Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

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It appears that Volodymyr Zelensky is fast catching on to the best way to curry favour with Donald Trump. The Ukrainian president has this week backed the US president’s call for a freezing of the conflict in Ukraine along its current frontlines so that negotiations proper can get underway.

“[Trump] proposed ‘Stay where we stay and begin conversation’,” Zelensky told reporters on October 22. “I think that was a good compromise, but I’m not sure that Putin will support it, and I said it to the president.”

And that’s the key. The Ukrainian president knows that Vladimir Putin won’t support Trump’s latest plan. Putin has said as much. So Zelensky gets to pal up with the US president while reminding him who is to blame. It’s statecraft worthy of Putin, the master manipulator, himself.

At the beginning of the week it appeared that it was Putin that had once again played the US president, phoning Trump to persuade him to ditch his idea of supplying Ukraine with the powerful Tomahawk missiles he’d been promising and instead schedule a get together in Budapest sometime in early November.

Reports from the White House were that Trump and Zelensky subsequently had a stormy meeting, during which the US president is said to have thrown maps of Ukraine around the room and ordered the Ukrainian president to surrender the key Donbas region or be “destroyed” by Russia.

Stefan Wolff, professor of international security at the University of Birmingham has discerned something of a pattern to Trump’s relationship with Putin.

“First he expresses anger and frustration with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin,” Wolff observes. “Then he threatens severe consequences. And finally – usually after some contact with the Russian president – he finds some imaginary silver lining that, in his considered view alone, justifies backing down and essentially dancing to the Russian dictator’s tune again.”

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Read more:
Trump’s heated White House meeting with Zelensky shows how well Putin is playing the US president

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Zelensky has clearly caught onto this, but if anything his technique is more Machiavellian – encouraging Trump in a venture he knows that the Russian president will reject and as a result gaining traction from the occupant of the Oval Office.

It’s already bearing fruit. Just one day after the plan for a Trump-Putin summit in Budapest fell through, the US announced it will impose sanctions on Russia’s biggest oil exporters, Rosneft and Lukoil. It is the first sanctions package imposed by the US since Trump returned to the White House in January.

It’s all very well, writes economist Sergey Popov, of Cardiff University. But will the sanctions really have much effect on Russia’s ability to continue fighting? The country’s economy is now fully geared up for war and Putin seems to be able to replenish the admittedly severe casualties his army is taking in Ukraine.

Russia has also proved itself adept at evading sanctions in the past. Popov believes that the west should have hit Russia with severe sanctions years ago – as early as 2008 when Putin sent his troops into Georgia. Everything since has been too little and too late, primarily coming from the EU and UK. And in fact, European countries still buy a great deal of oil from Russia.

But the US has joined the party. There’s hope, Popov concludes.

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Read more:
Sanctions on Russia have failed to stop the war so far – will Trump’s latest package be any different?

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The cancellation of the Budapest summit, meanwhile, has at least avoided the awkward diplomatic prospect of the Russian leader, the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), having to fly through EU airspace in order to get there.

Not only that, but Hungary – despite having announced its intention to withdraw from the ICC, has not yet completed the process, so would be formally obliged to detain Putin. The chances of that happening were always going to be remote in the extreme, but it raised an awkward situation when it comes to the delicacy of the country’s relationship with its EU partners.

As Marc Roscoe Loustau notes, Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orbán, is known to be an admirer of Putin and has often played a role in blocking or delaying the EU’s efforts to help Ukraine. But the Trump-Putin meet-up might have damaged the relationship beyond repair.

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Read more:
Trump-Putin Budapest summit would have posed threat to international rule of law and Ukraine’s relations with Hungary

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Meanwhile, Russia continues to make small but incremental gains on the battlefield. Some bad weather in Ukraine has played to Russia’s advantage, hampering Kyiv’s ability to exploit its much-vaunted expertise in drone warfare.

Russia has been taking advantage of this to push ahead on the ground, confident that the Ukrainian military’s ability to knock out its heavy armour with swarms of drones is weakened by conditions. As Peter Lee says, once again Russia is using its old ally, winter weather, to steal an advantage in conflict.

