This chapter opens the book by critically interrogating the framing of the situation in the Mediterranean during 2015–2016 as a ‘migration crisis’. It creates distance from a politics of crisis by exploring the articulation of the situation as such along various lines: as a crisis of the Schengen Area, as a crisis of solidarity, as a crisis of sovereignty, as a crisis of values or social cohesion, as a crisis of security, as a humanitarian crisis, and as a crisis of international protection. In so doing, the chapter draws attention to the multiple ways in which the crisis has been constituted in such terms, highlighting how each articulation reflects distinctive political concerns and diverse governing authorities rather than representing an uncontestable reality. By contrast to an approach that questions the specific way by which crisis is framed, the chapter goes on to question a politics of crisis and its effects more fundamentally. It draws on scholarship that interrogates the framing of crisis narratives as well as a form of governing through crisis, to highlight the ways in which crisis politics detract from an understanding of the foreseeable and preventable dimensions of the situation in the Mediterranean in 2015–2016. In so doing, the chapter concludes that the framing of the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ in such terms reflects a situation in which death and vulnerability are produced through policies that cut across both security and humanitarian domains and whereby people on the move are abandoned in the face of concerns to maintain the security of home. This, it suggests, can be understood as nothing less than a continued attempt to re/colonise the Mediterranean in a context marked by longer European histories of colonial violence.

In June 2015, the body of a thirty-four-year-old Syrian woman who had perished at sea was exhumed from her grave in Sicily with the permission of her family, and reburied in Berlin. Part of a political demonstration called ‘The Dead are Coming’, the burial was led by an imam, and was marked by the absence of German politicians, whose names were taped to a row of empty chairs as mourners looked on.2 The reburial was the first in a series organised by a Berlin-based art group called the Centre of Political Beauty, which sought to bring the bodies of those who had drowned in the Mediterranean to ‘the heart of Europe’.3 Describing border deaths as a result of ‘our inaction’ and claiming to give the deceased ‘the dignity that they deserve’, the group stress that it is ‘not just about saving their dignity’ but also that of European populations.4 The Centre of Political Beauty advocates a form of ‘aggressive humanism’ that must ‘hurt provoke and rise in revolt’.5 Just as Antigone refused to be swayed by authorities in marking the death of her ‘dearest brother’ during 442 BC, activists as part of the group seek to ‘do wrong in order to do right’. In a situation whereby border deaths across the Mediterranean are perceived to be met with widespread indifference, the group advances a humanist intervention that ‘assaults’ a form of ‘political apathy’ which is deemed to be deadly. As such, ‘The Dead are Coming’ can be understood as nothing less than an insistent attempt to reaffirm dignity in a situation where it has become lost to both the dead and the living.