 what we call forced mobility, while dozens of thousands of trans migrants from Central America remained stuck in Mexico, a good example of forced immobility. This is a very genetic sanitary border enforcement has been enacted to increase deterrence in many parts of the world, including Europe. So the crossing in general has become even more difficult and risky in the last months as the increase in the number of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean demonstrates. The hardening of borders has been a general trend in the last years. A trend that has been exacerbated in the wake of the crisis of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 with the rise of new nationalist forces of the right, just think of Brexit. In particular, in Europe, in the wake of what critical migration scholars and activists call the long summer of migration in 2015. Walls have proliferated physical walls like the one between Mexico and the US, but also metaphoric walls like the ones of fortress Europe. Walls have captured the critical imagination. This is of course an important trend that we need to analyze in detail. Nevertheless, I have to say that I agree with Wendy Brown, who explained some years ago that this proliferation of walls is more a symptom of crisis than a statement of sovereignty. But for several reasons. Among them, the fact that contemporary nation states need to manage mobility. Mobility can be managed in a selective and violently hierarchical way, but it is very difficult to stop them. Because contemporary capitalist is predicated upon specific forms of mobility of labor. In the first decade of the 21st century, we were confronted with the emergence of neoliberal theories and practices of migration management that precisely pointed to accomplish a differential inclusion of migrant labor. Walls do not tackle this question. However, there is a need to carefully analyze also the operations of walls and other reinforcement devices within wider assemblages of power and resistance and within wider geographies. And for me, a very important point. When we think of borders, the first image that comes in our mind is the one of the line traced on the map. Something stable, fixed and fortified borders tend to reinforce the validity of such image. But it is important to stress that contemporary borders, even the most fortified borders are at the same time mobile borders. And there is a need to reflect upon this combination of fortification and mobility of borders. I just think of the question of externalization of borders control in Europe, in the European Union, or of Mexico, a country that has been turned into what critical migration of scholars in that country call a vertical border. And the notion of border regime is particularly apt to capture this combination of fortification and mobility of borders. This notion has been particularly elaborated in Germany in the last 10 years by such scholars as Sabina S. and Berth Kasparov. And the notion of border regime underscores the flexible and multi-scalar nature of border control and of its geography, even the elusiveness of border control and its geography. An elusiveness which does not at all exclude punctual sovereign interventions on specific places on specific bodies. Another point that is stressed by the notion of border regime is the heterogeneity of the actors involved in border controls, public and private actors. Like private transport companies known as migration careers or companies operating in the global business of security like G4S play very important roles in the governance of borders nowadays. And they introduce onto the border regime a logic that is quite different from the classical political logic of sovereign. Let me come closer to the real topic of this talk. And let me say something about the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean has become in the last years the most lethal point of border crossing in the world. Well the combination of fortification and even militarization and mobility of borders becomes particularly apparent in the choppy waters of the Mediterranean. And note that in general the notion and institution of the border is constitutively linked with the land. Since the mythological image of a photo traced by a plow. Some of you may be familiar with Karl Schmidt's theory of the qualitative difference between land and sea from a legal and political point of view. It would be very interesting to go into the detail of the history of spatial demarcations across the oceans, which played an outstanding role in the history of European colonial and imperial expansion. It's a very nice book by Lauren Benton entitled A Search for Sovereignty that has a whole chapter on the sea. Corridors passageways channels rather than clear cut lines of demarcation emerge here in the liquidity of the sea seems even today to resist the geometric accuracy of border. As the often elusive intertwining of territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones, south zones and international waters, I'm going to demonstrate, and nevertheless, in many parts of the world, and in particular in the Mediterranean, bordering exercises are underway for the extraction of resources, and above all, for the management of migration. These bordering exercises are particularly interesting from the point of view of the geography of border control. You know that in the Mediterranean, somewhere there is a line, and this line is the external maritime frontier of the European Union. But how is the Mediterranean border managed? First of all, geographically, there is a distinction between three wide areas, the western, the eastern and the central Mediterranean. And if you look at the