Lee, an expert in air power and drone warfare at the University of Portsmouth, explains why drones are so vulnerable to harsh weather conditions.

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Read more:
Russia turns to an old ally in its war against Ukrainian drones: the weather

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An ‘American king’ in Washington

Last weekend an estimated 7 million people took to the streets of US cities to protest Trump’s increasingly autocratic style of government. The “No Kings” marches were, by all accounts, overwhelmingly peaceful and aimed to ram home a point which is sure to resonate with the majority of people, given recent polling that found 85% of Americans reject the idea of being subjects in a monarchy.

Tom Wright of the University of Sussex, who specialises in political rhetoric, says that America was “built on a rejection – the rejection of being ruled by a monarch”. The charge of wanting to set up as a royal ruler has been levelled against various US presidents over 250 years, he says. This includes – remarkably – Abraham Lincoln, whose sweeping powers during the civil war gave rise to concerns he had become too powerful.

Going back further, the very suggestion by Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, that the correct styling for a US president should be “His Highness”, resulted in widespread derision. (Incidentally, he was also given the nickname “His Rotundity”, which was dreadfully unfair given that he was reportedly 6’2″ and weighed just 82 kilos.)

But down the ages, when anyone wants to mock a president they portray them as wearing a crown. It was even done to Barack Obama in 2014 by the American Spectator magazine.

Wright argues that the No Kings protest is something that could unite large sections of the fractured US population: “It has the potential to speak to conservatives alarmed by executive overreach, to progressives wary of authoritarian drift, and to independents nostalgic for civic balance.”

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Read more:
‘No kings’: America’s oldest political slogan is drawing millions out onto the streets

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– ref. Putin, Zelensky and the art of ‘playing’ the US president – https://theconversation.com/putin-zelensky-and-the-art-of-playing-the-us-president-268246

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

The UK government is reportedly considering abandoning its goal of removing fossil fuels from the country’s electricity supply by 2030 in an attempt to keep energy bills down.

This is understandable given that the UK is already one of the most expensive places in Europe to use electricity, something that – despite plenty of investment in relatively cheap renewable energy – is unlikely to change any time soon. In fact, bills remain high even when wind farms are spinning at full capacity.

However, neither a drive to decarbonise the grid – which is needed for other reasons – nor abandoning this target is going to make energy significantly cheaper. The reason for this lies in how electricity markets work, and in the geography and policies that shape the UK’s energy system.

To begin with, wholesale electricity prices are determined in a way that essentially means that everyone has to pay for the most expensive source of electricity used at a given time, which in the UK is mostly gas power plants.

The gas which is burned to power the UK’s lights and kettles has to be liquefied, shipped from the US or Qatar amid global bidding wars, and then converted back into its original state. High gas prices drive high wholesale prices, which directly translate into high electricity bills.

Cheaper renewable energy sources (the cost of producing solar, wind or nuclear electricity is very low) have little effect. This is partly because while the operating cost of renewable electricity is very low, the cost of setting it up is not.

To encourage companies to build new generation capacity, the government must offer them a guaranteed price for the electricity they produce, to compensate for their costs. For a wind farm, this would include money for planning applications, as well as buying and installing turbines and electrical equipment.

Bringing different sources of electricity to consumers also requires expensive infrastructure investment. In the UK for example, grid capacity is not where it needs to be after decades of low investment.

Nearly 40% of the electricity produced by Scottish wind farms has been wasted so far this year, because the grid was not able to move it to other parts of the UK or store it.

Overall then, consumers’ bills will be high, both now and in the future, because of the combined costs of imported gas, infrastructure and the guaranteed prices for producers.

Most calls to decrease these bills effectively come down to suggesting moving some of these costs on to taxpayers – so effectively from one bill to another. This is what happened in France, where “cheap” nuclear electricity is the result of vast amounts of government spending in the past. The French may not see UK-level energy bills, but they do have higher taxes and public debt.

Clouds on the horizon

Despite these challenges, successive UK governments have committed to continuing investment in new technologies, because dependence on imported, polluting and volatile fossil fuels is deemed too risky. Postponing the full transition to renewables, as reported in the Guardian, is effectively a bet that gas prices will decrease in the short term, and that the UK will be able to commission cheaper renewables later on.

