Dear all,
We want to strongly recommend an article written by our friend and Alarm Phone activist Maurice Stierl - see the link and a few quotes below.
The text puts the developments of the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone in its historical context and - even more importantly - tries to describe the interplay and interconnections between the movement of migration and social activism. We also read the text as a (self-)reflection to sharpen our perception of social-political struggles and our potential to intervene in contested spaces.
Here you find the text:
A sea of struggle – activist border interventions in the Mediterranean Sea
All the best,
marion and hagen (no one is illegal/welcome to europe, Hanau)
Our 5 favourite quotes from the text:
„ (…) One of those ‘things’ through which (the subjects of) migration struggles at sea become politicised, is the phone. Be it the simple mobile-phone commonly carried by (Sub-Saharan) migrants crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, the satellite phone often kept on vessels leaving from Libya, or the modern smart-phone that accompanies most journeys in the Aegean Sea: their ability to carry voices, information and signs of survival audibilises the political struggles that take place even in the bleakest of spaces, at times able to counter the reactivation of the sea as a void and deterrent, beyond justice and democracy.
(...)
Part of these mobile commons and supporting the struggles of those moving for whatever-reason, at the (always-already blurred) intersections between unruly mobilities and citizenship, the Alarm Phone is able to amplify the political claims to international citizenship that are enacted in movement and enunciated in distress calls from the sea.
(...)
Subjects of escape and those in solidarity with them enact international citizenship by performing their right to move, cross, survive and arrive as well as by challenging and assigning responsibility to governments. It is exactly in these enacted solidarities between subjects of border-crossing and those of flight-help, always-already unstable signifiers, that novel communities come into being, invented in the struggle to traverse borders.
(…)
From deep within unliveable maritime borderzones, the Alarm Phone interprets distress calls, often conceived as mere pleas of desperation, as what they also constitute: expressions of political struggle and subjectivity, rights claims and enactments of international citizenship.
(...)
The activists know that the hotline is not a solution. They want to create a Mediterranean space of free movement, exchange and solidarity, and make such an emergency phone-line unnecessary. But for the time being, even deep in maritime spaces, the ringing of a phone continues to be a sign of stubborn survival and, possibly, a wake-up call for Europe. (…)"