Issue 9(1), 2026
© Verein zur Förderung der kritischen Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung e.V., Göttingen
We cannot understand Mediterranean migration and border control without considering maritime mobility conflicts. It is only by thinking with and through conflict that we understand the functionality as well as the dysfunctionality, failures, and fallibility of the EU border regime. Whether people on the move reach their desired destinations, are rescued, intercepted, pushed back, abandoned, or killed, is determined by conflicts over mobility that often involve a complex and changing assemblage of actors. This intervention examines what I call migrant manoeuvres, thus acts of evasion, negotiation, and confrontation that take place in Mediterranean encounters. While central antagonisms between movement and deterrence, between freedom and force, underwrite these encounters, their outcomes are not predetermined. By paying close attention to how mobility conflicts unfold, we can see how frictions and tensions are continuously exploited for a politics of escape.
Mobility Conflicts, Central Mediterranean Sea, Border Struggles, Migrant Manoeuvres, Escape
»Then one of the Maltese officials said, ›Ok we made a decision, we won’t return you to Libya‹. He said, ›We will show you the route to Italy‹. We said, ›No, we don’t have fuel‹. They said, ›Ok we will give you fuel‹. They gave us five gallons, 20 litres. Then we turned on the motor and it didn’t work. We told the officials that the previous Maltese vessel attached a rope to our boat to try pulling us back, but it hit the engine many times and the engine broke. They gave us a new engine, a 45 or 40 Yamaha« (Tondo 2020a).
As recounted by a migrant survivor, this exchange between an officer of the Armed Forces of Malta (AFM) and a group of 101 people escaping from Libya on a rubber boat took place at sea in April 2020. When the group eventually arrived at a Sicilian harbour, Roberto Ammatuna, the mayor of Pozzallo, had little doubt that this was due to a new strategy of ›traffickers‹. He speculated that, somewhere in the central Mediterranean, these traffickers had organised a transfer from a ›mother ship‹ to the rubber boat. How else could the 101 people have overcome a distance of approximately 500 kilometres, passing by Malta, and reaching Italy in relatively good health? (Ragusa News 2020).
What the mayor could not know at the time was that Malta’s military had contributed decisively to this boat’s arrival to Sicily. When realising that threatening the people on the move at gunpoint had failed to make them turn the boat south, back toward Libya, the AFM provided not only water, fuel, and a new engine, but also, according to a survivor, »a compass in a wooden box« with directions on how to reach the Italian coast. »We said ok. At that time, we started moving and the sun went down, it was around 5 or 6 pm. We kept moving until the next day around 10 am in the morning we arrived to Italy« (Alarm Phone 2020).1
This case, which I will unpack in more detail throughout this intervention and which led the Italian government to publicly denounce Malta’s behaviour, provides a glimpse into the complex encounters that take place in the Mediterranean Sea. In these encounters, people on the move are clearly disadvantaged, their survival often hinging on the behaviour of those they come across. Yet, this does not mean that they lack agency or the ability to impact and even determine the outcome of their precarious situation at sea. While »mobility injustice« (Sheller 2018) crystallises in these encounters – an injustice that underwrites entire migration trajectories – the very phenomenon of Mediterranean migration embodies disobedience and struggle, demonstrating the unwillingness to accept one’s containment ›elsewhere‹.
In this article, I will make the case that we cannot understand Mediterranean migration and border control without considering the complex maritime mobility conflicts that unfold in this space, every day and every night. Mobility conflicts involve changing constellations of (supra-state, state, sub- or non-state) actors that criss-cross the maritime space, including EU forces, such as FRONTEX assets or navies on EU missions, state actors, such as (EUropean2, North African, other) coastguards and navies, NGO rescuers, cargo vessels, fishermen, tourist ferries, private sailors, smuggling networks, militia groups, workers on offshore oil platforms, and, of course, the migrant travellers themselves. Beyond actors present at sea, there are also actors and infrastructures elsewhere, impacting maritime situations. These include (supra-)state or civil aircraft and surveillance drones, at times operated by private companies, as well as state and civil Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCCs).3 Through direct (satellite) phone communication with people on board migrant boats, relatives, friends, or activists can also crucially impact outcomes at sea, not least by mobilising further actors who may intervene – politicians, social movements, religious organisations, the media, and the wider public.