But cheaper renewables present their own problems, because they play different roles. Solar and wind are cheaper, but intermittent. Nuclear is the most expensive but works all the time.

This all presents a challenging situation for UK consumers. New nuclear faces very long safety and planning procedures and the national grid needs to be modernised. The decision to cancel an ambitious project to get solar electricity from Morocco may be regretted.

But the main factor is simply geography and timing. Partly due to its location, the UK has become a world leader in wind power, a renewable technology that seems to be taking a less important global role than solar. And while the cost of solar production is decreasing steeply, the learning curve is slower for wind.

And there is no obvious way to increase the number of sunny hours in England. A country like Spain, with both a lot of sun and wind, has a much easier job transitioning to cheap renewables than the UK.

So for all the frustration over high bills, the UK’s options are limited. Geography gives us wind, not sunshine. Policy has delivered world-class renewables, but also a grid struggling to carry their power.

The future will depend on whether new technologies, including cheaper batteries, tidal power and small modular nuclear reactors can fill the gaps left by weather and planning delays.

None of this will be easy or cheap. But the alternative – continued dependence on imported, volatile fossil fuels that make bills hostage to global crises – is worse. UK consumers face a future where electricity remains more expensive than much of Europe, not only because of policy choices, but because it lacks the sunshine that’s driving costs down elsewhere. Betting on emerging technologies is the only way to close that gap.

Renaud Foucart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why electricity costs so much in the UK (it’s not all about the weather) – https://theconversation.com/why-electricity-costs-so-much-in-the-uk-its-not-all-about-the-weather-268110

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Morgane Dujmovic, Chargée de recherche CNRS, Géographe et politiste spécialiste des frontières et migrations, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)

This series of articles draws on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations while onboard the ship.

This is the first of a four-part series. Read part two here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

‘The journey we’ve undertaken’

“We were ready to jump. We were so afraid the Libyans would arrive!” These words came from a young Syrian man, recorded in the data table as part of my year-long study aboard the Ocean Viking search-and-rescue ship, between the summers of 2023 and 2024.

His words did not reflect an isolated incident. Among the 110 rescued people who took part in the onboard survey, nearly a third described a similar fear at the sight of a ship on the horizon. Not fear of imminent shipwreck or drowning, but of being intercepted by Libyan forces and returned to that country.

The words echo those of Shakir, a Bangladeshi man I met on the OV – as the Ocean Viking ship is commonly nicknamed. He told me: “You refreshed our minds with the workshops. Since Libya and the sea, we felt lost. Now, we understand the journey that we’ve undertaken.”

On the OV’s deck and in the containers serving as shelters until disembarkation in Italy, I offered participatory mapping workshops. Around 60 people took part, retracing the steps, places and timelines of their journeys through hand-drawn maps.

I developed this collaborative research method to encourage the expression of knowledge formed through migration. I had not anticipated that these gestures and drawings could also help reclaim points of reference and build valuable understanding about the journey undertaken.

The words also resonate with those I collected after a disembarkation in Ancona. There, I met Koné, an Ivorian man who had been rescued by another NGO vessel a week earlier. He told me:

“The worst is not the sea, believe me, it’s the desert! When you go out on the water, it’s at night and you don’t see what’s around you – it’s only when daylight comes that you see the waves. In the desert, they put 50 people on a pickup truck made for ten: if you fall, you’re left behind. At sea, you die instantly. In the desert, you die a slow death.”

All these words have led me to rethink my assumptions about borders and their dangers. Why take the risk of crossing the sea, with such uncertain outcomes? How is rescue perceived from a boat in distress? What is life like during the days spent onboard an NGO vessel? What hopes are projected on to arriving in Europe, and beyond?

While rescues and shipwrecks often make headlines, the perceptions of the rescued people themselves are rarely studied; they usually reach us filtered through authorities, journalists or NGOs. Collecting these lived experiences and allowing exiled people to tell their own stories – this was the core purpose of my onboard research mission.

An improvised, floating laboratory

Onboard the OV, I occupied the “25th seat”, which is usually reserved for special guests. This was the ship’s first search-and-rescue (SAR) mission to host an external researcher.

