Of Ghosts and Grief Work

The relationship between solidarity, mourning, and alterity is complicated and messy. In this first part, I introduce Derrida’s notion of the »im-possible«, under which he places »all figures […] of what must remain (in a nonnegative fashion) foreign to the order of my possibilities« (2005: 84). Afterward, I show how Derrida’s method of deconstruction helps to unpack the relationship between solidarity and mourning, aiming to democratize democracy to undermine the hierarchies of equality and freedom. Referring to the EUropean SAR discourse and mourning practices in the Mediterranean, I discuss how solidarity becomes possible under »radical alterity« (Derrida 1994: 94).

Derrida’s Understanding of the Im-Possible

With the notion of im-possibility, Derrida captures how certain phenomena, events, or practices become part of social reality, although they are perceived as impossible under the (violent) conditions of normalization, for instance, because they are taboo or deemed improper. With an »impossible possibility«, Derrida outlines the ambivalence between a society’s normative orders on one side and the social reality in which ›impossible‹ events happen and materialize in deeds, political acts, and performances on the other (ibid.: 143). »One must constantly remember that the impossible … is, alas, always possible«, Derrida (ibid.: 220) concludes.

To unearth the inner workings of this paradox, Derrida uses deconstruction as a method to identify and scrutinize different layers of meaning within speech (acts), language, and power (re-)production. It can also be described as hauntology. In French, hauntologie and ontologie sound the same. Phonetically, one cannot differentiate between the two. Derrida uses this phonetic relation to show how a social ontology is haunted by other phenomena (past, present, and future) because it is never pure: its timeline is never linear or coherent but is ›contaminated‹ with difference. The im-possible is such a contaminated phenomenon. With the im-possible, Derrida commits to »to the irreducible modality« of im-possibility, which demands »a new thinking of the possible« (Athanasiou 2021: n.p.; cf. Derrida 2004: 326ff.). If we think about impossibility in a different way, we must alter our views on possibility at the same time. Hence, im-possibility.

I understand the solidarity practices of civil SAR in the Mediterranean as a phenomenon of im-possible solidarity. This solidarity keeps difference intact. It does not seek to get rid of it. Instead, it emphasizes a practice that values difference (Kerner 2018; Hark/Villa 2020), renders solidarity unconditional (Susemichel/Kastner 2021), and remains skeptical of empathy as the ground for solidarity (D’Souza 2024). It describes a solidarity that remains, as D’Souza writes, »imperfect« because we do not know, understand, or comprehend the other to develop a solidaristic relationship with them. Im-possible solidarity thus values the other’s »right to opacity« (Glissant 1997: 189–193; D’Souza 2024: 52–67) and asks a question that D’Souza summarizes as follows:

»What if we imagined a political solidarity that was not based on empathy but on its opposite—on imperfect solidarity; a solidarity defined by its respect for opacity? Are there ways to sit with the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms? Are there ways to understand the world outside of the binaries of self and other, instead embracing the fundamental interconnectedness of human (and, in this time of environmental collapse, nonhuman) life? What would it mean if our politics are based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness to care for others just by virtue of their being beings?« (D’Souza 2024: 81)

I understand the politics and practices of civil SAR in the Mediterranean as an act of im-possible solidarity that respects the other’s right to opacity, that sits with the unknowability of those rescued somewhere on the high seas. It is a solidarity that does not ask »Who are you?« but instead, »How can I support you?« and »What do you need?«. In that sense, it is unconditional and detached from shared experiences or mutual comprehension.

Besides the practice of SAR, I will also look into the discourse on civil SAR, especially the discourse fragments that support it (Laube/Ullrich 2023). Contrastingly, I will discuss one episode of far-right activism’s interpellations of solidarity as similarity that forecloses the possibility of solidarity with othered populations. Simultaneously, an understanding of solidarity in difference enables solidaristic bonds beyond binaries, such as self and other. Derrida’s hauntology of the im-possible helps me carve out the work of solidarity within the discourse on and the practice of civil SAR in the Mediterranean. The im-possible illustrates society’s spectrality (Derrida 1994). It dwells in the socio-political and haunts its infrastructures like pasts shape the present. Therefore, I understand the im-possible as something perceived as impossible under conditions of normalization, for instance, because it is inconceivable, but that repeatedly takes a ghostly shape in social reality. Hence, the mechanism of normalization is called into question. Combining Derrida’s notion of the im-possible with the lens of solidarity gives leeway to thinking through acts of im-possible solidarity as a radical democratic praxis in difference. It is a solidarity perceived as improbable, improper, or inappropriate within the normalized settings of society. It must not be and yet is. In that sense, the practice of civil SAR in the Mediterranean can be understood as a practice of im-possible solidarity.

Mourning Otherwise: Democracy and Deconstruction

Derrida connects the im-possible to a democratic project that seeks to widen and deepen equalities, justices, and freedoms. Derrida’s democratic project, however, is a negative one: he does not formulate ideals, goals, or aims. Instead, he pushes for a political critique that seeks to unpack the tacit power relations, hidden mechanisms of domination, and historical acts of violence. Derrida ties democracy and deconstruction together. There is »no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction« (Derrida 2004: 335). Deconstruction equals democracy insofar as it questions democracy’s normative claims. Through iterative processes, deconstruction moves democracy towards becoming more democratic. Derrida insists that democracy can only ever become more democratic, not be democratic. A democracy that becomes identical to itself relates democracy to an identitarian ontology that rids democracy of difference. All space for alterity is eliminated democracy withers when it is imagined and practiced as identitarian.

