Mare Nostrum: the visual politics of a military-humanitarian operation in the Mediterranean Sea

Abstract

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.

Voice and community in the 2015 refugee crisis: A content analysis of news coverage in eight European countries

“…This body of research falls within a broader category of migration and media studies literature, which engages with the portrayal of refugees in the media (van Dijk, 1991;Wright, 2002;Gross et al, 2007;Triantafyllidou, 2013;and, for the recent crisis, Giannakopoulos, 2016;Musarò, 2017;Berry et al, 2015;Gillespie et al, 2016;Georgiou and Zaborowski, 2017;Chouliaraki, 2017;Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2017). v Despite its internal diversity, this field is defined by a strong critical perspective on the language used to represent the refugee across a range of public genres.…”

The mediatized border: technologies and affects of migrant reception in the Greek and Italian borders

“…This discourse relied on the masculinist ethos of military security infused by the empathetic emotion of humanitarian care, in ways that legitimized the hegemony of the former over the latter. While its stories did capitalize on the migrants' suffering and sorrow in the high seas, it ultimately prioritized the celebration of the "humanitarian-soldier," the gratitude of the surviving victims towards "us," and the threat and blame towards those who dream to follow the same route to Europe (Musarò 2017). The narrated border was thus a fully normative border that aimed at disseminating and normalizing the exclusionary practices of the Italian/European military both as public acts of salvation and protection and as sites of trauma and threat.…”

Refugee Integration in Europe Since the ‘Crisis’

“…6 Another significant watershed was the sinking of two vessels near Lampedusa on 3rd and 11th October 2013. These tragedies mark a decisive turning point as they motivated the Italian government's decision to implement its Mare Nostrum rescue operation (Musarò 2016), later to be replaced by Operation Triton, the border security operation conducted by the European Union's border security agency -Frontex. 7 Goodman et al (2017) show how in the UK media, the terminology used shifted first from "Mediterranean migrant crisis" before becoming the "Calais migrant crisis" in which migrants were constructed as a threat to UK security.…”