For SOS Méditerranée, it was an opportunity to open the NGO’s work up to objective observation by a social scientist and to refine its operational response, drawing on the priorities expressed by rescued individuals. Among the crew, several members suggested this work could enhance their practices and deepen their understanding of the migration journeys they had been witnessing for years.

This was the case for Charlie, one of the NGO veterans who have spent a decade refining their rescue techniques for boats in distress. As SAR team leader, he coordinates the RHIBs (rigid-hulled inflatable boats) launched from the OV to carry out rescues. “This work is really useful because we are constantly looking to improve,” he told me. “What I’m really curious about is what happens before [the rescue]. I talk with them sometimes, but I want to know more about them.”

As for me, while I have worked for 15 years with exiled people, this was the first time I have written about borders while being physically inside a border zone – a feeling of immersion heightened by the horizon of the sea and the confined daily life onboard the OV.

The study unfolded over the course of five rotations, each a six-week mission in the search-and-rescue zone. It was implemented with the support of the entire OV crew: rescue, medical, protection, logistics and communications teams – all of whom were trained in the survey methodology.

The questionnaire emerged from a dialogue between scientific and operational objectives. It was designed around three themes: the sea rescue itself; care onboard the mothership in the post-rescue phase; and migration projects and pathways – from the country of origin to the imagined destinations in Europe. My presence on board allowed me to refine the initial version as I received feedback from both rescued people and crew members.

This was complemented by qualitative methods I have previously used on land, at the French-Italian and French-Spanish borders or in the Balkans, offering people who cross them participatory and emotional mapping tools to narrate their journeys.

To adapt these methods to the sea, I brought on board the OV maps previously drawn by other exiled people along with creative materials, and arranged a dedicated space. In this improvised, floating laboratory, I sought to create a space-time conducive to reflection, allowing silenced knowledge to emerge and be shared with the wider public – for those who wished to.

The invitation to participate was designed to be reassuring and encouraging. The workshop was guided and required no specific language or graphic skills; the aesthetic result mattered less than the interaction experienced during the mapping process.

These scientific and ethical concerns closely aligned with operational priorities – during the days of navigation before disembarking at an Italian port, there is a need to fill the waiting time and lift spirits.

On the OV’s deck, mapping gradually found its place among post-rescue activities, some of which had a psychosocial dimension aimed at restoring the dignity of rescued people and preparing them for the next stage of their journey in Europe. The collective mappings – where texts and drawings appeared – became a shared language and gesture, linking crew members and rescued people who joined the workshop.

Read part two of this four-part series here, and explore the immersive French-language version of the series here.

Morgane Dujmovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Voices from the sea, part one: people rescued in the Mediterranean tell their stories of survival in ‘onboard workshops’ – https://theconversation.com/voices-from-the-sea-part-one-people-rescued-in-the-mediterranean-tell-their-stories-of-survival-in-onboard-workshops-267131

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Morgane Dujmovic, Chargée de recherche CNRS, Géographe et politiste spécialiste des frontières et migrations, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)

This series of articles draws on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations on board the ship.

This is the second of a four-part series – read part one here and part three here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

Fragments of journeys

In all, 21 sketches were created in the workshops I conducted onboard the Ocean Viking. They tell fragments of journeys – routes that were sometimes smooth but often fraught, starting from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

Some journeys were very costly but quick and organised, such as those of some Bangladeshi individuals who had travelled from Dhaka to Zuwara via Dubai in just a few days. Others stretched and intertwined over several years, adapting to encounters, resources, dangers and the multiple wars and violence in those countries crossed.

Among 69 people who responded to the questionnaire, 37.6% had left their country of origin the same year. But 21.7% had been travelling for more than five years – and 11.5% for over ten years. The longest journeys began in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and, in 60% of the cases studied, Syria. As one respondent explained:

I fled the Syrian army. I spent three years in prison and torture, saw terrible scenes. I was 18, I was not old enough to live or see such things.

2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015: the steady spread of departure dates for these journeys highlights the persistence of the conflicts that drive migration around the world. Motivations to continue these long journeys are often personal ambitions for a better life, such as being able to study or help family left behind – as was explained by a young Egyptian man: “I am the only son in my family. My parents are old and they are worried I won’t make it.”