Given this complex and changing assemblage of actors, many of whom operate on antagonistic rationales, mobility conflicts are not rare occurrences but everyday phenomena, determining whether people on the move reach their desired destinations, are rescued, intercepted, pushed back, abandoned, or killed. In the space of the sea, mobility, and therefore the border, is constantly fought over and negotiated (Stierl/Tazzioli 2025). Despite decades of EUropean attempts to militarise the Mediterranean border and prevent crossings, people on the move and their allies have room for manoeuvre – in the many senses of this term. As found across different dictionaries: an act of steering, guiding or piloting a vehicle; a tactical or strategic movement that requires skill, care and dexterity; a way of stealthily working one’s way past obstacles into a position; a way of negotiating one’s way around; an action planned that intends to get an advantage; an action aimed at evading an opponent (see Cambridge Dictionary n.d.; Oxford English Dictionary n.d.). The materiality and skilfulness of maritime manoeuvres are encapsulated in the term itself, which derives from the Latin manuopera, ›work with the hands‹, as well as from the French manipulation, ›to skilfully handle objects‹.
Honing in, as this intervention does, on specific migrant manoeuvres and mobility conflicts does not mean that there are no larger scripts that mediate conflictual encounters at sea. As Sara Ahmed (2000: 8) notes, though in a different context: »[E]ncounters between embodied subjects always hesitate between the domain of the particular – the face to face of this encounter – and the general – the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism.« Mobility injustice is the script that frames encounters at sea, producing spaces where thousands of racialised people on the move succumb to necropolitical violence. Still, by paying attention to encounters at sea, we see how they are not predetermined but subject to negotiation and conflict. Migrant manoeuvres and mobility conflicts reveal time and again that there is a »›grey area‹ of biopolitical technologies and modes of governing that […] neither can be fully captured through the ›making live‹ rationale nor through the different nuances of necropolitics – letting die or killing« (Tazzioli 2021: 3). It is only by thinking with and through conflict that we understand the functionality as well as the dysfunctionality, failures, and fallibility of the EU border regime.
This intervention is organised into three parts. First, it will offer a more detailed account of the maritime encounter of April 2020 in the Maltese Search and Rescue Region (SRR). Part two will point to the broader lines of conflict that mark out the Mediterranean battlefield, emphasising, at the same time, the ambiguities that maritime encounters reveal. The third part draws out what the case of 101 people on the move, and migrant manoeuvres more generally, tell us about conflicts and tensions among EU border enforcers that are exploited for a politics of escape.
When the 101 people embarked by boat on 10 April 2020 from the area of Zliten in Libya, about 160 kilometres east of Tripoli, they dared to move during a time when movements, especially those across state borders, were drastically limited. The COVID pandemic had spread around the world, and many borders were declared ›closed‹. On 7 and 9 April, the Italian and Maltese governments announced the closure of harbours through emergency decrees, suggesting that neither Italy nor Malta could be considered places of safety and disembarkation any longer (Stierl/Dadusc 2021). Unsurprisingly, however, those who could not afford to go into ›lockdown‹, moved nonetheless.
Over the Easter days of 2020, there were (at least) four boats that had left the Libyan coast. The Alarm Phone (2020) activist hotline was alerted to all four: one boat carrying 47 people on board who were left abandoned in the Maltese SRR for days until the NGO Salvamento Marítimo Humanitario intervened. A second boat with 77 people who also ›miraculously‹ reached Sicily. A third boat carrying 63 people who were pushed back to Libya in an undercover operation orchestrated by Malta, leading to twelve deaths and the incident’s designation as the ›Easter massacre‹ (Kingsley/Willis 2020). And the fourth boat with 101 people on board, who eventually reached Pozzallo in Sicily.
