Italian Quarantine-Ships: Floating Totalitarian Institutions in the Central Mediterranean Sea

“We’re all in the same boat” became a common refrain in response to the ongoing Covid19 pandemic, referencing the global and indiscriminate nature of the pandemic. Except, we are not. Instead the pandemic has exposed the deep rooted and racialised global inequalities in health and access to mobility. Here, we take the image of the boat to expose these inequalities and reveal how people are quite literally and metaphorically on very different boats indeed. Our analytic focus is the cruise ship repurposed as a quarantine-ship under Italian ‘emergency’ migration policy triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. We present how these former cruise ships, devoid of their usual tourist passengers as a result of the pandemic, have been transformed into sanitary surveillance spaces in which migrants' bodies are subjected to racialised biopolitical practices of control.

The Central Mediterranean Sea is now one of the most dangerous maritime migration routes, with 232 deaths already recorded since January 2021. These deaths need to be understood in the context of the politics of abandonment and European governmentality, as a result of which the sea ‘has been made to kill’ (Heller and Pezzani, 2017, p. 96). Something Forensic Oceanography’s compelling ‘Left-to-die boat’ shows as the deadly natural forces of the sea must be faced by this vessel. Yet, as Enrica Rigo (2018) has shown, still people embark on this journey more than once, knowing full well the risks that await. This has not changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ‘Italian Solution’ for the isolation of migrants

Italian policies have sanctioned a state of emergency; legitimate public health concerns are used as an excuse to detain people in poor conditions on the ferries and to restrict access to asylum. Measures implemented by the Italian government were immediate and first included port closures, declaring them ‘unsafe’, the reduced presence of search and rescue vessels, followed by the creation of ‘quarantine-ships’. On 7 April 2020, an inter-ministerial decree (PDF 1.4MB) declared that as a result of the COVID-19 emergency, Italian ports are unable to meet requirements as a Place of Safety whilst the pandemic continues. The decree was approved the day after the Alan Kurdi ship (flying the German flag), requested to dock in Lampedusa. 150 migrants intercepted in the Libyan SAR area were on board.

The Italian Association for Legal Studies on Immigration (ASGI) evidenced the dubious legitimacy (PDF 120KB) of the decree with respect both to international legislation - the principle of non-refoulement - and to the Italian Constitution. On 12 April 2020, under the decree of the Head of the Civil Protection department, quarantine-ships were prepared for containment with the aim of providing accommodation assistance and health surveillance of people rescued at sea. The ASGI points out its very rationale is flawed in that those same cruise ship spaces now used to quarantine migrants unable to access a ‘Place of Safety’, were closed to tourists as a health risk due to their spatiality that encourages the spread of disease, are being utilised as a quarantine space for migrants. Unsurprisingly, this has led to concerns from human rights groups and others on discriminatory measures (PDF 976KB) and poor conditions.

For Elena, this was starkly apparent during her time on as a caseworker for an humanitarian organization on two missions on quarantine-ships during December 2020 to March 2021, what was immediately apparent on boarding the ship, was that these supposed health-centred spaces had become spaces of surveillance and control of unwanted bodies. Migrants were subject to: identity checks, assessment of intention to seek asylum , and documenting of vulnerabilities, such as minor age, pregnancy. These features are the precise administrative processes that the Italian authorities requested when they asked for ‘floating hotspots’ in 2016, a proposal rejected by the EU. The proposal was rejected as unlawful both from an administrative and from a human rights point of view: the identification process takes usually weeks and the health care on board would have been insufficient. Floating hotspots enhance deportation practices, restricting access to protection both temporally and administratively. Amnesty International described it as “useless and cruel”.

Totalitarian institutions

A diary entry from Elena explains:

“In the end, this is securitarian control disguised - barely - as health control. You can feel it in your body. It is a disproportionate and totally unreasonable health control, as migrants with a negative COVID-19 test are also contained. It is also extremely expensive. A time-space suspension, devoid of legal regulation or any human rights guarantee".

Analyzing the onboard diary, the feeling that emerges is of a totalitarian institution (Goffman, 1961) that adopts bio-political techniques that act on the body and mind of all on board, both migrants and workers. In the words of a colleague: "you understand that it is a sick system when, as you board the migrants, you no longer think about the people boarding, but about the number of rolls of toilet paper that you will have to buy." The quarantine ship is a space that leaves no room for critical thinking, which disables the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes (Arendt, 2019).

Quarantine-ships immediately became another piece of the wider externalization of European borders process, facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

What’s next?

The emergency arising from the COVID-19 has legitimised the enhanced securitization of the management of migratory flows along the Mediterranean border space. The question is now: what will happen after the COVID-19 pandemic? Will these quarantine-ships officially become ‘floating hotspots’?

Blog based on an article first published in Routed Magazine.

Short Biographies

Elena Giacomelli is a Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna. She is now working on environmental change and migration dynamics win the EU funded project #ClimateOfChange. She obtained a PhD, conducting an ethnographic research on social workers with asylum seekers and refugees. In 2018 Elena was a visiting research fellow at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). Her research and publications focus on mobility and migration, ethnography and cultural sociology

Sarah Walker has worked for a number of years as a researcher and practitioner in the refugee sector in London, as well as in academia. She is currently working as a Research Fellow on a project examining the nexus between climate change and migration at the University of Bologna. Her PhD in Sociology explores the productive nature of borders through examining the interaction between migration regimes and young African men, bureaucratically labelled 'unaccompanied minors', who have made the perilous, illegalized journey to Italy. Employing qualitative research methods, her work examines the intersections of migration, race, gender and citizenship. Her work is inherently interdisciplinary, cutting across research in anthropology, geography, politics, public policy and sociology

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