way in which these areas are controlled and governed, each of them points to the crucially relevant role of a non-European country. Morocco, western Mediterranean, Turkey, eastern Mediterranean and Libya, central Mediterranean. These three countries are involved in the European border regime, which implies a kind of shift in the geography of European borders. Moreover, the externalization of European border control reaches deep into sub-Saharan Africa, involving several countries in a variable geography of control. So if we ask, where do migrants and refugees encounter the European external border? This is a question that is really difficult to answer in a straightforward way. What we definitely know is the intolerable price of the operations of the European border regime in the Mediterranean. Since 2014, more than 20,000 people died in the Mediterranean according to the international organization for migration. I know that such figures are well known, but I think it is politically and even ethically necessary to repeat them when we talk about the Mediterranean. If you keep such figures into account, it is easy to understand why the notion of necropolitics that was forged by Achille Mbembe several years ago circulates so widely in critical debates on border and migration in the Mediterranean, as well as elsewhere, for instance, in Mexico. A specific aspect of the hardening of borders in recent years, with different degrees in different countries, in different parts of the world, has been the criminalization of humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention. Just think of the politics of closed ports pursued by Matteo Salvini of Italy, when he was deputy prime minister in 2018-2019. The so-called crimes of solidarity in France, of the criminalization of a group like no more deaths in Arizona, where it runs a desert medical clinic and disseminates bottles of water and food across migrants roots in the desert. Or think of growing intimidations against NGOs assisting Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and India, of the persistent administrative obstacles to search and rescue operations carried out by the ships of civil society in the Mediterranean. The list could easily go on. Humanitarian intervention is under attack in many parts of the world. It is not taken for granted that humanitarian intervention is something legitimate. And this is a significant shift with respect to earlier years. For a relatively long time, humanitarian actors had been part of the border regime in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. The criminalization and humanitarianism have indeed often intermingled in the operations of the European border regime since the early 2000s. The opening up contradictions and the space of maneuver for migrants and refugees, but also leading to what the critical scholars have often described as a governmentalization of the humanitarian reason to quote the phrase introduced by Didier Fassan in the famous book. The new conjuncture of criminalization has made humanitarian intervention even more difficult and risky, often with little implications for people in transit. At the same time, it has also challenged many humanitarian actors to rethink anew the very foundation of their engagement. It was precisely in this conjuncture characterized by the criminalization of humanitarian intervention at sea, particularly in Italy, that we decided to launch a search of rescue project in June 2000. In 2018, Salvini had just shot Italian ports to the ship Aquarius of Medicin San Frontier and SOS Mediterranean, carrying more than 600 rescued migrants and refugees. So we started to discuss within a relatively small group of activists and we had to find something unexpected, something nobody could expect from us. Of course we organized demonstrations, we wrote calls and articles, but we wanted to do something more, something practical to put it simply. So we decided to search for the boat and we dedicated the whole summer to that search. And we found both the boat and the money to buy it. And on October 3, the anniversary of the shipwreck of 2013, our boat sailed for its first search of rescue mission. Following two years, we have accomplished several missions, pursuing a systematic monitoring activity in the Mediterranean, rescuing several hundred migrants and entering several clashes with the Italian government. If you are interested in the details, I can say more in the discussion. For now, what interests me more is the way in which we framed our initiative, entering several productive dialogues with humanitarian actors, but stressing the fact that our initiative was not a humanitarian initiative, not a classical humanitarian initiative. It's a kind of joke we used to say that Mediterranean, the name of the initiative is not an NGO, it is rather an NGA, a non-governmental action. We attempted to promote the kind of politicization of certain rescue operations, promoting the convergence between different NGOs operating at sea. We stressed the importance to build bridges between the sea and the land, in a way going beyond the classical humanitarian logic of emergency intervention. The classical humanitarian logic of emergency intervention is focused on the site of emergency, in this case on the sea. We were trying to develop a different kind of gaze, different kind of action, combining the movements and struggles of migrants at sea with the movements and struggles of migrants on the land, and with more general political movements on the land. We developed a politics of law negotiating with several levels of jurisdiction, but at the same time we claimed the necessity to break the law when it is needed. Moreover, and