While at sea, all four boats were spotted by FRONTEX’s aerial surveillance. As a leaked investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF 2021: 17) into the EU border agency later noted: »Between 10 and 12 April 2020, a FRONTEX Surveillance Aircraft (FSA) deployed in the Central Mediterranean detected four rubber boats in distress, with around 250 migrants on board, moving from the Libyan Search and Rescue Region (SRR) to the Maltese SRR.«
Despite this movement into Malta’s SRR, the Maltese authorities, OLAF (2021: 17) notes, »did not cooperate with FRONTEX in the search and rescue operations, nor provided FRONTEX with information about the exact locations of the boats following the detection by the FSA.« Later, the Frontex Situation Centre (FRONTEX 2024) in Warsaw – »a unit responsible for 24/7 situation monitoring, early alerts and a comprehensive and up-to-date situational picture of the external borders and the pre-frontier area of the European Union« – noted the arrival of two of the four boats in Sicily. Also, due to the lack of cooperation between the Maltese authorities and FRONTEX, the EU border agency appears unaware of what had unfolded in the encounter between the AFM and the 101 travellers, prompting FRONTEX staff to speculate that the boat had been towed by the Maltese forces to Italy.
A rather different account emerged after the migrant survivors were released from an Italian quarantine centre three weeks after arriving in Pozzallo. Reaching out to Alarm Phone (2020), the survivors provided testimonies, recounting the encounters they had experienced during their maritime journey. Besides passing by several commercial vessels that refused to provide assistance but pointed them in the direction of Malta, they came upon an unidentified white vessel – likely of the AFM – whose crew distributed life vests. Later, as can be seen in video footage recorded and shared by the survivors, Malta’s armed forces arrived on scene with the P02, a fast rigid-hulled inflatable boat, co-financed by the EU (Armed Forces of Malta n.d.).
According to the survivors, Maltese officers requested their satellite phone, into which they inserted GPS coordinates for Libya, suggesting they return there. The people in distress refused. As one of them recounted: »We said no, we won’t go back to Libya, we made it to Malta. Anyways, we jumped into the water« (Alarm Phone 2020). In the shared video footage, at least a dozen people can be seen floating in the water and the P02 asset moving at high speed dangerously close to them: »When we got into the water, they were likely to kill us. They made waves, and we drank sea water, and we were very tired because the sea water was very salty. […] They have done all this so that we wouldn’t go into Malta« (ibid.).
Instead of rescuing, the Maltese forces provided merely a rope so that those overboard could return onto the rubber boat. In order to force the group to turn south, the AFM reportedly threatened them with guns: »They stood up there and put up their arms and told us we give you 30 minute« [sic] (ibid.). However, facing the defiance of the people in distress, Malta’s armed forces changed strategy. After refuelling the boat and providing directions to Italy, a Maltese vessel took the lead and guided the migrant boat toward Sicily.
»We left Malta on our left, and we were on its right, so we didn’t enter Malta. We saw the lights of Malta, and they said come behind us, come behind us, but don’t go in Malta. We went behind him for 12 hours, the whole night. ... And early in the morning they told us to always go straight ahead, ›don’t go this way or that way‹. It left us at sea and he left. Then we went until we got to Italy« (ibid.).
When, in the aftermath of their arrival, the public learned about Malta’s actions at sea, the foreign ministry of Italy noted: »The conduct of the Maltese authorities in this circumstance is in line with an unfortunately not new attitude on the part of Valletta. […] Maltese authorities have often evaded the obligations set out in international conventions on the subject of rescue at sea« (Tondo 2020b).
While the police in Sicily launched an investigation, with The Guardian suggesting that Maltese officers could be at risk of »being charged with aiding illegal immigration« (Tondo 2020b), and though there were indications that an Italian prosecutor’s office could open an investigation into Malta (Amnesty International 2020; III Comissione Permanente 2020), nothing further appears to have come of it. When a journalist from Malta Today approached the Armed Forces of Malta, they responded:
»The Armed Forces of Malta adopts measures to preserve the safety of life at sea at all times and at no point are the lives of those involved placed in any additional risk. On the contrary, the AFM often has to adopt steps to mitigate as far as possible or counter the danger occasioned by the migrants themselves« (Vella 2020).
