The Mediterranean has become a prominent border zone where migrants excluded from legal channels attempt to cross clandestinely into European countries. The responses of European institutions to the ongoing influx of boat migrants in the Mediterranean are constituted by a tension between the control of borders and humanitarian concerns about migrant deaths, and migrant deaths have become a symbol of Mediterranean boat migration. Ongoing instability in the Mediterranean neighborhood suggests that boat migration will continue, and migrants will continue to die. The future of Mediterranean migration is anything but clear, and the prospects for Europe ‘managing’ the border are equally uncertain.

A five-year NWO-funded project begun at VU University Amsterdam, titled ‘Border Policies and Sovereignty: Human Rights and the right to life of irregular migrants’, directly addresses the issue of migrant mortality and border deaths in the Mediterranean. We investigate three main themes relating to (1) a shift in the “organizing logics” of European migration policy (including securitization, privatization, and externalization); (2) human rights law and externalities; and (3) the relation between European policies and migrant mortality. This panel will present the preliminary results of the first two years of data collection. The papers will provide unique data and arguments which concern the legal accountability of states and private enterprises, shifting discourses of humanitarianism and securitarianism, counting migrant mortality, and the networks of security and surveillance which constitute the European border. The discussion will focus on theoretical, methodological, empirical, and ethical contradictions in a Europe that ‘manages’ migration.