Eurosur, Humanitarian Visibility, and (Nearly) Real-time Mapping in the Mediterranean

This article analyses the ongoing transformations occurring in the regime of visibility of migration governmentality in the Mediterranean sea, investigating two complementary politics of visibility: on the one hand, humanitarian visibility, that is the threshold of visibility fixed by humanitarian actors, and in this specific case the visibility at stake with the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum, that produced a sort of good border spectacle of the rescue; on the other, the (nearly) real-time visibility envisaged by monitoring systems like Eurosur, that articulates temporality (the real-time one) with a specific look situational awareness. The article interrogates how humanitarian visibility and real-time visualization are articulated in the current Mediterranean context for producing migratory events, tracing maps of future risks and opening new spaces of governmental intervention. I conclude by drawing attention to strategies through which both activists and migrants have appropriated and utilized visibility in their own ways by demanding that people in distress at sea are 1 promptly rescued.