For Derrida, democracy, contrastingly, is defined by difference and its refusal to adhere to metaphysical ontologies. Derrida summarizes this critique of democracy in the name of democratization in his notion of »to come« (ibid.: 325f.), which outlines democracy as a project for more democratic futures. The »expression ›democracy to come‹ does indeed translate or call for a militant and interminable political critique« (ibid.: 331). A democracy to come is »linked to spectrality, the figure of the event, the unanticipated coming of the other, and the notion of l’a-venir which denotes the coming of the impossible as a condition of the possible« (Athanasiou 2021: n.p.). In this sense, SAR activists practice im-possible solidarity and a democracy to come. They fight for continuous democratization of democracy, conjuring solidarity in im-possible places. Their democracy is not about parliaments and election campaigns but a space of critique and a practice of resistance that undermines the routinized letting die of the Mediterranean border regime (Gebhardt 2020). Im-possible solidarity keeps democracy in the making.

Moreover, the im-possible separates autonomy from democracy (Derrida 2004: 331). Scrutinizing the androcentric idea of an autonomously operating ›I can,‹ im-possibility emphasizes a »coming of the other, of a heteronomy, of a law come from the other, of responsibility and decision of the other—of the other in me« (ibid.: 329). Derrida does not think of the production of otherness as an external process to identify the boundaries and borders between ›us‹ and ›them‹. Instead, it occurs within the (collective) self that is, therefore, ›contaminated‹ with alterity. We do not externalize the other but come from (within) the other. Borders are drawn not so much between a clear-cut internal and a clear-cut external but within the (collective) self.

This reminds me of Étienne Balibar’s take on borders. In his iconic essay »What is a Border?« from 1993, he argues:

»But there can be no doubt that, in national normality, the normality of the national citizen-subject, such an appropriation is also internalized by individuals, as it becomes a condition, an essential reference of their collective, communal sense, and hence, once again, of their identity (or of the order, the ranking, by which they arrange their multiple identities). As a consequence, borders cease to be purely external realities. They become also—and perhaps predominantly—what Fichte, […] magnificently termed ›inner borders‹ [innere Grenzen]; that is to say—as indeed he says himself—invisible borders, situated everywhere and nowhere« (Balibar 2002 [1993]: 78; emphasis in original).

Balibar echoes Derrida’s understanding of the production of otherness in the study of borders. Border work, such as the production of the other, is done by invisible mechanisms that delocalize ›the border‹ and disseminate its workings everywhere, and thus nowhere. This border work is ghostly. Therefore, a hauntological approach to studying borders and democracy deconstructs the border phantasms of unity, identity, and purity that, for instance, haunt the Mediterranean border regime.

To show how the im-possible works in social relations, we can turn with Derrida to mourning practices and grief work.1 We do »the work of mourning« in the face of impossibility, Derrida (1994: 113) writes, because we never truly know the ones we mourn, even if they were close to us. In civil SAR, mourning practices are pivotal to creating a space of collectivity and shared loss that brings together those who lost someone, could not rescue someone, and those who died. We can find these mourning practices on SAR NGO rescue ships (Spasiano 2025; see Sarah Spasiano in this issue) and in activist networks, acknowledging that we can mourn those we lost, even if we do not know them.

In the practices of SAR activism, mourning is detached from traditional understandings that narrow the circle of »grievability« (Butler 2009: xix; Butler 2004: 34) to family. For instance, on 9 February 2021, Alarm Phone2 expressed »solidarity« with the families of the 91 people missing at sea on 9 February 2020 (2021). Exactly one year after they were reported missing, you can read what happened on 9 February 2020:

»[At] 04.09 AM, the Alarm Phone was called by a group of 91 people who were in distress on a deflating black rubber boat off Garabulli, Libya. They were in panic, but they managed to clearly communicate their GPS coordinates, which Alarm Phone immediately relayed to the Italian and Maltese authorities, as well as to the so-called Libyan coastguard. At 05.35h CET, the people in distress called the Alarm Phone for the last time. Contact with the boat was lost ever since« (Alarm Phone 2021).

Alarm Phone’s report is part of the 2021 CommemorAction, transnationally organized events that draw attention to the Mediterranean »deathscape« (de Genova 2017: 1). What we know about 9 February 2020 is that Alarm Phone lost contact. Neither FRONTEX, the Maltese or Italian authorities, nor the so-called Libyan coast guard initiated SAR operations. The people on the boat remain missing and were not included in official statistics. Their double invisibility became haunting when a network of activists, families, friends, and support structures, together with Alarm Phone, rejected »the logic of reducing Black/Migrant people, their lives and their deaths to numbers and statistics« (2021). To Alarm Phone, this

»racist dehumanization does not account for the loss of Abdul, of Aboubacar, of Adnan, of Afdel. It does not account for the pain inflicted on their mothers, their sisters, or their friends. It does not account for the White [sic] supremacist violence, by action and by inaction, historical and present, that keeps murdering Black/Migrant lives or lets them die at sea« (ibid.).

