From Romanticization to Criminalization and Demonization – and back?!Discursive Practices within the Discourse on Civil Search and Rescue in the Mediterranean

Gastbeitrag von Mareike Gebhardt

Symbolfoto: Yiğit KARAALİOĞLU Photography / Pexels

The blogpost is a summary of the lecture „Verherrlichung – Kriminalisierung – Dämonisierung: Stationen der zivilen Seenotrettung im Mittelmeer“ held at 14 October 2025 as part of the lecture series “Politische Kipppunkte. Feministische Perspektiven auf gegenwärtige Autoritarisierung und Faschisierung” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Innsbruck (CGI). It presented preliminary results from the ZivDem research group (“Zivile Seenotrettung als Kristallisationspunkt des Streits um Demokratie”), based at Münster University and the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW) at the University of Bonn, and funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and FIW. The research group is dedicated to civil search and rescue (SAR) in the Mediterranean. The lecture focused on the discourse on civil SAR in Germany and Italy, ranging from “the long summer of migration” of 2015 up to the ten-year anniversary of civil SAR in the Mediterranean in 2025.¹

It paid special attention to discursive elements that center on how civil SAR is celebrated, criminalized, or demonized within an increasingly anti-migration climate in Europe, generated and instrumentalized by authoritarian parties and far-right movements.² The lecture summarized this development by interpreting three discursive practices over the 10-year period: romanticization, criminalization, and demonization. These discursive practices must not be understood as linear phases on a strictly horizontal timeline. Neither can they be interpreted as mutually exclusive. Rather, we can identify specific peaks or lows in which one discursive practice is more prevalent than another, and thus societal debates, policies, and acts of solidarity aligned with or contested these discursive practices.

Romanticization

In the early years (2014–2016), civil SAR was widely understood as a non-governmental infrastructure and humanitarian movement that stepped into a “rescue gap” left after Italy’s Mare Nostrum operation ended, as the European Union (EU) failed to provide sufficient financial support.³ In these years, SAR NGOs were praised for upholding international maritime law to rescue people in distress at sea; support came, for instance, from churches, political actors, and civil society.

In this supportive, sometimes even celebratory, atmosphere, civil SAR was associated with romanticized gendered notions of seafarers and adventurers. Civil sea rescuers were portrayed as heroic figures, sacrificing, among other things, their mental health and vacation days to do what state actors and governmental infrastructure should do. Moreover, they were understood as responsible citizens following an unquestioned legal and moral imperative, especially within democratic frameworks: rescuing people in distress at sea, disregarding their legal status or personal motivation.

Picking up on these romanticized notions of civil sea rescue, postcolonial and feminist criticisms emerged. They warned that the visibility of predominantly white male rescuers in media outlets, both from the NGOs themselves and public media institutions, risks reproducing colonial tropes, gendered understandings of rescue, and paternalistic frames, thus eclipsing the voices of People on the Move (PoM) or female activists.

One of the most visible events is the highly circulated photograph from a Sea-Watch operation in 2016.⁴ It shows a white, middle-aged, male sea rescuer, Achim, holding a drowned infant, maybe just a couple of months old, in his arms. Achim’s story was retold, shared, and, back then, retweeted. We learn that he works as a music therapist, is a father himself, and used his vacation days to join the Sea-Watch operation. We learn that he cried when he found the infant’s body afloat and that he started singing as he brought the infant to the Sea-Watch 2. However, we neither learn about the infant’s story, their parents’ story, nor the stories of those with whom they shared a boat.

We can see from this example how the white savior comes to the fore in this story. This one example, taken from many, poses questions about visibility, the “border spectacle”, and the politics of representation. While intended to combat oblivion, neglect, and indifference, such images shift attention to the rescuer — often just for a fleeting moment in which ‘Europe’s’ moral outcry is loud.⁵ However, these pictures risk depoliticizing border violence and thus reproducing the power structures that civil SAR set out to change.

As much as the white savior trope was present in the media representations in the first years, the SAR NGOs took this criticism — coming not only from academia but often from migrant-run organizations and anti-racism movements —seriously, and changed their representation politics drastically. Today, we see various scenes of rescue. Additionally, the crew members‘ demographics have changed over the years, and we see more people engaged in civil SAR who have experienced (maritime) migration or whose families have (albeit this is still a very small number). Finally, the NGOs are more sensitive to whose stories are told in their media outlets. Educational workshops were established to address these criticisms. From the early 2020s onwards, events such as “White Saviorism in Sea Rescue Activism” and critical whiteness workshops took place.⁶ ⁷They indicate the SAR NGO’s internal efforts to interrogate colonial continuities, avoid mere victimization of PoM and instrumentalization of stories of maritime migration (e.g., through fundraising spectacles).