Migration through the Mediterranean Sea involves a process of navigation, the act of finding a way from one place to another. The finding of a way to EUrope by boat does not involve a moment of crossing a border, imagined as a line, but constitutes an often-lengthy struggle to overcome an extended border zone (Heller/Pezzani/Stierl 2023). Maritime migration prompts encounters with the sea’s »turbulent materiality«, where »[e]ach wave, shaped by the wind, marks the water’s surface and gives the sea not only (ever shifting) depth but also form – calm or angry, placid or brooding« (Steinberg/Peters 2015: 247, emphasis in the original). When people on the move leave northern African shores, they face, however, much more than the turbulent sea. Whomever they come upon may determine their very survival. The task at hand is thus not merely one of navigation, of finding one’s way, but one of manoeuvring.
The case of the 101 precarious travellers highlights conflictual manoeuvres: Escaping Libya, its militias and the contested Libyan SRR, finding one’s way into the Maltese SRR, refusing to return despite threats of violence and an attempted pushback by the AFM, defiantly jumping over board, documenting deterrence attempts, negotiating with state authorities and ultimately accepting assistance in their onward trajectory to Italy, later cooperating with activists to publicly expose border violence. While the incident of April 2020 is a singular case that took place during a specific time and in a specific political context, it encapsulates the centrality of conflict in maritime encounters, without which the past decade could not have become the decade of unauthorised sea migration, with more than 2.5 million people crossing the Mediterranean Sea and reaching EUrope (UNHCR 2025).
As Sandro Mezzadra and I (2019) noted, the Mediterranean is a battlefield on which mobility is fought over. In 2019, when boat arrivals to Italy dropped to the lowest level in years, from approximately 181,500 people arriving in 2016 to 11,500 in 2019 (UNHCR n.d.), we argued that »the lines between force and freedom that mark out the battlefield of migration are drawn with greater clarity than ever« (Mezzadra/Stierl 2019). At the time, following years of significant border transgressions, the decrease in arrivals to levels before the uprisings in the MENA region highlighted the increasing effectiveness of EUropean-Libyan interception and deterrence efforts. We noted that »a veritable ›refoulement industry‹« had emerged, »a machinery based on the violation of rights and dignity« (ibid.). Now, looking back, I would suggest that our general observation stands, particularly in view of EUrope’s collective desire and ambition to deter through brutal means. At the same time, it may not have been entirely accurate to speak of an »erasure of complexity« in Mediterranean conflicts, as we did at the time.
Rather, the complexity of the maritime border, characterised by stubborn migrant manoeuvres, ambivalent (legal) geographies, and a multiplicity of actors encountering one another in a variety of combinations, is precisely why the Mediterranean remains a battlefield of migration. In the four years since 2019, boat arrivals to Italy have increased every year, reaching a level of arrivals in 2023 not seen since the mid-2010s, prompting some to speak of a »summer of migration in the central Mediterranean« (Civil MRCC 2024). Though there are consistent EUropean efforts to turn the Mediterranean into a »carceral seascape« (Stierl 2021), maritime encounters reveal ambiguities, tensions, and conflicts, at times along surprising lines.
The case of April 2020 highlights the crudeness of the AFM’s deterrence practices: raising arms, voicing threats, attempting a pushback – forms of border violence that have become routine in the Mediterranean context. At the same time, the incident highlights further aspects. While the 101 people in distress were not rescued, they were also not killed or left to die. They were handed life vests, which enabled more than a dozen of them to go overboard without drowning. Facing their defiance, the AFM appear to have accepted that a forced return to Libya would be unworkable, in particular, as the Libyan forces were rather inactive during that time. Instead, they facilitated the boat’s onward movement to Italy and accompanied them along much of the way. The actions by Malta – which, if carried out by non-state actors, would easily amount to a sophisticated smuggling operation – and the reactions by Italy and the EU border agency FRONTEX point to conflicts and tensions among EU border enforcers, which this part explores in some detail.
For decades, Italy has called on Malta to either take responsibility for incidents occurring in its SRR or otherwise relinquish parts of that region (Mainwaring/Stierl 2025). In 2004, the year that Malta joined the EU, Italy signed a series of amendments to key international conventions regarding maritime safety (the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea and the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue) while Malta refused to sign, fearing the obligation to disembark those rescued in its SRR. Malta has maintained that, regardless of whether an incident had occurred in the Maltese SRR, the state with the nearest safe port should disembark – which in the case of central Mediterranean distress situations often is Lampedusa and thus Italy. These conflicting conceptions have prompted frequent diplomatic rows (Jiménez García-Carriazo 2019).
