Clandestine migration from Africa to Europe frequently occurs between Libya and Italy. Migrants often travel on inflatable or wooden boats that are unseaworthy, overcrowded, and improperly supplied. Boats are automatically considered in need of rescue, but the EU has gone to great lengths to avoid its legal responsibility to aid them. Instead, a Libyan coast guard has been funded by the EU to recover these boats and detain migrants, who are in danger of imprisonment, torture, slavery, and sexual assault. Policies regulating migration by sea have failed to prevent dangerous maritime migration and the deaths that result from it; nearly 25,000 migrants have gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014 (IOM 2022). This situation has led to an increase in ‘civil rescue boats’ actively seeking and caring for migrants until a safe port can be found. Civil rescue boats operate as NGO’s, usually staffed by volunteers, making them unaffiliated with government agencies. Since 2018, coordination between EU states and civil rescue boats has broken down significantly, leading to legal complications, harassment, and detention. At the same time, the EU coast guard has become increasingly dependent on civil rescue boats to spot and aid migrants in international waters off the coast of Libya. All of this creates a fluid, complex, and generative triangular relationship with tension between practices of care and control.

Despite the severity and emergency of this context, and work done in political, geographical, and media studies frameworks, there is still a large gap in our understanding of the anthropological effects of such solidarity, humanitarianism, hierarchical maneuvering, and the tensions between care and control in those who make up the migration route: migrants, rescue crews, and coast guards. The implication that the positionalities and interpersonal relationships of these people are not fixed, but in fact are in flux, and co-created through impactful encounters in crisis situations, is particularly compelling.

This research aims to examine productive moments of crisis, emergency, care, violence, and (il)legality between migrants, rescue crews, and coast guards, and to explore the impacts of these encounters via an ethnographic approach. It will trace the complex human connections forged in search and rescue encounters, which can last up to two months, and often require migrants, crew members, and coast guard to take on each other’s roles. Analysis aims to reveal structures of power, methods of adaptation, and schemes of both hierarchy and community, as actors relationally establish, reframe, and reconstruct themselves. It may be used to expand anthropological understanding of crisis and emergency reaction, solidarity, and systems of power, as well as in tailoring policy to accurately address the challenges of continued migration flows.