The survey made it possible to outline the types of support received and the dangers encountered along the way. Alongside financial resources from personal savings or family loans, nearly 60% of respondents mentioned the importance of immaterial resources such as “advice from friends”, “psychological support from my husband”, or “information and emotional support from my niece”.

For some, the information received from loved ones seemed crucial at certain stages of the journey: as one respondent explained, it provided moral support to “survive in Libya”. Conversely, another participant confided it had been essential to hide the realities of their daily life in Libya from their family, in order “to hold on”.

Indeed, it was in this North African country that most difficulties were encountered: among the 136 situations of danger described, half were in Libya – compared with 35.3% at sea, 8.8% in the person’s country of origin, and 5.9% at other borders along their migration routes.

‘Inhumane acts’ against people in exile

The atrocities targeting people on the move in Libya are now well-documented. They appear in numerous sources including NGO reports and documentary films, as well as direct testimonies from those affected.

The findings of an independent UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission, published in 2021, qualified these realities as crimes against humanity. The report described “reasonable grounds to believe that acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants form part of a systematic and widespread attack directed at this population, in furtherance of a State policy. As such, these acts may amount to crimes against humanity.”

Through the study on board the OV, participants were able to define, in their own words, the nature of the dangers they had experienced there. Their quotes conveyed subjective, embodied experiences reshaped by emotions – yet they were numerous and convergent enough to reconstruct what has been happening in Libya. The mechanisms of the reported violence were systemic: punitive detention combined with torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, racial and sexual violence endured or witnessed. And these acts were often cumulative:

During my first period in Libya, I was imprisoned six times, tortured, beaten. I can’t even remember the exact details.

The acts of violence involved perpetrators who were, to a greater or lesser degree, institutionalised, including coast guards, prison guards, mafias, militias and employers. They occurred across the entire country (Benghazi, Misrata, Sabratha, Sirte, Tripoli, Zawiya and Zuwara were the most frequently cited cities), but also in the desert and in detention sites at unknown locations. Omnipresent was the prospect of violent and arbitrary detention, which generated a presumption of widespread racism against foreigners:

The racism I experienced as an Egyptian is just unimaginable: kidnapping, theft, imprisonment.

Black people felt particularly targeted by such attacks. Among those who testified, an Ethiopian man trapped for four years in Libya described his constant sense of terror, linked to the repeated racist arrests he had endured:

People get kidnapped in Libya. They catch us and put us in prison because we don’t have papers. Then we have to pay more than US$1,000 to be released. It happened to me four times: two weeks, then a month, then two months, and finally a year. All because of my skin colour – because I am black. It lasted so long that my mind is too stressed from fear.

Such racial discrimination was confirmed by the UN Human Rights Council report in 2021, which found “evidence that most of the migrants detained are sub-Saharan Africans, and that they are treated in a harsher manner than other nationalities, which suggests discriminatory treatment.”

However, the risks of kidnapping and ransom would appear to spare no one on Libyan soil. Koné described them as a generalised and systemic practice:

There’s a business that many Libyans run. They put you in a taxi which sells you to those who put you in prison. Then they demand a ransom from your family to get you out. If the ransom isn’t paid, you’re made to work for free. In the end, in Libya you’re like merchandise: they let you enter the country only to make you work.

Several study participants had been caught in these networks, and their analyses afterwards converged on one point: the Libyan experience amounts to a vast system of exploitation through forced labour.

The facts reported match the International Labour Organization’s definitions of “human trafficking” and “modern slavery”, and were again confirmed by the UN report, which noted: “The only practicable means of escape is by paying large sums of money to the guards or engaging in forced labour or sexual favours inside or outside the detention centre for the benefit of private individuals.”

Ultimately, what Koné remembered most painfully was the feeling of shame:

I pity myself, my story, but I pity the people who went to prison even more. If your family can’t pay the ransom, they must take on debts, so it’s a problem you put on your family. Some people went crazy because of it.

Mapping as testimony

While the accounts of time spent in Libya were always bitter and often horrifying, sometimes beyond words, the study revealed a strong desire to bear witness to what happens there – not only for the general public, but for those who might attempt the same journey:

I want to say that in Libya, there are many women like me who are in a very difficult situation.