For example, in 2009, after Malta had refused to let the merchant vessel PINAR E disembark 140 rescued people, Malta’s then Minister for Justice and Home Affairs Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici reacted defiantly to Italian calls to cut down on its SRR: »It is true we are a small country but the large SAR [Search and Rescue] area could be considered to be part of the bonus we inherited from our Colonial [sic] past. It is an asset for our country and I don’t think a country should simply give up its assets« (Grech/Sansone 2009). Reducing the SRR would mean losing out on income generated through Malta’s profitable flight information area that coincides with the region as well as on oil exploration, with fears that this would also embolden Libyan interests in exploring oil on the Medina Bank, which is situated at the southern edges of the Maltese SRR (ibid.).
Though relations between Malta and Italy improved from 2013 on, this proved to be short-lived. Following an informal agreement in 2013 and in view of the infamous 3rd of October shipwreck that saw Italy launch the Mare Nostrum operation, Italy agreed to disembark (nearly all) rescued people in Italy, including those rescued in Malta’s SRR (Asylum Information Database 2021: 20). In return, it is rumoured that Italy gained access to Maltese oil exploration areas (Mainwaring 2019). Between 2014 and 2017, whilst Italy saw the arrival of a record number of 624,747 people via the sea (UNHCR n.d.), only 720 people were rescued to Malta. This ›secret deal‹ collapsed when the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right Lega formed the Italian government coalition in 2018, with Matteo Salvini becoming interior minister and announcing a hard-line approach to migration (Mainwaring 2018). Facing the prospect of increasing disembarkations, Malta resorted to varied measures to reduce its maritime involvements, in the hope that boats would either be returned to Libya, including from within its SRR, or move onward to Italy (ibid.). According to the Asylum Information Database (2022: 23), Malta ignored more than 7,400 people in distress in the Maltese SRR in 2022 and was involved in at least 14 pushback operations to Libya, involving 789 people.
Unsurprisingly, tensions between Malta and Italy rose once more. When Malta refused to allow the NGO Mission Lifeline to disembark 200 people in 2018, Salvini asked »humanly and politically that Malta finally opens one of its ports and lets these desperate people disembark«, to which the Maltese minister for home affairs responded that Italy’s interior minister »should get his facts straight« and accept that Malta was not responsible, as the rescue operation had taken place between Libya and Lampedusa (Al Jazeera 2018). Conflicts over migration have persisted ever since, with one of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party colleagues of Fratelli d’Italia accusing Malta in 2023 of »pretending not to see« migrant boats in distress, in light of Malta allowing merely one person rescued at sea to disembark in Malta up to April 2023, while arrivals to Italy soared (Times of Malta 2023).
The incident of April 2020 thus needs to be situated in this evolving geopolitical context. In the aftermath of the arrival of the 101 people in Pozzallo, Italy’s foreign minister Luigi di Maio noted that the Italian authorities had been left in the dark about the events that occurred within the Maltese SRR:
»The Italian authorities did not know about what happened within Malta’s search and rescue area. Frontex first spotted the boat in trouble in Libya’s search and rescue zone, close to the border with Malta’s area of responsibility. Next time we hear of it was after almost three days, when the dinghy was spotted in the Italian area of responsibility. When they spotted it our Coast Guard escorted the migrants to Pozzallo harbour. When they disembarked the migrants were processed under sanitary rules and public order requirements. No news on this dinghy was shared with us neither by the Maltese nor by the Libyan authorities. They did not even ask us for any cooperation in the rescue. … We have pleaded with the Maltese government that they should cooperate in a coherent fashion to reach the shared objective of managing well migration in the central Mediterranean fulfilling past joint obligations« (Delia 2020).