The missing names were reconstructed, and 62 names and photos were eventually published under #saytheirnames (Alarm Phone 2020). In addition, the 2021 CommemorAction included a memorial event in Al Fasher/Darfur and a protest against the »invisibilisation of the disappearance of loved ones« (ibid.). With CommemorAction, a transnational, Euro-African solidarity unfolds that does not accept the routinized letting die of People on the Move in the Mediterranean:

»In solidarity with them, and in solidarity with the friends and families of all people who went missing or were killed by the violent European border regime, today we gather in several cities to demand answers. Together with them, we say their names out loud to remind Europe that each Black Life matters, that we will not forget, and that we will keep fighting against this racist border regime. Together with them, we demand an immediate end to racist violence, to the killing of people on the move, and their forced disappearance. Today and every day, we fight to hold Europe accountable for its racist violence, and we fight for freedom of movement for all. Stop deaths at sea, now!« (Alarm Phone 2021)

The examples of Alarm Phone and the 2021 CommemorAction represent a politics of mourning we find in no-border and refugee activism, which refers to an understanding of solidarity that I describe as »im-possible« (Derrida 2004: 329). I argue that in the case of civil SAR, the question of the other translates into a political praxis in which solidarity appears in im-possible spaces: between the descendants of the colonized and the colonizers, between the white beneficiaries of the EUropean necropolitical border regime and the Black and Brown others, and between the living and the dead.

Im-possible solidarity moves against EUropean necropolitics. When we look at grief work, such as CommemorAction, we witness how necropolitical ideologies are challenged in mourning otherwise (Délano Alonso/Nienass 2016; Athanasiou 2017; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2023). However, historically and theoretically, notions of similarity and sovereignty haunt solidarity to intertwine nationalism, racism, and colonialism. Accordingly, necropolitical ideologies not only justify the deportation of the other. Instead, they hold »the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not« (Mbembe 2019: 80). If mourning remains bound to similarity, familiarity, and proximity, the space of the im-possible closes. Contrastingly, CommemorAction mourns otherwise because those who are mourned are not necessarily familiar to us: many of their names remain unknown or represent a chiffre for so many who drowned in the Mediterranean and have never been found, identified, or known. This grief work in difference comes from, not for, the other. It sits with the other, who remains unknown. Even when mourning in solidarity seems impossible, »grief activism« (Stierl 2023: 174), like CommemorAction, shows us that mourning remains possible. Derrida writes:

»That the without-ground of this impossible can nevertheless take place is on the contrary the ruin or the absolute ashes, the threat that must be thought, and, why not, exorcised yet again. To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome« (Derrida 1994: 220; emphasis in original).

By mourning those who drowned or went missing at sea, CommemorAction makes us experience our radical relationality with the other. It presents those killed or made missing by the Mediterranean »border death regime« (Cuttitta/Häberlein/Pallister-Wilkins 2020) as those who return to us, not as revenants but as arrivants, in Derrida’s words. We mourn not to chase away the ghosts but to acknowledge everybody’s right to leave, come back, appear, and count. With mourning practices such as CommemorAction, those who died in the Mediterranean eventually arrive in Europe. These dead take on a spectral agency and remind us of the im-possibility of feeling grief, loss, and pain for someone we did not know

The Mediterranean deathscape, as a result of EUropean border and migration policies, produces ghosts that haunt EUrope. These ghosts conjure EUrope’s colonial past to shape its present and futures. They open up spaces for mourning otherwise: for a resistance in mourning that does not accept the daily routine of letting die. In the face of those ghosts, the people of EUrope are confronted with the knowledge and feeling that letting the other die is devastating not only to ›them‹ but to ›us‹, too. Eventually, these ghosts subvert what we understand as ›ours‹ and ›theirs‹. Without knowing those who died, without being close to them or related to them, the sea rescuers, civil society actors, and activists understand that solidarity arrives from the other. Im-possible solidarity is thus neither paternalistic aid nor maternalistic sorrow for the other. It is in being made »undone« (Butler 2004: 23) by the other that im-possible solidarity emerges from the depths of the sea.

Against Identitarian Notions of Solidarity

Deconstruction is a negative method of political critique that seeks to unearth inherent inequalities and injustices in societies. This negativity scrutinizes orders of meaning-making entrenched in speech (acts), rhetoric, and tropes. Deconstruction analyzes iterations, such as those of solidarity, to unearth their layers of meaning, norms, and mechanisms of power that operate within these iterations. In this chapter, I will focus on iterations of solidarity that I describe as solidarity within the confines of possibility.

The first iteration is theoretical. Theodore W. Adorno (2005 [1951]) offers an iteration of solidarity that draws on the Marxist tradition of brotherhood. He outlines solidarity as a phenomenon that emerges when people [meaning: men] come together as equals. It tames individual interests, transforms them into a collective effort, and thus strengthens social cohesion. This androcentric iteration of solidarity operates on exclusions primarily based on gender, but we might also find traces of racism and ableism. While Adorno supports emancipatory struggles of the oppressed (ibid.: 51f.), he reproduces the historical bonds between solidarity and brotherhood—reminding us of the French Revolution’s fraternité, where we neither find (Black and Brown) sisters nor queer siblings.

While Adorno’s approach remains andro- and eurocentric, he also foreshadows a political critique that Derrida will transmute into the method of deconstruction. In the aftermath of national socialism and fascism, Adorno (ibid.) understands that solidarity might become »sick« when the bonds that bind us become totalitarian or, in the words of Derrida, identitarian. Adorno also connects solidarity to the abundance of left struggles for freedom and equality, but remains cautious regarding the (nationalist) romantics of its unifying powers.

