Conclusion

Summary

In what ways do different pro-migration activist interventions contribute to the formation of alternative horizons of solidarity and hope in the midst of a deadly ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’? And how effective is an appeal to human dignity in challenging the dynamics of power through which death and vulnerability have become regular and accepted? This book has set out to address these questions by undertaking a sustained analysis of the relationship between practices of governing migration (Part I) and activist interventions that seek to contest them (Part II). It has explored diverse narratives and framings of the so-called crisis of 2015–2016 (Chapter 1), various EU policy mechanisms and dynamics of power and violence that constitute contemporary practices of governing migration (Chapter 2), as well as different materialdiscursive processes of dehumanisation that create the conditions for the pervasive deaths and vulnerabilities of people on the move (Chapter 3). Moreover, by considering how the normalisation of death and vulnerability has been contested through diverse activist interventions, the book has examined attempts to facilitate safe passage and a welcoming arrival (Chapter 4), to enact effective rescues and document rights abuses at sea (Chapter 5) and to mark the graves of the dead in terms that account for the lives of those lost (Chapter 6). As well as exploring the ambiguities of different responses to unruly forms of migration that are unauthorised by states, I have also advanced an analysis of the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ as reflective of a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European form of humanism. In so doing, I have presented a series of reflections on crisis, humanism and dignity, with a view to exposing alternative horizons of solidarity and hope that go beyond a divisive politics that is embedded in a postcolonial present and orientated towards the security of home.