Vessels of global resistance: ships as containers of transnational solidarity in ocean activism

While social movement actors and scholars alike have a long-standing interest in transnational movements and what it means to act politically beyond the borders of nation-states (for instance della Porta and Tarrow, 2005), much less is known about social movements acting outside of national territory, in the international waters of the planetary ocean. This article demonstrates that scholars with an interest in global resistance and transnational activism have much to gain from paying attention to instances of "ocean activism" (Scharenberg, 2022, 2024), through a discussion of seagoing vessels as containers of transnational solidarity. The findings in this article derive from an ongoing, four years long ethnographic research project at the University of St. Gallen and the University of Southampton that explores what it means for civil society actors to act politically at sea. In this paper, I focus in particular on the role of seagoing vessels, drawing on research conducted with civil sea rescue organisations in the Mediterranean Sea in 2023, including semi-structured interviews with seafaring activists, textual analysis of activists’ alternative media texts, and shore, vessel- and shipyard-based participant observation. Theoretically, the paper brings my ethnographic findings in conversation with social and political theorists’ discussions of other contemporary and historical instances of resistance on and through ships (for instance Graeber, 2023; Stierl, 2023; Sharpe, 2016; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2013), and with Isin’s idea of traversal citizenship (2012). The paper argues that more than facilitating the very act of sea rescue, attention to the ship's material and metaphorical capacity reveals the ship as a vessel of cross-border solidarity that holds together a diverse collective of actors across cultural and geographical boundaries as well as connecting ship- and land-based actors. As such, the role played by ships in the work of civil sea rescue actors points to traversal conceptions of collective subjectivity such as the crew or the fleet, and thus helps us conceive of new ways of conceptualising activism and resistance beyond territorial boundaries. References: Della Porta, D., & Tarrow, S. G. (Eds.). (2005). Transnational protest and global activism. Rowman & Littlefield. Graeber, D. (2023). Pirate enlightenment, or, The real Libertalia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Isin, E. F. (2012). Citizens without frontiers. Bloomsbury. Linebaugh, P., & Rediker, M. (2013). The many-headed hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon Press. Scharenberg, A. (2022). Sea changes: How ocean activism reshapes the way we see borders, sovereignty and power. The Sociological Review Magazine. Scharenberg, A. (2024). Ocean Activism: Understanding Political Acts in Extra-National Terrain. Social Movement Studies. Sharpe, C. E. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press. Stierl, M. (2023). Rebel spirits at sea: Disrupting EUrope’s weaponizing of time in maritime migration governance. Security Dialogue, 54(4), 356–373.