Solidarity’s ambivalent histories and iterations become graspable with an example from the current EUropean migration and asylum regime. Commenting on the Russian war against Ukraine, sociologist Steffen Mau (Koester 2022) describes how sickened solidarity works. He explains the enormous solidarity of European governments and civil societies with (mostly female, young, or elderly) Ukrainian refugees by referring to the common bond of whiteness. Trying to pass the EU’s Eastern external borders, Black Ukrainians and Ukrainian refugees of color, especially men, were not acknowledged as ›real‹ Ukrainians and thus excluded from the border-opening welcome of Europe. Contrastingly, the predominantly white societies of EUrope welcomed the mainly white and female Ukrainians (often young, mothers, or elderly) as refugees from a war-torn country where ›our brothers‹ fight for ›our‹ freedom and liberal lifestyle. This ›our‹ connects to a shared Europeanness as whiteness. Through the example of the Ukrainian refugees, we learn about the racialized and gendered undertone of solidarity. When solidarity translates into the EU’s border regime, racist, colonial, and ethno-sexist tropes rework the border space: white people, especially (suffering) »womenandchildren« (Enloe 2014 [1989]: 25), cross border spaces more easily than Black men and (male) People of Color—if they maneuver through them staying alive at all. If you look and read through the Black faces and the male names of the missing and dead mourned in the 2021 CommemorAction, the »ethno-sexist« (Dietze 2016) border regime and its confined solidarity lie blatantly in front of us.

Part of this border regime are far-right iterations of solidarity. They deploy semantics of solidarity to bind together those who ›naturally‹ belong. When we look into the discourse and practice of civil SAR, we encounter an episode of fascist letting die covered as a sea rescue. In 2017, the far-right extremists of Generation Identity (GI)3 chartered the ship C-Star to police the Mediterranean and stop alleged human trafficking by SAR NGOs. GI also wished to support the allegedly overwhelmed coast guards of Italy, Malta, and Libya (!). It thus turned Search and Rescue into Find and Deport with the proclaimed goal of ›saving Europe‹ and stopping ›illegal immigration‹. The C-Star’s Find and Deport mission was part of the GI’s Aktion Solidarität that emphasized »autarky«, »sovereignty«, and the infamous »remigration«. However, administrative and technical problems, along with a lack of expertise and funds, dominated the C-Star’s first and only operation. For instance, Italian and Maltese ports refused entry because the ship’s Swedish owner could not guarantee payment of docking fees. The Sri Lankan sailors, who had previously worked on the ship and had been hired to bolster the GI crew’s limited nautical expertise, did not have valid visas, and GI was accused of aiding illegal migration (Cusumano 2022).

In its fascist and identitarian iteration of solidarity, GI combines a nationalist phantasm of sovereignty, a masculinist vision of autonomy, and racist notions of a white Europe. With Derrida in mind, the solidarity politics of GI can be denoted as an identitarian metaphysics that works against more democratic futures.

Like other movements of the far-right, GI camouflages its racist and ethno-nationalist agenda under the euphemistic notion of ethnopluralism (see Laila Riedmiller in this issue). It suggests that populations inhabit separate spaces where they develop their full potential under optimal conditions. The solidarity of the far-right separates autochthonous peoples and ethnicities to define a contained space where they belong. Each population is assigned ›their‹ proper place, which, in turn, stays separated from others. While biological and racial differences between imagined groups are emphasized in ethno-pluralism, each group is considered homogeneous, unitarian, and identitarian. Far-right actors, such as GI, connect their ethno-pluralist ideology with a racialized understanding of democracy. In their vision of a racially ›pure‹ democracy, they seek to protect ›democracy‹ from heterogeneity and »differance« (Derrida 1994: 37, emphasis in original). Hence, the violent deportation of individuals and groups, who putatively do not belong, is justified in the name of democracy’s re-purification. If alterity, according to the idea of a ›voelkisch‹(ethnic)-essentialist solidarity, returns to its place, the putative danger the others pose is averted. Brought back to ›their‹ place, ethno-pluralism claims, the others lose their menacing proximity. In this racialized and segregationist notion of ›difference‹, solidarity conjures similarity.

Because of their multidimensional notions of closure—state-centric, culturalized, gendered, racialized—I describe the far-right’s iteration of solidarity as hermetic. Hermetic solidarity tries to define a clear line that separates ›us‹ from ›them‹. The restricted vision of hermetic solidarity is lethal because it reinforces the »genocidal binary of human/Other« (Emejulu 2022: 69), where those who are othered are simultaneously removed from the frames of humanity. The most important motor of this binary is whiteness, which is equated with humanity and associated with superiority and masculinity (ibid.). Hermetic solidarity thus annihilates the others’ »solidarizability« (Gebhardt 2023) because they are not considered human. Solidarizability refers to Judith Butler’s work on the politics of mourning, where they introduce the concept of »grievability« (2004: 34, 2009: xix). It describes how othered populations are mourned less (publicly) or not at all. Hermetic solidarity rests on the historical and ongoing dehumanization of othered people who are deemed threats from without. Regarding the drowned and missing persons in the Mediterranean, not only grievability comes to the fore but also solidarizability, i.e., how racialized-gendered populations are less worthy of European aid. We thus understand how empathy cannot serve as a basis for im-possible solidarities because if people are extinguished from the frames of humanity, so is the capacity to acknowledge them as someone who ›deserves‹ it. The whole spiel of deservedness and empathy is deeply embedded in the racial regimes of borders and mobilities.

Besides the threats from outside, GI and other far-right actors sketch a scenario in which the threat emanates from within. Dangers, according to hermetic solidarity, also lie dormant in the nation. Balibar’s inner borders cited above are at work when authoritarian, fascist, and far-right actors outline threats from within to target grief activism and migrant struggles for equality and freedom (Stierl 2023). The far-right discourse blathers how activists and those who embrace heterogeneity and difference destabilize their ›own‹ societies. SAR activists and sea rescuers are among the groups targeted by far-right hate speech. After all, they pose a putative internal threat because they bring the others who dared to cross ›our sea‹ to ›our‹ shores (Albahari 2016; Danewid 2017).4 Activists who cannot ignore Europe’s »death by policy« (UNITED n.d.) are demonized as traitors of their ›own‹ in the far-right’s hermetic solidarity.

