NATO exercises in the Mediterranean in 2005. Petros Giannakouris/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.
The struggle of refugees and migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean is increasingly being managed as a crisis for Europe: a threat that Europe needs to contain far away from its territory and to tackle through frontline interventions of deterrence, containment, and blockade. The deployment of military operations like the EU’s ‘Operation Sophia’ in the central Mediterranean and the NATO intervention in the Aegean Sea is part of this approach. Presented, respectively, as a humanitarian intervention against migrant smugglers and a securitarian intervention to stop irregular migration, these naval operations are in fact an offensive against the ferrying of refugees and migrants to European shores.
Naval operations of migration management in the Mediterranean. Map from the House of Lords report, page 23. Fair use.
