Rubber boats: transnational legal encounters in the Mediterranean

This article proposes the heuristic of transnational legal encounters to investigate the enactment of law as a concrete event between people, rules and objects within a complex transnational force field. Thus, we can examine how formal rights and obligations come to life - are mobilised, ignored, circumvented, or violated in the practices of states, corporations, legal advisors, human rights activists, and ordinary people to pursue their projects and protect their interests - or even lives. Objects play a crucial role in this 'politics of protection'. To illustrate this argument, this article investigates these dynamics through the rubber boats used by irregular migrants on the Mediterranean Sea. Operating within a transnational force field, the boats turn from a humanitarian object to one that precludes the irregular migrants from the protection of the non-refoulement principle as well as the old maritime duty to rescue. Crucially, this politics of protection is not a neglect or failure of, but indeed facilitated by and enacted through international law itself.