While demonization might be the tool of the far-right, European countries, their elected officials, and their legal regimes have been increasingly criminalizing sea rescue (Cusumano/Villa 2020; Alagna/Cusumano 2023). The criminalization of solidarity and human rights activism became a vital tool in the hands of center-right, center-left, and post-fascist governments in Europe to continue letting die (Graziano/Mars/Medak 2025). These acts and policies also practice, enact, and institutionalize a hermetic solidarity in which EUrope comes first, and the lives of the others, at best, second.

Deconstruction and an understanding of solidarity as im-possible carve out the problems with restricted or hermetic iterations of solidarity. They are dominated by andro- and ethnocentric, parochial, and racist readings of solidarity as (ethnic) similarity and (nationalist) brotherhood. In these iterations of solidarity, ›we‹ only mourn those we knew and loved and who are similar to us because we share an ethnic, nationalist, and sociocultural identity that ties us together. If solidarity connects to these iterations, it thrusts solidarity towards the confines of the possible. It becomes thus highly exclusive and, eventually, lethal.

Mourning That Counts

As we have seen, by means of deconstruction, solidarity iterations can be used to criminalize, demonize, and kill othered groups. Deconstruction, however, does not set solidarity free in an emphatic sense. It does not pick a side, but it discloses how oppression operates. As a political critique, deconstruction queries solidarity and connects it to the fragile experience of »perhaps« (Derrida 1994: 42):

»Once again, here as elsewhere, wherever deconstruction is at stake, it would be a matter of linking an affirmation (in particular a political one), if there is any, to the experience of the impossible, which can only be a radical experience of the perhaps« (ibid.; original italics).

The perhaps is the space where im-possible solidarities take place. It is thus the space of civil SAR’s »solidarity actors« (Monforte/Steinhilper 2023: 3) who practice solidarity »from below« (Celikates 2022) when they resist the normalized letting-die politics. SAR practices take place in the in-between of affirmation (possible) and negation (impossible): For instance, predominantly white sea rescuers save the lives of Black and Brown people abandoned by EU law and European societies alike. In politicizing solidarity, solidarity actors, like Alarm Phone, intervene in the rules of proper mourning. Their grief work gives »a name, a face, a smile to many of those whom European authorities made disappear at sea« (Alarm Phone 2021). In mourning the unknown dead, in practicing and embodying an im-possible solidarity, the others’ deaths come upon us, haunt us, and yet assure us of the possibility of mourning otherwise. Mourning in im-possible solidarity not only counts the dead but acknowledges that their lives count.

These mourning practices connect to an understanding of democracy, scrutinizing liberal democracy’s representation and perception regimes. It carves out how, under the veil of consensual politics, discrimination and oppression thrive in liberal politics: How marginalized and »migrantized« populations are rendered invisible under Europe’s necropolitical regime (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2023; cf. Gebhardt et al. 2025). When the solidarity actors of political SAR NGOs ask why the voices of those drowning, (not) arriving, and (not) making it over the Mediterranean remain unheard in the »post-democratic condition« of deliberative noise, parliamentary debate, commonsensical politics, and party rivalries (Rancière 1999: 101ff.), they also ask about the democratic futures of EUrope.

As Rancière and Butler have argued, democracy appears when the oppression within liberal democracy’s arithmetic is challenged by those who are not counted and thus do not count. To both, democracy can rarely be found in institutional settings but happens in an eruptive, fleeting, and fragile moment when the »part of those who have no part« (ibid.: 99) claim their »right to appear« (Butler 2015: 25). But does this also work if the uncounted are made audible and visible by sea rescuers and political activists? What if those who do not count can’t »›say‹ ›we are not disposable‹« (ibid.) because they died on their passage over the Mediterranean?

From Rancière’s and Butler’s criticism of the numerical logic of counting, we learn that consensual politics count the dead, while their lives and deaths do not count. Counting, however, is also a question of representation. Both emphasize that othered populations must re-present themselves in the policed spaces, which Rancière describes as the »partition of the perceptible« (1999: 26f.). Intervening in the neat calculations and perception regime of liberal democracy’s arithmetic by their demand to count is not easy. You need allies, people who stand with you, even if you are dead, mute, and invisible, in solidarity. It is by proxy that the uncounted inscribe themselves into the police order, re-present themselves, and thus render their death visible. At the moment when the part of those who have no part demands to take part and to count by themselves or by proxy, oppression becomes visible. To Rancière and Butler, this moment is a moment of democratization.

However, is counting by proxy not only a mere representation? A paternalistic act, even? When we think about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous postcolonial critique on representation and female subalternity from the late 1980s, mere representation is a problem because it lends voices and visibility to those who already have it. Regarding representation, a complex picture emerges when we turn to the example of SAR in the Mediterranean: If only NGO members and solidarity actors from the Global North have their say and speak on behalf of migrant groups, the »subaltern [still] cannot speak« (Spivak 1988). Can im-possible solidarity bridge the gap between representation, democracy, and speaking for oneself? If sea rescuers and activists speak for voices rarely listened to, as amplifiers or conduits of people who do not count, is that not solidarity, even if it must, in the face of their different positionalities, remain im-possible? Why would it be impossible to think of sea rescue as solidarity and acknowledge that those predominantly white Europeans are complicit with colonial paternalism and white saviorism? I argue that im-possible solidarities plead for precisely that: sitting with ambivalence, contradiction, and complicity (D’Souza 2024).