I don’t have much to say, except that so many people are suffering even more than I did in Libya.

I don’t advise anyone to come by this route.

To accompany these stories, our mapping workshops aboard the OV served as an invitation – an opportunity to share experiences without having to put traumatic events into words.

At first, the collective mappings organised on the OV’s deck allowed participants to bring out the main themes they wanted to address, according to three sequences: “our past”, “our present”, and “the future we imagine”. My role was to create an appropriate framework for expression, guide participants toward accessible graphic techniques, and enable the sharing of creations through their gradual display on the deck.

Workshops were then offered to small groups or individuals inside containers – spaces that were more conducive to the confidentiality of intimate stories.

One of the tasks suggested by participants was to represent the zones of danger felt throughout the migration journey — where Libya inevitably stood out. From these personal pathways, a second exercise was introduced: describing the experience of danger at the Libyan scale, building on the places already mentioned.

Participants were encouraged to enrich their sketched maps with personal illustrations and narrative legends in their native languages, which were later translated into English.

Ahmed’s experience of Libya

On his map, Ahmed, a Syrian-born participant, depicted “insecurity” in Tripoli, “bad treatment and extortion of money” in Benghazi, and “violation of rights” in Zuwara.

His illustration shows a scene of ordinary, widespread crime: “the Libyan” shooting at “foreigners” evokes the collective violence that Ahmed described as occurring all across Libya. This emotional and participatory method served as a language for sharing stories that were difficult to verbalise, and for mediating them.

Beyond what these drawings facilitated for those sharing their stories, they allowed myself and others observing these violent images to contextualise them within a complex web of factors across time and geographical space.

Now read part three in this four-part series, or explore an immersive French-language version here.

Morgane Dujmovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Voices from the sea, part two: using maps and drawings, survivors share the dangers they faced on their journeys to reach the ship – https://theconversation.com/voices-from-the-sea-part-two-using-maps-and-drawings-survivors-share-the-dangers-they-faced-on-their-journeys-to-reach-the-ship-267135

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Morgane Dujmovic, Chargée de recherche CNRS, Géographe et politiste spécialiste des frontières et migrations, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)

This is the final part of our series drawing on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations on board the ship.

Catch up on parts one, two and three, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

Solidarity at sea and autonomy

While my study onboard the Ocean Viking search-and-rescue ship highlighted civil rescue operations by one of the many NGOs now present in the central Mediterranean, it is important to emphasise the significance of autonomous crossings – and the many rescues and acts of solidarity at sea carried out by exiled people themselves.

For example, Ellie, a member of the SOS Méditerranée search-and-rescue (SAR) team, recounted a rescue during which two vessels in distress assisted each other:

There are people I remember very well. They had left through the Tunisian corridor in a fibreglass boat and came across another boat, wooden, which was adrift. When we arrived, we had this fibreglass boat in distress towing a wooden boat in distress, with 30 or 40 people on board. It was like a rescue of a rescue – quite incredible, this solidarity among the people at sea.

NGO crews thus seek a balance between maintaining the autonomy of exiled people, and the management of large numbers of people onboard boats in sometimes extreme conditions (often referred to as “crowd control”).

Our study on the OV precisely explored the expectations of rescued people in the immediate aftermath of rescue, known as the post-rescue phase. Their opinions made it possible to formulate several operational recommendations for the days of navigation until the rescue ship reaches a safe port in Europe.

One of the most striking findings was the need for direct communication with loved ones – particularly to inform them that the crossing had not ended fatally.

Support and information from family and friends are among the main resources available to people on the move at different stages of migration (mentioned by nearly 60% of respondents). But it is not uncommon for rescued people to lose their phone during the crossing, and even when that’s not the case, connectivity is limited in the middle of the sea.

Psychological and physical impacts

The study also revealed both the physical and psychological impacts of violence in Libya, which affect the mere ability to meet basic needs. Participants mentioned their difficulties eating, as well as finding rest and respite:

In prison we only ate once a day, we could wash only once a month.

My back is very painful, I cannot sleep.