this is maybe the most important point, but I will come back to it in a moment, we have been, since the beginning, very critical with respect to the rhetoric of victimization that characterizes humanitarian. Anyway, Mediterranean is, of course, part of a lively and heterogeneous spectrum of actors engaged along the European border zones on the land and at sea in attempts to support migrants and refugees in the process of border crossing. Some of these actors are humanitarian actors, others are, let's say, more radical actors. Over the last years, we have been witnessing the emergence of the amazing transnational project of alarm phone, a multi-sided hotline, employing information and communication technologies to provide immediate assistance to migrants in distress, and the connected welcome to Europe network. Well, alarm phone, the welcome to Europe network are definitely not classical humanitarian actors, although they cooperate with a panoply of humanitarian actors as also Mediterranean does. For alarm phone, what is really important is the legacy of abolitionism in the Americas, and in particular the practice but also the means of the underground railroad. Convinced that the legacy of abolitionism and more generally black radical thought is a crucial important archive to rethink what emerges as a crucial object of critical thought against the background of the criminalization of humanitarian intervention, which means the very question of the human, at least since David Walker's appeal to the color of the citizens of the world, 1830, the foundational text of African American political thought, the claim to be human, the simple claim to be human in front of powerful devices of dehumanization and even animalization to quote a message there and transfer non is a defining characteristic of African American thought and movements. Let's take seriously this question of the humanization. Humanizing processes are definitely playing borderlands and the long maritime frontier at the juncture between racism, violence, and the specter of death that often haunt migrants journeys since their inception. The human appears here, for instance in the Mediterranean, in front of the risk of a shipwreck or interception by an actor like the so called Libyan coast guard precisely as a claim as an uncertain and even fragile wager. To be more precise, I think it appears as a battlefield where the denial and the affirmation of the human are directly confronted and clash beyond the pitfalls of humanitarianism and more generalism of European humanism. We should rethink the human, I think, from the point of view of subjects whose belonging to a shared humanity has been and continues to be contested. And we should take their claims, not only the processes of dehumanization that target them, but also their claims, their struggles, their movements as a threat to reinvent the human. So such a rethinking of the human implies that the human is always embodied, that the human can be thought of as a kind of abstract universe. It has long been a point of disagreement with humanitarianism in my own experience. Looking at people who die or are rescued in the Mediterranean, humanitarian actors often insist that we should not call them migrants, but rather persons and all encompassing figures of vulnerability. Those people do not die as quote unquote persons while attempting to cross a border in the Mediterranean or elsewhere. They precisely die as migrants. They die as people with a specific skin color and gender, with bodies that bear the traces of long histories of racialization and colonial domination, with bodies which bear the stigma of poverty. Perhaps more importantly, these people are not mere victims. Their practice of freedom of movement is a political practice. I will also discuss about the meaning of political in this case, and I am happy to do that later. But I insist that their practice, migrants and refugees practice of freedom of movement is a political practice. Stubbornness, the amazing stubbornness with which they challenge the necropolitics of borders, often paying an intolerable price should be acknowledged as the foundation of any politics of migration today. So let me conclude by saying that in the past months, notwithstanding the pandemic and the penalty of administrative hurdles put up in particular by the Italian government, the cooperation between civil actors engaged in search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean as intensified for shadowing the birth of a real civil fleet. Something else happened over the last months in and around the Mediterranean, something that I find particularly interesting. I have written quite extensively with Brett, with Brett Nielsen about the question of translating movements and struggles from one context to a different one. And something like that happened in the Mediterranean since last summer. Black lives matter has reached the Mediterranean, and you may find that that slogan in the statements of several organizations. And this is producing a further shift in the discourse of sea rescue, which is moving toward a more accurate recognition of the specific histories and conditions behind movement of migration across the Mediterranean and of the subjectivity of migrants and refugees beyond the rhetoric of vulnerability and victimization. So the next months and the years will continue to be tough in the Mediterranean. But the stubbornness of migration and the further expansion of activism at sea can build the basis for unexpected political alliances and hopefully for an effective transformation of the border. Thank you. It's a pity that we cannot make an applause although I think that probably zoom should allow should