We can think of SAR activism as a movement that, in part, victimizes refugees and migrants while glorifying the (male) white savior (Sea-Eye 2019: 5).5 Therefore, they remain embedded in the coloniality of European democracy (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018; Kerner 2021). Their solidarity remains entangled in the colonial past of Europe, while colonialism comes back to haunt the Mediterranean border regime. However, civil SAR activism and NGOs reacted to the critique from activists of color, postcolonial scholars, migrant feminism, and Black studies who drew attention to the entanglement of SAR with colonialism and racial capitalism (Smythe 2018; Ehrmann 2021; The Black Mediterranean Collective 2021). For example, the Berlin division of Seebrücke, the German-based Sea-Eye, and the French-based SOS Méditerranée organized an information event on »White Saviorism in Sea Rescue Activism« on 19 August 2021. The event stood under the slogan »Solidarity is Not Enough!« (Seebrücke 2021). Moreover, the Swiss division of Seebrücke organized a »Critical Whiteness Workshop« on 11 March 2023 (Seebrücke 2023). This does not mean that they deny their entanglements with systems of oppression, but they work through and sit with them. Moreover, ZivDem research shows that we need to differentiate between the practices and politics of left SAR activism on the one hand and the logic of the surrounding discourse on the other because the discourse follows a logic different from the actual practices on board. It brings together a much broader socio-political spectrum of progressive conservatism, center-left, center-right, and the humanitarian left, where neo-colonial paternalism still ›works‹, for instance, to raise money for the NGOs’ SAR operations.

When we take into account civil SAR NGOs’ dependence on donations—since the end of Operation Mare Nostrum in October 2014, there has been no proactive state-operated SAR in the Central Mediterranean—we can acknowledge their »strategic humanitarianism« (Schwiertz/Steinhilper 2020): Europe’s predominantly white societies ›best‹ react to the needs of others in stories of heroes they can identify with. Referring to a »humanitarian space« (Vandevoordt/Fleischmann 2021), SAR NGOs gain the most societal recognition, moral value, and thus financial support since politics do not mess it up. Isn’t that a subversive strategy? While SAR activists learned about the efficiency of raising donations via colonial tropes and white tears, they are part of a political struggle against racism, rescuing hundreds and thousands of people of color. When attempts to emphasize the political dimension6 of SAR are followed by decreasing donations, social delegitimization, criminalization, and demonization, more people drown in the Mediterranean.

We can, of course, scrutinize SAR NGOs for their instrumentalization of tropes of tragedy, empathy, and pity to raise funds and donations from predominantly white audiences who are moved when the other suffers and needs their aid. When we look, for instance, at pictures and visual media outlets from different SAR NGOs at the beginning of their work on the high seas, we often see a white man helping a Black or Brown person into the NGO’s RHIB7, where the first encounter of sea rescuers and People on the Move mostly happens. These visualizations ooze empathy, or at least the will to generate it.

In the meantime, ZivDem desk research and conversations with activists tell us that some SAR NGOs explicitly ask photographers or filmmakers who accompany them on their operations not to reproduce those pictures because they relate to colonial tropes of white saviorism. To counter the reproduction of colonial and androcentric tropes, political activist SAR groups, like Louise Michel, Sea-Watch, and Sea-Eye, not only tell stories about the others in their media representations. They also let them speak for themselves in testimonials and obituaries—often during demonstrations, rallies, or sea burials—to tell their stories about in/visibility, in/audibility, and in/tangibility. All those stories, the stories of the rescuer and the rescued, weave a network of stories about the Mediterranean border regime’s violence and eventually become the grounds for im-possible solidarities.

Suppose European and white SAR activists appeal to solidarity with refugees, migrants, missing persons, or dead people of color in a predominantly white society. In that case, they use their position to make suffering and injustice visible. Still, they might contribute to depoliticizing the pains, grief, and loss if their work is merely deemed humanitarian. We can sit with this contradiction: sea rescuers remain entangled in the colonial-humanitarian nexus, while their politics of resistance subvert the neo-colonial letting die of people of color in the Mediterranean.

From Im-Possibility to Fugitivity: A Solidarity’s Journey

SAR activism’s im-possible solidarity intervenes in normalizing the others’ drowning in the Mediterranean. When we focus our attention on the SAR collective Louise Michel, we see how civil SAR has become part of a wider transnational struggle alliance against different forms of oppression on a global scale. Co-financed by street artist Banksy (Banksy.blog, 2020), the MV Louise Michel, a former French navy vessel, is currently one of the fastest ships saving lives in the Mediterranean. The crew follows an explicit feminist and intersectional approach to SAR (see Sarah Hüther in this issue). As we learn from their webpage, SAR can »combine lifeguarding with the principles of feminism, anti-racism and anti-fascism. … activists and volunteers actively resist the discriminatory power structures of nationalism, racism, patriarchy and capitalism« (Louise Michel n.d.). Drawing on intersectionality and queer_feminism, the »rebel spirits« (Stierl 2023) of the MV Louise Michel have pushed civil SAR beyond »Search and Rescue« to »Solidarity and Resistance« (Louise Michel n.d). They frame it as part of the broader struggle for social justice:

»The MV Louise Michel intends to uphold maritime law by rescuing anyone in peril without prejudice. In solidarity with people on the move, we are working against any policy that willingly lets people drown at sea. We are fighting for freedom of movement for everyone […]. Humanitarian aid alone is not the answer. The people who die at sea are not unlucky casualties of the elements. This situation is not a natural disaster. It is created by political decisions and a failure of humanity and solidarity. It cannot be solved by lifeboats. If we want to sustainably stop the drowning, we have to stop forcing people onto these boats. So, if you want to contribute: Speak up against racism. Join movements for decolonisation, climate justice and against capitalism. Take any kind of action to defend global respect for human rights and all forms of life, near or far« (Louise Michel n.d.; emphasis MG).

