MARESIA · Maritime Rescue. International Norm Contestation and Seaborne Migration to Italy and Australia
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2024-08-30
- EU contribution
- €257,210
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Maritime Rescue. International Norm Contestation and Seaborne Migration to Italy and Australia
Between 2013 and 2020, irregular maritime migration caused at least 17,000 deaths in the Southern Mediterranean basin alone. While crucial to save the lives of those in distress at sea, maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) operations have been increasingly criticized. Despite being signatories to all relevant international conventions and facing mixed flows comprising of both economic migrants and refugees, Australia and Italy have developed different (although eventually converging) approaches to irregular maritime migration. Not only governments, but also different seafaring organizations have understood and complied with the duty to rescue in different although eventually converging ways. What explains variations in rescue policies across countries, over time, and between maritime actors? By conceptualizing maritime rescue as a contested international norm, this project has offered novel insights into this puzzle. Specifically, the project highlights the increasing salience of discourses problematizing maritime rescue as a pull factor of migration inadvertently causing more deaths and hindering border control by facilitating human smuggling. These discourses, advocated by a broad coalition of actors, have shaped an increasingly narrow understanding of the maritime rescue norm, restricted to the obligation to assist sinking boats and disembarking their passengers to the closest port.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Between 2013 and August 2019, seaborne migration caused over 15,000 casualties in the Southern Mediterranean alone. While crucial to save lives, maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) operations have been increasingly criticized as a hindrance to effective border control. Despite being signatories to all relevant international conventions and facing mixed migratory flows comprising of both economic migrants and refugees, Australia and Italy have developed different (although eventually converging) approaches to seaborne migration. Not only governments, but also different seafaring organizations have understood the duty to rescue in different ways. What explains variations in rescue policies across countries, over time, and between maritime actors?Drawing on constructivist international relations scholarship, this project conceptualizes maritime rescue as a contested international norm, investigating the role of norm contestation processes in informing varying interpretations of the duty to rescue. To this end, I will conduct a structured-focused comparison of maritime rescue offshore Australia and Italy between 1990 and 2020. Specifically, the project consists in two interrelated tasks. First, I will systematically compare how the Italian and Australian governments and publics have understood the moral and legal obligation to conduct SAR. Second, I will examine public and private organizations’ internalization of the rescue norm by examining the discourses and behaviour of navies, border and coast guards, shipping companies, and NGOs operating in Australia and Italy’s maritime regions. In previous years, I conducted fieldwork aboard NGO ships and published extensively on SAR in the Mediterranean. By funding the first comparative, book-lengthy study of the maritime rescue norm and its ongoing contestation, a Marie Curie Global Fellowship would be crucial for my career development, allowing me to become a leading scholar of maritime security and international norms.
Original text from CORDIS.
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union