Search and rescue
What are the moral dilemmas posed by sea rescue?
Search-and-Rescue NGOs in the Mediterranean have been increasingly criminalized. This criminalization has chilled conversation about the ethical dilemmas practitioners face. What, if any, can be the adverse byproducts of rescuing life at sea? In this article, we concentrate on the dilemmas involved in search and rescue (SAR) as rescuers have described them. Our aim is two-fold. The first is to offer a phenomenological account of search-and-rescue dilemmas. The article sheds light on the complexity and nuance of the ethical landscape of maritime rescue, revealing an intricate web of interactions acknowledged by rescuers as posing ethical challenges. The second aim is to offer a conceptual framework for what it is that SAR NGOs are, in fact, doing. We contextualize their actions within the larger terrain of ‘border externalization’, in which states have moved enforcement activities to extraterritorial zones, where human rights law is diluted or inapplicable. We thus argue that the set of norms underlying NGO rescue practices amounts to a strategy of counter-externalization. The ideal here is that a window of opportunity can be created at sea, where human rights or international law protections more broadly apply, but enforcement powers of states are suspended. By utilizing these legal gray zones to the benefit of migrants, rescuers effectively turn extraterritorial zones from spaces of lawlessness into spaces of resistance. The rescue ship thus becomes a ‘floating sanctuary’.
Mann and Mourão Permoser probe the ethical dilemmas raised by rescuers as they pursue their seaborne search and rescue strategies. Resisting the ‘chilling effect’ on honest self-inquiry of aggressive anti-SAR criminalization strategies by states, Mann and Mourão Permoser advance a question posed by rescuers themselves: ‘What if any are the adverse byproducts of rescuing lives at sea?’ The ethical conundrum facing SAR activists is not unfamiliar. Real world, non-ideal pragmatism regularly thrusts itself into the calculus of human rights activism, including in the migration context – whether to challenge a negative state decision when the challenge might provoke a worse one, whether to collaborate with sub-optimal reform proposals when the alternative is no reform at all, whether to defy unjust measures when the outcome of that defiance is unpredictable. This response explores some of the further questions thrown up by Mann and Mourão Permoser’s paper.
How do Search-and-Rescue (SAR) NGOs understand the ethical dilemmas they face while conducting rescue at sea? And how might we conceptualize that rescue within a broader context? Itamar Mann and Julia Mourão Permoser’s article, ‘Floating Sanctuaries: The Ethics of Search and Rescue at Sea’ proffers an illuminating conceptual framework for this ‘ethical landscape,’ and creatively posits that we understand SAR NGOs to function as floating sanctuaries within the larger terrain of border externalization. This response expands on this contribution, exploring questions of innocence and fragility as they relate to sea rescue and sanctuary.
The incredibly complex questions that Mann and Mourão Permoser discuss can be approached from innumerable angles. One perspective, which the authors did not, on this occasion, explore, is that of structural injustice. This concept, as introduced into contemporary political theory by Iris Marion Young (2011), refers to injustice caused not by unjust interactions between individuals or groups, but rather by large-scale structural processes which are under no one’s control. In this response, I suggest that there are at least three ways in which the perspective of structural injustice can contribute to a better understanding of the dilemma at hand. First, it helps us appreciate the moral significance of being part of the chain. Second, it helps us see the fact that there is not one, but two commands SAR organisations need to respond to: the urgent ethical command of rescue, and the command of dismantling the unjust structures within which they operate. And third, it helps us reflect on the question what SAR organisations can and should do to contribute to collective efforts to dismantle such unjust structures.
In a climate of hostility to NGOs rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, Itamar Mann and Julia Mourão Permoser’s (2022) article, “Floating Sanctuaries: The Ethics of Search and Rescue at Sea” bravely breaches an unspoken taboo on the activist and academic left when it invites us to consider the potential negative consequences of rescue. This response takes up their invitation by proposing that we situate the ethical dilemmas of rescue in relation to a central tension: between humanitarianism and politics or between, on the one hand, the imperative to save life and, on the other, the open secret that something else, if not something more than life is at stake at the scene of rescue. Pointing to the plethora of interests that rescuers, migrants, merchants and states implicitly invest in the purportedly a- or pre-political ethical “command” to save life, this response explores the predicaments involved in posing the political questions and ambitions at stake in the Mediterranean passage in ethical terms.
Search and Rescue operations are at an impasse. In my response to Mann’s and Mourão Permoser’s paper, I focus on transparency and the adoption of clear operational standards by SAR NGOs as central elements in responding to states’ current assaults on NGO’s SAR operations, arguing that these are key in demonstrating accountability and safeguarding spaces for humanitarian action.
We are grateful to Jacqueline Bhabha, Leti Volpp, Zsolt Kapelner, Chloe Howe Haralambous, and Albert Kraler for their thoughtful engagement with our article. In this short rejoinder, we respond to some of their many excellent points. In particular, we engage with the idea of a “chain of solidarity”, the critique of sanctuary as inherently limited, the notion of structural injustice, and the tension between humanitarianism and politics. While we agree with many of the points raised, we choose to respond by defending sanctuary as a prefigurative form of ‘human rights politics’ that escapes the ‚humanitarianism vs. politics‘ divide.