The statement by the Louise Michel crew connects SAR activism with struggles against racism, capitalism, (neo-)colonialism, and climate injustice. They understand solidarity beyond similarity when emphasizing that all forms of life, human and non-human, whether near or far, similar or dissimilar, deserve respect (not empathy or pity). With their politics, the crew of the Louise Michel is part of a queer_feminist iteration of solidarity as difference and embodied practice (Hark/Villa 2020). Solidarity is understood as »bodies in alliance« within a »coalitional framework« (Butler 2015: 27, 66ff.) that brings together different struggles against (hetero-) sexism, femicide, racism, police violence, cis-patriarchy, and climate collapse without unifying them into a coherent movement. These solidarity actors accept that their alliances are messy, complex, and complicated. However, they share politics that expose the histories and presences of oppression.

When I refocus the lens of im-possible solidarity with Black feminism, I must learn from the concept of fugitivity and infuse im-possibility with it to show how Anti-Black racism shapes the Mediterranean deathscape. Black queer_feminisms negotiate failure, understood as an inability to ›succeed‹ in consolidating democracy and solidarity, in the register of »fugitivity« (Bey 2019; Emejulu 2022; von Gleich 2022). The vocabulary of the fugitive conjures notions of escape, mobility, crossing borders—national, regional, social, racial, gendered—and being on the move. It echoes the vast geographies of the European migration and border regime and its coloniality, where Black lives have been considered non-human, ungrievable, and thus unsolidarizable. Against this backdrop, the figure of the fugitive—as a »wild thesis« and a »paradoxical experiment«—places a »porous, changeable, and unstable identity« at its center, as Emejulu (2022: 9) emphasizes: political critique must be formulated from the perspective of the fugitive subject that is constantly exposed to violence but, at the same time, full of hope to escape the conditions that render them disposable. Crossing the Mediterranean is a fugitive practice and an imagination of fugitivity. Rescuing people in distress in the Mediterranean is an accomplice to that practice and imagination. If we iterate im-possible solidarity from the perspective of fugitivity, we can learn that the fugitive subject is not alone but embedded in manifold networks of support, accomplices, and solidarity.

Like im-possible solidarity, fugitivity operates by »strife, discord and uncertainty« (ibid.: 62), which reminds us of central motifs in Butler’s and Rancière’s works. Emejulu’s approach also shares with these authors the post-Marxist skepticism that the police order can be overturned by revolution. Rather, it is in the struggles and escapes of othered peoples that the oppression becomes visible and tangible. Nevertheless, Emejulu goes beyond these approaches when she discusses the white spots of democratic and feminist theory. From the position of fugitive feminism, the theories and practices of solidarity fundamentally change:

»What would it look like to generate relations of care and solidarity with those Others outside the category of human? For instance, what gets exposed about the inhumanity of Europe’s borders when we consider placing the interests and needs of the fugitive—the migrant, the refugee, at the center of our caring and solidaristic politics?« (ibid.: 9; emphasis MG)

Decentering solidarity from a practice between humans to an act that comes from the fugitive can challenge the »interlocking oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability and [to] bring different kinds of people together to work for the liberation of everyone« (ibid.: 2022: 63). Emejulu outlines solidarity beyond humanity because humanity is socio-historically linked to whiteness. In the face of her fundamental critique of humanity's socio-ontology, Emejulu seeks a pathway to practicing solidarity under conditions of im-possibility. Since solidarity is, historically, not only bound to fraternity but also to humanity, solidarity remains impossible at the intersections of race and gender because »Black people are not human, and what’s more, there is an impossibility for us to be human« (ibid.: 3; emphasis MG). Hence, their exclusion from solidarity.

While poststructuralist queer theories, such as Butler’s, show how othered populations are dehumanized to stabilize lethal social hierarchies, Emejulu shows how Black people were never considered human. The solidarity-fraternity-nexus is inescapably linked to whiteness: »I believe that the human is a construction of whiteness and any discussion about Black inferiority is a product of the futile struggle to be recognized as human« (ibid.: 23; emphasis MG). Emejulu’s emphasis on futility echoes the impossible. She radicalizes Butler’s critique of the liberal category of the human as the great equalizer. At the same time, Butler’s work on racialization and racism nevertheless offers an entry point to think about im-possible solidarities under conditions of racialized-gendered capitalism. It can be approximated to Emejulu’s socio-ontological reading of Black lives’ impossibility to be part of solidarity practices because Butler (2004: 30f.; 2009: 58) also challenges the possibility of human equality:

»Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own« (Butler 2009: 42; emphasis MG).

Butler shows how similarity dehumanizes the others and locates them beyond humanity. But at the same time, and this is the Derridean moment in Butler, self and other always remain entangled. Through this entanglement, the self is connected to the other’s dehumanization. Butler (2015: 1) finds sparks of »radical hope« in this in-between that relates us to each other. The socio-ontological entanglements of human and non-human beings are a relationality that connects us. Nobody remains untouched by the suffering, pain, and violence inflicted on the other. It is within this ›undone-ness‹ that Butler sees small cracks for new beginnings without forgetting about oppression, power asymmetries, and the unequal distribution of grievability.8 Fugitivity connects to these new beginnings since becoming a fugitive marks a new form of existence. When people become fugitives—from racism, patriarchy, and humanity—there is a fundamental break, a socio-temporal caesura, from which the fugitive becomes a political subject.