My mind is too stressed and I can’t control it.

These traces are also visible in the countless graffiti drawings left on the Ocean Viking’s walls over the years.

In this chain of violent borders, the stay on the rescue ship represented a breathing space, judging by the open-ended comments offered at the end of our questionnaire:

We are treated like your brothers here; it’s so different from Libya!

I don’t have much to say, but I will never forget what happened here.

In the middle of the sea, when the number of people on board allowed it, we would sometimes witness moments of regained intimacy – or, conversely, collective jubilation, most notably when a port assigned by Italy as a landing point for the survivors was announced.

As for the mapping workshops and the questionnaire study I conducted, participant feedback suggests that they were able to engage in a form of empowerment – or at least, in the power to reflect and to narrate their experiences.

It’s the first time in a very long time that someone asked me what I think and what my opinions are about things.“

A sense of regained control over their actions emerged as the prospect of disembarkation and a new life in Europe drew near. As we sailed towards the Italian coast, the drawings and comments gathered from survivors on our collective exercises illustrated their increasingly concrete dreams and imaginings:

I hope to quickly get a residence permit in Germany.

I’m thinking to give back the money I borrowed to its owners, learn the language fast, and see my family safe and healthy.

A new form of violence

One can imagine the emotion of setting foot for the first time in a European port for those who finally make it. But what is less often imagined is that this step can represent a new form of violence. In Ancona, for example, Koné recalled the impression left by the heavy deployment of forces when they arrived:

When I got off the boat, I saw so many sirens that I thought: ‘Are there only ambulances in Italy?’

The welcome committee for people disembarking in Italy after being rescued at sea is composed of national security authorities (police and the carabinieri), Italian health services, the Italian Red Cross and Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – whose intervention is systematically oriented around a single question: “Who was driving the boat from Libya?” In other words: “Who could be prosecuted for facilitating unauthorised entry into the territory of the European Union?”

At the level of international search-and-rescue (SAR) conventions, the rescue officially ends once people are disembarked in a “place of safety”. For the SOS Méditerranée crews, it is customary to consider that the work stops there – even if human relationships sometimes continue afterwards.

For civilian search-and-rescue NGOs, disembarkation is quickly followed by many administrative procedures and interrogations that they must undergo to avoid the risk of vessel detention, which would prevent a ship going back out into the operational area to continue its rescue missions.

After several days aboard the Ocean Viking together, the goodbyes are tinged with both joy and anxiety, as we know that for each of these individuals, a new journey of struggle is beginning.

In this fleeting moment of grace, when dreams touch the ground, I am struck by the profound power of silence.

The silence of the sea that swallowed so many bodies.

The focused silence of rescue teams when RHIBs race toward distressed boats.

The stunned silence aboard the same RHIBs bringing people back to the mothership, still dazed from escaping shipwreck.

The exhausted silence of survivors regaining their strength; the palpable silence as I listen to their stories on the deck of the Ocean Viking.

The tentative silence as the Italian coast appears for the first time.

The silence of European institutions, which conceal and obstruct the efforts to save lives at sea – and on land, by supporting interceptions and forced returns to Libya.

And finally, my own silence, faced with the awareness of my powerlessness toward the exiled people I met at sea:

I know you’re writing – it’s good, people will see it. But the story will go on.

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Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks go to everyone who participated in this onboard study and shared their stories, especially Koné and Shakir, as well as to all the teams at sea and on land who supported my long-term research, in particular Carla Melki and Amine Boudani. I also warmly thank Rafik Arfaoui and Elizabeth Hessek for their assistance with translations from Arabic and into English.

Note: some real first names were used in these articles and others were changed , according to the preferences of the people concerned.

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You can also read this entire series in French

Interactive version: En pleine mer: Un an sur l’Ocean Viking

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (1) : paroles de personnes exilées secourues en mer

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (2) : avant la mer, les périls des parcours

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (3) : échapper à la Libye, survivre à la mer

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (4) : quand les rêves touchent terre

Morgane Dujmovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Voices from the sea, part four: when dreams reach land, what’s next? – https://theconversation.com/voices-from-the-sea-part-four-when-dreams-reach-land-whats-next-267139