have a new function that allows for for applause is because I think this, this paper that you presented tonight really deserves a lot of applause and more. I think, obviously, there are lots of questions about I would like to start by maybe asking you a couple of questions precisely around the last issue that you raised around the issue of the human. One of the issues in which the human comes to be reconceptualized away from the humanitarian construction of the human as either a universal subject, which denies the history of racialization oppression, dehumanization and racist undertakes that you very well articulated. It is in your talk tied to a to the emergence of a social movement or to an emergence of a of a community of struggle that in a way takes from a variety of legacies the abolitionist one as you mentioned but also to an extent in the practice at least I imagine it also draws upon the need, the immediate need to to oppose necropolitics in the Mediterranean sea which which basically means that as you mentioned at the end of your talk it is the quintessential political practice of the movement is to stop death, at least in the context of the Mediterranean sea then of course you articulated the ways in which these struggles, born together land and sea and and and and, of course, not only the legacies the historical legacies but the contemporary legacies extend beyond the actual Mediterranean will go back to or extend towards other border regimes and border struggles, such as the Mexican one and of course I mean when you were talking about the whole idea of of the Mediterranean as, as the new border of Europe, I could not kind of stop but thinking about another experience of political struggle in the sea and across the sea which was the flotilla, the people trying to reach and challenge the fortification or the erection of a sea barrier or border encircling the Gaza Strip. So I also wanted to kind of introduce these comparison and ask you whether there was any moment in which this legacy made appeared in the political practice of the Carania or it was ever discussed and so on and whether actually in the practice of the of the social movement that is being produced out of this political contestation of the border regime, there has been some connection with that particular historical experience of challenging borders at sea, if you wish. Yeah, I would like to ask you if you could elaborate a little bit more about this reconceptualization of the human that emerges in this redefinition of humanitarianism, because I'm really interested in this and further elaboration on that. And also, I have a question around something that you said at the beginning of your talk in relation to Wendy Brown's point on borders or border regimes being a symptoms of a profound crisis of the sovereign or sovereign power. And I wanted you to elaborate more on this point in terms of giving us your own political and intellectual understanding of what this crisis is about. And how does sort of the in that sense, experiences such as Mediterranean speak to that crisis or speak back to that crisis. So these are some of the issues that I had in mind I have of course lots of me have taken lots of notes and I have lots of questions but I would also like to open up the Q&A to the audience. So maybe I'll ask you to not answer my questions straight away but to maybe we'll collect a few. I like usual we welcome questions either by raising hands and so you know you can take you can unmute yourself and ask a question directly we can see the hands that are raised. So that's a possibility alternatively of course you can post your question in the chat there are already few questions so while people are gathering their souls and finding out where the function of the raising hand ease if they are not yet familiar with it I'll just read out a question that has been posted on the chat to you Sandra and the question is from Laura Zuccaro who writes in October 2020 the Italian government made a U turn on Salvini's approach to migration, promoting positive welcome and integration policies. What is your professors Medzadra or your opinion about how widespread are Salvini's views still in Italy, among the electorate. And that could put pressure on the current counter government, thus resulting in a return to less tolerant measures. So there is another question. I mean there, as usual this chat has become an archive itself Sandra something that you probably are very familiar with but it's really interesting to see that in in in the chat. The same of some dear friends. Some dear friends are also a lot of people exchanging views experiences and the materials which is really fascinating and interesting. So I'll give actually the floor to Eugenia who has raised her hand so you can unmute yourself. Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me. Yes, very well. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much for your presentation it was so interesting and so well put it was just really inspiring. And you talked about a lot of things and I was interested about when you said that in the border regime and in the governance of migration there are a lot of actors so private and public actors. And, and you also talked about externalization. I'm referring to the political to migration, European migration policies which in the last years have depended a lot on externalization and externalization has been one of the main objective. So in this regard, we kind of saw different different humanitarianism so on one hand, we have NGOs at sea, which, like you said, carry out political action. And I mean, apart from saving lives they also carry out political action but then on the other hand, we also see a humanitarianism that has been used as a tool for externalization. So in this regard I'm referring for example in the case of Libya. Recently there was a case of NGOs that were found that were accused or at least were found guilty, let's say of walking with the public money in detention centers in Libya. So the question is, what do you think is the difference between humanitarianism at sea and humanitarianism at land, if there is, in the context of externalization. So to what extent it could possibly, one could argue that humanitarianism at land, especially in third countries such as Libya with NGOs operating in detention centers can be seen and can be defined as a tool of European externalization action. I'm sorry, I don't know if it was clear, it's quite complex and so thank you. Sandro, you need to unmute. First of all, stopping death is a radical political action, particularly Europe, not only Europe but particularly Europe. It is an action that has not only to do with what happens in the Mediterranean or along the Balkan route, it is an action that intervenes in the very heart of the European space. It is a kind of impressive work of art by Gary Dider, which is entitled Necropolis, and which shows in a very effective way the spread of the very logic of death across Europe, starting from what happens at the border of Europe. The question of the frontier that has been mentioned by Ruba is very interesting. According to my own experience, let's say the memory of the frontier is very present in particular in Greece. And there are Greek activists who took part in the experience of the frontier and nowadays are engaged in rescue operations. I say that the experience of the frontier is, in fact, part of the heterogeneous kind of archive, upon which search and rescue operations at sea are predicated. So the human could, of course, require much more time to be discussed in depth. But let me say that I am convinced that there is a need to tackle again the question of the human in a situation in which the academic debate in the humanities in the west is characterized by kind of too easy dismissal of the question of the human. I know very well that the post-colonial, the feminist, the anti-racist critique of humanism has shed light of kind of hierarchical construction of the human that was produced by European humanism. But I think that there is a need to reorganize those critiques moving toward a different understanding of the human. And this, in particular, in a situation in which the post-human is shaping so many debates in the humanities today. Rosa Braydotti asked me and Rosa Braydotti, who introduced this notion of the post-human, asked me and Brett to write an entry on Lampedusa, the Italian island, for a glossary of the post-human. And I noted in that entry that it is very common to hear migrants and refugees claiming we are human during demonstrations. And I decided this idea to rethink the human from the point of view of those people whose humanity has been and is contested, emerged precisely from such experiences. I was very happy to see that in particular in the francophone debate between Africans and African descendants, such an idea is quite widespread. And needless to say, to do that implies a move away from any idea of the human as a given essence, in a way such an idea of the human stresses the plasticity of the human. And at this point of view, I think it is possible also to make bridges with some interesting recent developments in science, in neuroscience. But, you know, at the end of the day, what I think we should put an end to the rescue is precisely the materiality of the human, the materiality of passions, the materiality of desire, the materiality of pain and joy. Kind of spinosian angle on the question of the human. Laura was asking about the current situation in Italy. I would say that we are witnessing a U-turn in migration politics in Italy, but definitely there have been some significant improvements with respect to the legislation of the Salvini era. Also, to answer the genius question, there would be the need to take into account another dimension of the problem, which means the European dimension. The way in which the European Union is trying to change its political approach to migration and borders. I know that the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, presented a new pact for migration some weeks ago. This new pact of migration is interesting, at least to me, because it implicitly takes stock of the crisis of European migration and border politics over the last five, six years. And tries to lay the ground for the new start. The new start whose elements were all present in the European border regime before the crisis of 2015. So I'm not kind of endorsing that plan, but I think it is interesting. I repeat, 2015 was a turning point in European migration and border politics. It was a turning point, precisely because of what we call the long summer of migration, the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants were able to effectively challenge the border regime in the Aegean and were able to reach the heart of Europe across the so-called Balkan route. That was a really kind of shock in Europe. And we know that after a couple of months in which a well-timing attitude was prevalent in several countries from Greece to Germany, the reaction of the European Union to that challenge was very weak, very, very weak. What happened? Something quite simple, but important, which means a process of re-nationalization of border control. And it was the combined effect of the long summer of migration and this process of re-nationalization of border control that produced a deep crisis in the European migration