Looking at the discourse on civil SAR, we notice a strong emphasis on humanitarianism and a vocabulary centered around humanity. Both should generate empathy, while they also seek to relate a shared humanity to enable solidarity. In the dominant discourse, humanitarianism is often linked to Christian norms and values—saving is a »Christian duty« (Sea-Eye 2019: 27): a religion-based moral imperative for white people that refers to the nexus of humanity-humanitarianism. In this vein, references to shared humanity often appear moralized and depoliticized, while also being monetarized to fund civil SAR operations. In the humanitarian imperative of rescuing, the political dimension of SAR is blurred, and its whiteness is apparent. The concrete policy decisions, the political agenda of the Global South’s colonization, and Europe’s neoliberal migration management might disappear behind the human-humanitarian nexus, but they are deeply intertwined. If the humanitarian logic makes European and white audiences believe that the routinized drowning in the Mediterranean is not the result of policies and government decisions but a tragedy, a stroke of fate, or a natural disaster for which nobody is to blame (Athanasiou/Sheikh 2019), humanitarianism is the border regime’s most potent tool. It reproduces racism, colonialism, and nationalism in the white face of humanity. Looking at EU responses and the responses of national governments in Europe when Russia started its war on Ukraine, the racist regime that orders and evaluates different people’s mobilities becomes blatantly tangible. White Ukrainians—especially those who evoke humanitarian tropes, such as (pregnant) women, children, the elderly, and the sick—passed through Europe’s border regime smoothly to reach safe ›harbors‹. The Black and Brown others, however, are left behind to die in a war or to drown while trying to get to Europe’s shores. Their deaths, it seems, taking up Butler’s thought, generate less horror and (moral) indignation.

When we look into SAR activism, the double bind of coloniality and fugitive solidarity can be observed: If the predominantly white crew members and SAR activists name the colonial continuities of their actions, they, too, remain entangled in the coloniality of the EUropean border regime. Their coalitional practices of solidarity remain enmeshed in the power relations that the colonial regimes erected. Coloniality—inextricably linked with capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—works deep inside EUrope. It is part of its democratic regime. The task of deconstruction as critique is, however, not disentanglement but identifying cracks and fissures in the putative coherent mechanisms of normalization to open up spaces for more democratic fugitive solidarities.

A Conclusion: A Solidarity From the Other

As long as the EU and its member states cannot reinstall and sustain a state-funded fleet of SAR vessels and infrastructures, SAR NGOs depend on private funds and remain entangled in a complex of complicity and allyship. However, their politics insist on im-possible solidarity that is made possible with every rescue of People on the Move, with every campaign that condemns the normalized letting die that we witness almost daily when we check the news on our smartphone, when we turn on the radio or watch tv, or when we turn our eye to the Mediterranean shores where the dead, literally, are washed ashore (Athanasiou/Sheikh 2019: 94f.; Gebhardt 2020: 131).

Throughout this article, I showed how im-possible solidarity oscillates between radical and fugitive moments of a democracy to come and the SAR NGOs’ entanglements with the coloniality of the Mediterranean border regime. The democratizing connection between solidarity and mourning in SAR activism in the Mediterranean served as an example of im-possible solidarity for two reasons: First, it discloses authoritarian, nationalist, and familial notions of rescue. Second, it fights not only for the others but with the others. It mourns ›their‹ dead, making them ›their own‹ without seeking to comprehend the other’s pain or loss. With D’Souza, I conclude that their solidarities remain imperfect: The crewmembers, both at sea and on land, might never understand what the people, rescued and not-rescued, went through, but they continue to unapologetically drive out on the high seas rescuing people in distress at sea, no matter their name, skin color, place of birth, gender, sexuality, or story. Their solidarity arrives from the other, not for the other.

In the in-between of im-possible solidarities and fugitive moments of democratization, I locate the practices and supportive discourse fragments of civil SAR in the Mediterranean that pertain to a political critique of letting die. The rescues decrease the death toll. The discursive elements support the rescuers and care for People on the Move, alive and dead. This in-between comprises resistant refusals, practices of differentiation, and prefigurative practices of more democratic fugitive futures. When the MV Louise Michel crew reinterprets civil SAR from Search and Rescue to Solidarity and Resistance, rescue and resistance begin to slide metonymically (Ahmed 2004: 119): Sea rescue, resistance towards the violent border regime, and transnational solidarity struggles coalesce. Political SAR activism, at sea and on land, saves lives, and those lives are saved from oblivion in public mourning. These practices on ground, at sea, and from below open a fugitive space for im-possible solidarities among different peoples and positionalities. From SAR activism we eventually understand that we do not need to know the others to save their lives and mourn their dead.

Acknowledgments

This paper is indebted to many conversations with Lena Laube, Sarah Spasiano, and Maria Ullrich at the research group ZivDem (»Zivile Seenotrettung als Kristallisationspunkt des Streits um Demokratie«), funded by Gerda Henkel Foundation. I also want to thank all participants of the authors’ workshop in March 2024 at Münster University in preparation for this issue for their helpful feedback. Lastly, this article first took shape during a fellowship with the research group »Internalizing Borders: The Social and Normative Consequences of the European Border Regime« at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, 2023-2024. I am grateful for the many fruitful discussions and the conceptual work of the research group, especially for the conversations with Maurizio Albahari and Marijana Hameršak.

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