Sasha Milonova

Visualising the Architecture of Complicity in State Crimes Against Migrants in the central Mediterranean Sea

When, how and why did the idea that people should not die at sea become a contentious political issue, rather than a moral imperative enshrined in legal standards that have governed maritime behaviour for as long as humans have sailed the seas? Sasha’s practice-based research investigates European state crimes against migrants and civil society’s resistance to the normalisation of death within border regimes

It engages an archive of data collected by activists who have spent over a decade disrupting border violence through proactive search-and-rescue operations in the central Mediterranean Sea.

By employing timelines, geostatistical analysis, case reconstruction, and ethnographic work, she examines the ways in which European states have structured choices of actors in the Mediterranean away from rendering assistance to those in distress at sea towards a situation that could position even search-and-rescue actors as potentially complicit in state crimes.

She seeks to understand which links in the web of complicity are the weakest, most susceptible to change, and potentially reversible.

Supervisors

• Susan Schuppli
• Başsak Ertur