and silently legitimizes the difference between the ‘us’ (the figure of the citizen) and the ‘them’ (the figure of the foreigner).

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In line with the European self-description of its borders as a space of "humanitarian securitization," this article approaches the border as a network of mediations around migrants and refugees, where emotions of fear and empathy co-exist through digital connectivities-what we call the "mediatized border." Drawing on media, security, and gender studies, we demonstrate how such techno-affective networks are constitutive of (rather than simply complementary to) the border as a hybrid site of both military protection and care for the vulnerable. We do this through hermeneutic and participatory engagements with the two main border sites of the 2015 migration "crisis," Italy and Greece, and discuss their implications on our understanding of the power relationships of human mobility.

The last decade has been characterized by an intense inflow of people into borders of what has been called the "Fortress Europe". Italian governments, from Gentiloni-Minniti to Conte-Salvini, have implemented restrictive border management and migration control measures, fueled also by an over mediatization of the issue in and by public discourses. However, from February 2020 public debates and narratives have been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a health emergency often described as a war against an invisible enemy. Through a qualitative analysis of Italian media representations, this paper analyses how Covid-19 overshadowed and reframed migration narratives and discourses. Moving within the concept of (in)visibility, this paper explores the two macrodiscourses around migration during the lockdown: on one side, the link between migration and illness (fear of infection) that led to strict border security measures; on the other, the utilitaristic x\regularization of migrants working in informal economy. The conclusion reflects on long-term implications of the pandemic on mobility justice (Sheller 2018) and what Mbembe (2020) has defined the "right to breath".