border politics. Now the European Commission is trying to lay the ground for a new start. And which is the problem behind the crisis? Well, I want to say it again. I quickly refer to it speaking of the walls and of the book by Wendy Brown. The problem is mobility. The main point for a European border regime has never been simply stopping mobility. It has rather been an attempt to promote processes of selective and differential inclusion of mobile subjects into the world. Violent hierarchical processes, but not simply stopping mobility. So if you read the new pact for migration, the paper that describes the new pact, you find at the end two pages on the need to have again a well-ordered migration. And the phrase, and those two three pages are completely neoliberal in character. The main notion is human capital, race for talent, this kind of stuff. But it was several years that the European Commission did not speak explicitly of the need to restart mobility, legal migration. According to very specific schemes, you know, circular migration, seasonal migration, temporal migration, point systems as in the UK and so on. And this is an important point. I think both to speak about what is happening in Italy, what the Italian government is currently doing, and to speak about processes of externalization. Very, very quickly. Laura was also asking about the influence of Salvini's views in the Italian society nowadays. You know, with the pandemic, the question of security linked with migration has practically disappeared from the public agenda. Salvini tried to make it again central with respect to the pandemic. You know, a few migrants arriving from the Mediterranean tested positive for coronavirus and Salvini started to say, okay, this is the threat. This is the origin of coronavirus. It is migration. I'm over simple fun, of course, this argument. But it didn't work. It didn't work. And more generally also looking at movements, popular movements in the peripheries of the big cities where racism has been a problem in the last years. In the last months was not particularly visible. There were no relevant events in this respect. This does not mean that Salvini's views have disappeared from the Italian public opinion. This is definitely not the case. But in this moment, they are not so visible. They are not at the center of public debate. That being the question of NGOs in the detention centers in Libya, you know, I put it in very general terms, which is the way which we can effectively act in the framework of processes of externalization of border control. It's the usual dilemma, you know, the tension sentence in Libya, you may know that I have a lot of real life. This is something that the UN as I mean, it's not, it's out of question. They are like that. And so you think, what do you do as an NGO if you have the possibility to operate in such a place. On one hand, you are aware of the fact that doing that you legitimate the existence of the place. On the other hand, you are also aware of the fact that with an NGO, with an international NGO, in the detention center, violations of human rights can be at least reduced. And you have to negotiate this kind of dilemmas. For me, the important point is that you never, never become completely complicit with either European or Libyan in this case. You always need a margin of time. Because if you become entirely complicit, then you cannot do anything. Then the governmental logic is the only logic that is added. We have another couple of questions. I also wanted to ask you again to maybe elaborate a little bit upon the kind of relationships that are coming into being in this context of C activism. As you actually told us very, in a very point and way about how activism at C is actually a reverberation or reverberates across, because sort of stretching beyond the sea and feeding into a political struggle in the land. And I couldn't help but think again another connection to think about the one of the books I read recently, which is the last book by Isabel Allende, the last book she wrote. A Long Petal of the Sea where she describes, of course in a fictionalized way but it's quite historically accurate. The rescuing that Pablo Reiruda organizes of communist refugees escaping the Spanish Civil War via refugee camps in France and then she describes sort of the kind of relationships and political activism that starts on the boat on the ship itself and extends and then in Chile under where these refugees find themselves fighting against the dictatorship of Pinochet and then Argentina and so on. So there is another really interesting I think comparison there to be made about the connections that have not not to mention, for example, of course, Paul Gilroy is black Atlantic and so I'm just wondering whether you could tell us a little bit about the kind of the everyday relationships and political ideologies ideas that are shared and shaped in the context of Mediterranean and whether these what you described as the overcoming of the humanitarian reason in the experience of Mediterranean is what is it, what is its flesh and bones, what is it made of, do these relationships continue, what is the movement that is behind the such activism and what what makes us hopeful that it will become or expand into a political movement that contests that is wider than the actual rescuing of migrants and becomes a force in itself. So that's sort of my question that also builds on the previous one. Before I give you the floor maybe I'll, because it might be the case that there is a lot to say so I would like to read out some of the questions that are here in the chat so maybe you can take all of them together. And then the question that was posted