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The Gates of the Sea
Migration and Rescue at the Edges of Europe
The Gates of the Sea explores how the Spanish government is reclaiming search and rescue assets to keep migrants out of its territory — and how rescue workers resist becoming border enforcers.
About the book
The Gates of the Sea examines the paradoxes of maritime search and rescue at Europe’s frontier. Focusing on Spain, Luna Vives explores how governments have redefined maritime rescue systems towards border control. Unlike other European countries, Spain chose not to assign this responsibility to a militarized state security force, but to a civilian agency whose workers often liken themselves to firefighters of the sea: they are dedicated to saving lives, not enforcing borders. Caught between their duty to protect life at sea and government efforts to transform them into border enforcers, rescuers have pushed back, primarily through their anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT. Committed to border abolition and international solidarity, the rescuers’ struggle positions them within a global movement of resistance to the politics of organized abandonment along the external borders of the European Union. Vives’ revelatory, deeply researched and accessible book grapples with both state methods of control and containment and, crucially, ways in which solidarity activism can thrive in unexpected places.
Activism & Social Movements International Politics Labour & Unions Sociology
What people are saying
Nandita Sharma, professor and graduate chair, University of Hawai’i“Nation-states have pushed the violence of their borders into the sea, causing a tidal wave of misery and deaths. It is poor, negatively racialized people who are increasingly left to die. This study of the small Spanish maritime agency, SASEMAR highlights the efforts of its workers and their anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT, to keep their mandate of universal rescue. Not all people have abandoned ‘migrants’ to the sea.”
Jamie Liew, professor, University of Ottawa“In this meticulously researched account, The Gates of the Sea explores the tensions between militarized border control and a universal approach to search and rescue at sea. Providing a historical and socio-legal context, the book traces the colonial, labour, class and economic forces that shape ideas that the sea can and should be conquered. Luna Vives provides us with case studies that clash, leaving us to ask who deserves the ethical and moral imperative to be saved in the open waters. An important work to read in our times to understand how the EU and especially Spain treats movement of people, whether migrants, tourists or citizens, differently, and how borders are a true fiction.”
Maurice Stierl, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University“The Gates of the Sea is a truly remarkable book. With expertise, experience, and skill, Luna Vives weaves together her impressive findings and offers a serious advance in state-of-the-art research regarding the evolution of the Spanish Search and Rescue system in the context of sea migration.”
Petra Molnar, Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab, York University and author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence“A book such as this will flourish in the world. Vives’ writing style bridges deep research and theoretical underpinnings with real world examples.”
Sebastian Cobarrubias Baglietto, Universidad de Zaragoza“The Gates of the Sea inserts the story of rescue not only into that of borders, migration and practices of externalization, but also the parallel and intersecting story of the geopolitics around oceans, and the history of both rescue as well as international law in that environment.”
Author
Contents
- Chapter 1: Sea Migration and the Politics of a Manufactured Crisis
- Chapter 2: Defining Safety, Jurisdiction, and Responsibility at Sea throughout the 20th Century
- Chapter 3: The Origins of Salvamento Marítimo
- Chapter 4: The Western Mediterranean
- Chapter 5: The Canary Islands
- Chapter 6: The Rescuers’ Union: Resistance from Within
- Chapter 7: Epilogue: Death, Resistance, Hope