Besides conflicts among EU member states, the case of April 2020 also points to tensions between Malta vis-à-vis the EU and its border agency. The relationship between Malta and the EU has been rife with tension over the question of migration. Considering itself at the forefront of a migrant ›invasion‹ from the south, Malta has relentlessly staged border spectacles. Indeed, in the month of the incident involving the 101 travellers, Malta incarcerated hundreds of people off its shore on a ferry, installing a banner that called for ›European solidarity‹. At the time, a government spokesperson noted: »Malta’s position remains very clear. Our ports are closed. Now it’s up to the European Union to shoulder responsibility and show solidarity towards these illegal migrants« (Cacciottolo 2020). Propagating its role as a ›victim of geography‹, Malta has used the issue of migration to its advantage in EU policymaking, exerting, as Cetta Mainwaring (2019: 122) shows, »an unexpected level of influence on EU migration governance«. Indeed, Mainwaring (2019: 150, 121) argues that it is precisely the ostensible defence of the collective EU border that has put Malta »on the European political map«, allowing Malta to wield a »Lilliputian power« and punch above its weight.
Arguably, this has also prompted Malta to take an ambivalent, and at times antagonistic stance toward the EU border agency. Though calling for more FRONTEX involvement in 2009 (Malta Independent 2009), Malta refused to join FRONTEX operation Themis in 2018, given the lack »of a clear rule foreseeing the disembarkation in Italian ports of people rescued in the Maltese SAR zone« (Carrera/Cortinovis 2019: 7). While readily accepting FRONTEX to run its surveillance drone from the Maltese international airport from 2021, leading to a range of human rights violations (Sunderland/Pezzani 2022), it has failed to cooperate with FRONTEX in specific distress events in Malta’s SRR, as was the case in April 2020. The leaked OLAF (2021: 17) investigation into the EU border agency includes the following exchange among FRONTEX staff on the incident (redactions as well as emphases in italics and bold in the original):
»On 13 April 2020 at 13:37, ████████, sent a WhatsApp message to ████████ to inform ████████ about the difficult on-going situation […]. In particular, ████████ stressed the lack of cooperation by the Maltese Authorities, refusing to provide to FRONTEX the coordinates of the migrants’ boats. In addition, the ›(...) boat that arrived in IT [Italy] had new water bottles on board from MT [Malta]; so MT probably towed them towards IT. I wonder too whether political level could put pressure on MT since this becomes a human irresponsible situation .‹«
Of course, these tensions between Malta and FRONTEX do not necessarily translate into severe ruptures within the EU border regime. In fact, senior FRONTEX officers have done their utmost to cover up Maltese human rights violations (Amnesty International 2020). Still, paying attention to the conflictual relationships between Maltese, Italian, and EU actors highlights that the ›defence‹ of the collective EUropean border is anything but smooth. When we consider the border »a dynamic relation of conflict and negotiation, involving a variety of local, regional, national as well as supra- and trans-national actors« (Hess/Tsianos 2010: 248, translation MS), manifold possibilities for intervention open up.
In the case of April 2020, it was due to the conflictual encounter between people on the move and Maltese forces that the group eventually reached Sicily. Keeping both Italy and FRONTEX in the dark aided Malta’s human rights violations and state smuggling activities. There have been plenty of similar incidents, in several of which people on the move were even more willing to accept Malta’s re-fuelling activities, not least to steer clear of Malta and thus avoid being stuck on an island state, hampering onward trajectories to more desired EU member states. Involving Alarm Phone activists, it was due to the survivors and their testimonies that Malta’s behaviour at sea was uncovered, prompting diplomatic rows between Malta and Italy.
To be very clear: emphasising the centrality of conflicts, tension, and ambivalence in Mediterranean encounters neither ignores the larger scripts of mobility injustice that underwrite these encounters nor does it downplay the »urgent need« (Foucault 1980: 195, emphasis in the original) of the EUropean border regime to deter racialised groups by the boatload. Of course, the central antagonisms between movement and deterrence, between freedom and force, continue to underpin maritime encounters. At the same time, what happens out there in the central Mediterranean is not predetermined. By paying close attention to how mobility conflicts unfold, we can see how frictions and tensions are continuously exploited for a politics of escape.
I would like to thank the editors of the issue and the movements editorial board for their helpful comments.
Maurice Stierl received funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – SFB 1604–501120656.
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