about which I think is really interesting by, I don't know whether I pronounce it correctly but Valekos. Valekos. Thank you so much for your presentation I wanted to ask you if migrants are dying as migrants and not as persons, I guess as the final act of a non wanted political action, aren't these deaths reinforcing sovereignty of national states. And that is obviously very pertinent, although it's the one million million dollar question, which is about why is Europe, allowing such suffering to keep these hard borders on. So, maybe you can take these three. Well, it's a question that is about sort of why is this happening why is Europe, continuing these politics of these necropolitics of literally letting people die or killing them through this externalization of borders and private private actors that you described in the editorial agency, which may be connect back to the question of what symptoms of which crisis are these material and immaterial borders. Well, I like very much your reference to the end of the book. And I will be very familiar with the story. Your question about the relations in everyday life, particularly on the ship Mediterranean is again a very interesting question. You know, the first article I wrote on Mediterranean newspaper article to announce the sailing of our boat on October 3, 2018. Concluded with a quotation of C. L. R. James of his book on Melville, where he says that the ship is a miniature of the world we live in. And I glossed that in our case, it is also a miniature of the world we want to build. It is interesting to go back to C. L. R. James, because in that book, he expands on the ship as a miniature of the world, describing in detail the different skills that are needed to let the ship roll and to produce a specific form of cooperation. Of course, we had also to take this aspect into account, take the aspect of skills into account. First of all, the marionne is a tugboat. The tugboat needs seven professional maritime warheads to be allowed to sail. There were only 15 persons allowed on board, and seven of them were the professional maritime warheads. We had to recruit them. In order to recruit them, the union helped us. And the union of seafarers, maritime warheads has a strong internationalist legacy, and this internationalist legacy is still present in the union. This was the first level of cooperation. It was very interesting. But then we had to adapt the boat to search and rescue operations. So the boat was in a shipyard. And you may imagine that shipyards and the maritime war in general is a male-dominated war. Of course, we didn't want to pay too much for the work, and so there were 20, 25 young activists who volunteered to work on board. Most of them were women. Young women, it was summer, it was very hot in Sicily. So you can imagine the gaze of the male warheads in the shipyard. And the kind of difficult situation we were confronted with. But it was, in a way, surprisingly easy to start interesting conversations with those people. And the same was true with the professional maritime warheads. You know, most of them from Sicily, they did not necessarily have a positive view of migrants and refugees crossing the European border in the Mediterranean. All of them said, if somebody is in distress at sea, it is a duty to help him or her. This was, you know, the kind of basic point of departure of our conversations. And again, these conversations were really very productive and interesting and several of them became activists. And Ruba, you know a bit of Sicily, you can imagine the maritime war in Sicily. It is quite surprising that people, you know, 50, 55 years became activists. They became really engaged beyond the salary that we have to pay. But then elaborating again on the question of skills. You need positions. You need medical personnel. You need also people who have a bit of experience in search of rescue operations. You cannot go at sea without any kind of experience because then the risk is very, very high. So we had to work a lot on the composition of the crew, let's say, but it was a nice motley crew. And I mean, it was very interesting to work on this kind of composition. In a way, at the end, the ship became a miniature of the world we want to construct. So the question of the depths and the reinforcement of sovereignty is of course a crucial and also difficult question. You will definitely know that Michel Foucault defined sovereignty through the phrase, let people live, make people die. To be honest, I don't think it is a very accurate description of sovereignty. Nevertheless, this relation between sovereignty and death is an important one. From my point of view, I would say that sovereignty cannot be simply constructed upon death. Because otherwise it becomes a spectral sovereignty. And again, the work by Arkady Tsailes, Necropolis, that I was mentioning before, gives an effective representation of the kind of spectral sovereignty. Representing at the same time sovereignty's subjects as zombies. But it is sure that through an ecopolitical border regime in Europe, the European space is produced every day. And the kind of European space we are currently living in is what nurtures the operations of a necropolitical border regime. So if you look at the question from the angle of life, we have to ask ourselves which kind of life is produced, and how is it possible enabled by the operations of a necropolitical border regime? And this is the reason why, as I was saying before, we have to fight against this border regime, not only at the border, at sea, but also on the land. And also the question why is this happening is, of course, important, but very, very difficult, because it necessarily refers