The Gates of the Sea: Migration and Rescue at the Edges of Europe

The Gates of the Sea examines the paradoxes of maritime search and rescue at Europe’s frontier. Focusing on Spain, Luna Vives explores how governments have redefined maritime rescue systems towards border control. Unlike other European countries, Spain chose not to assign this responsibility to a militarized state security force, but to a civilian agency whose workers often liken themselves to firefighters of the sea: they are dedicated to saving lives, not enforcing borders. Caught between their duty to protect life at sea and government efforts to transform them into border enforcers, rescuers have pushed back, primarily through their anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT. Committed to border abolition and international solidarity, the rescuers’ struggle positions them within a global movement of resistance to the politics of organized abandonment along the external borders of the European Union. Vives’ revelatory, deeply researched and accessible book grapples with both state methods of control and containment and, crucially, ways in which solidarity activism can thrive in unexpected places.

Luna Vives is a political geographer and associate professor in the Department of Geography, Université de Montréal. She has a background in sociology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), geography (University of British Columbia) and social work (McGill). Her research explores how governments in the European Union and North America use borders to filter people and exclude certain groups of migrants. She has studied the situation of unaccompanied migrant children, the transnational mothering practices of Senegalese women living in Spain, the use of the ＂crisis＂ framework to push forward radical and costly changes to migration and border policy, and the standardization of maritime search and rescue systems in Europe. Her work has been published in several academic journals, including Geopolitics, Political Geography, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, International Migration, Criminologie and the Journal of Borderland Studies. She also contributes regularly to print media and radio. Her current research focuses on the use of drones and atmospheric and low earth orbit satellites to watch over the border.