to questions of global justice and injustice of relations between different parts of the world. Again, for me, the main point is the quality of life within the space that should be circumscribed by the borders we are talking about. The question is which are the conditions for different politics, different border politics, different politics of freedom of movement that could transform at the same time the border regime and the political space in Europe. And the last question asked by Ruba, what symptoms of which crisis? I think, to put it quickly, that such a border regime as the one I described is able to produce what my friend Nicolas de Genova calls the spectacle of an integrated space, but at the same time, nowadays, there are other spaces that are traversed by other forms of mobility that tend to escape the very possibility of control by sovereignty. Over the last years, I have been working very much on the topic of logistics. And you might know that there is a kind of lively critical debate on the issue of logistics. What I find particularly interesting in such a debate is the attempt to map a logistical space that does not overlap with the political space of states. The logistical space is the space of capital. If we take seriously this point, it means that sovereignty is not at all able to come to grips with the dynamics, the movements of capital. It seems to me quite profound transformation and crisis of sovereignty. Again, the question of mobility is crucial. There is a lot of stuff, as Deborah Cohen says, but if you look at the way in which migration means human mobility is managed nowadays in many parts of the world, you will find that the logistical rationality plays a more and more important role also in the management of human mobility. Just think of the so-called hot spots that have widespread in southern Europe in countries like Italy, Greece. Hot spot is a logistical notion, of course, but okay, this would be the topic for a different kind of conversation. I wanted to say that on the one hand you have the spectacle of the border, on the other hand, you have a complexity of movements, of dynamics that challenges the grid of sovereignty. Yeah, I was muted, so I was just thanking you very much for the very interesting answers to the questions that obviously would raise other questions, but there is this painful moment where one has to decide that it's time to wrap up to let the speaker go, although you've been very generous by responding to questions for now more than an hour. Yeah, so basically I really wanted to thank you so much Sandra for accepting this invitation for these incredibly powerful insights for the really powerful message that even in a seemingly humanitarian operation there is a political subjectivity emerging that can bring claims to the table and can become a political movement in and of itself. And I think that for me was the most powerful message that I want to take home, especially as we are particularly interested in this question in our teaching these days. There are students where in the last few weeks grappling with the question of the limits of humanitarian practices and what can be rescued within that in a context where the violence of the border regime is so heightened and the rise of the numbers of people dying at the border or across the desert is on the rise in such a clear and horrible way. The question of how to navigate the the impellant need to impede these debts, while not abandoning the political project or the political ideal of transformation of society is I think a crucial one, which I think is very powerfully discussed in your talk and in your article as well. And in your wider work. So I wanted to really thank you very much because you spoke to some very impellant kind of an important questions that we are grappling with in this in these last few weeks and I'm sure I am also interpreting the feelings of all the members of the audience tonight in wanting to thank you and hoping to have you as guests again in the next future. Thank you for those who have asked questions that couldn't be answered, but I'm sure that Sandra is going to be very happy to answer those over email, or maybe even better. Just read the very important powerful work that Sandra has produced over the last years and most of the answers will be in those in those really important works. Thank you very much everyone as announced last week, this is the last of the talks for this term and we are resuming the series next with 2021 next year. So Hasan Hajj's talk will be is postponed to January 21 and we will be more precise about when exactly in the next couple of days. I think that's that's all for for tonight. Thank you Kim for organizing everything and we'll see you again in the new year. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm just going to say that you will receive information about the next seminars, which will take place from January to March as you have registered into this seminar tonight. So if you're interested, just register for the next ones as well. Yeah Kim I don't know whether you wanted to say something. Yeah, we'll be sending around the recordings as per usual but then also be up on the migration and diaspora Facebook group. And then yes so I will be sending a follow up email with the new dates of the next seminar series. So if you don't want to receive any of those emails or you need to do is just email me back and let me know and I can definitely take you off of the mailing list, but it's just helpful to know what other sessions are coming up in the next, in the next term. Brilliant. Thank you Kim. And, and so this is now really the time to say goodbye to everyone and thank you. Good night. Bye.