Our findings suggest a more nuanced picture, even in the early days, when SAR NGOs were newly founded and in need of societal and media attention to raise funds for their resource-intensive operations. Therefore, we should be careful against hastily branding civil SAR as mere white saviorism, acknowledging the complexity of technical, nautical, logistical, and mental stakes in sea rescue operations as well as their politics that directly oppose the EU’s death by policy.⁸ Still, after ten years in which SAR NGOs have drastically professionalized and become a consolidated solidarity actor in the Mediterranean border assemblage, knowledge about civil SAR—its challenges and resource-intensive work—is scarce, and we would be wise not to judge their media outlets and representational politics too hastily.

Criminalization

The modern international law of the sea (notably SOLAS and UNCLOS) obliges ship captains to assist persons in distress at sea and coastal states to coordinate rescue operations. Rescued people are to be brought to the closest safe port.⁹ ¹⁰Civil SAR operates on these legal bases, which it not only upholds but defends in a climate where these international legal obligations are increasingly undermined by supranational and national policies. We can observe that not the decrees and policies that actively negate the international obligation to rescue are criminalized, but SAR NGOs, especially the vessel’s captains and crews.¹¹ As a result, since 2014, thousands have died in maritime distress, indicating state neglect and a growing indifference towards the deaths of People on the Move.

The research of ZivDem suggests that a central entry point for an explanation is the increased migrantization of both people and boats in distress at sea. We argue that states increasingly avoid contact with vessels perceived as ‘migrant boats,’ presuming the passengers are seeking unauthorized entry to the EU.¹² This phenomenon intertwines legal discrimination—every person has a right to claim asylum and elaborate their case in an asylum hearing—with racialized and gendered stereotypes toward people on board these vessels. Consequently, “migrantized” boats experience delayed rescue, or none at all.

Italy’s Piantedosi Decree from 2023 exemplifies this repressive turn. Contrary to international law’s nearest-port principle, it forces civil SAR vessels to navigate to distant ports, for instance in Northern Italy, often hours or even days away from the rescue location, thereby compounding the health risks to rescuers and those saved from distress at sea as well as the technical overstrain of the machinery, such as the engine. Moreover, according to Pieantedosi, SAR NGOs are not allowed to conduct multiple rescues in a row but are supposed to return to the assigned port after each rescue operation.

Additionally, scholars have shown an administrative competence shift in the migrantized boat cases.¹³ Once a boat is framed as ‘migrant,’ in Italy, rescue coordination moves from the transport ministry and port captaincies to the ministry for the interior. The notion of the “migrant boat in distress” reorganizes the operational handling of maritime emergencies and compromises the universal right to rescue by creating administrative cultures of differentiation. It opens an entry point for police- and security-driven protocols that recommend delayed or non-rescue for migrantized cases. This classification relies on racialized-gendered assumptions and an inferred legal status of those in danger—contradicting the foundational maritime premise that distress is situational, not status-dependent. As one of our interlocutors from a SAR NGO, we call him Eduardo*, underscores: people are not shipwrecked because of their papers or skin color; they are shipwrecked because of a very concrete, perilous situation at sea. Italy’s institutional re-routing of rescue competencies prioritizes policing and national security logics over rescue principles, creating a structural pathway for delayed or non-rescue and legitimating a politics of letting die at Europe’s maritime borders. In conclusion, both the state-driven criminalization and the legal migrantization of rescue, both undergirded by discursive practices, mutually normalize lethal inaction in the Mediterranean.

Demonization

Drawing on María do Mar Castro Varela’s and Paul Mecheril’s works, I understand demonization as a discursive strategy for stabilizing a gendered-racialized order in a legitimacy crisis by casting the “Other” as a threat.¹⁴ In the European migration discourse, demonization operates both externally, against threats from the ‘outside’, such as illegalized migrants, and internally, against ‘enemies from within’ to justify harsher repressions against both groups. Especially in far-right discourse fragments, social media posts, and conspiracy narratives, civil SAR has been rendered the ‘enemy from within’ who undermines national cohesion and ethnic purity — a familiar scapegoating tactic centering ‘betrayal’ we also find, for instance, in anti-semitism.

Solidarity actors, such as civil rescuers, experience hate speech, for instance, by far-right politicians and movements. In the case of female representatives of the civil SAR community, such as Pia Klemp and Carola Rackete, we can also witness deeply misogynistic attacks and gender-based violence, for instance, when Rackete was confronted with hateful comments that hoped for her to be raped by the hypersexualized ‘predators’ she rescued. Rackete’s example shows how racist and colonial tropes towards ‘the Black man’ or non-European masculinities more generally intersect with sexism and misogyny towards outspoken feminist representatives of the civil SAR community.¹⁵ Such hostility contributes to exits from frontline roles, mental health risks, such as burnout, but it also signals a broader authoritarian and far-right normalization of “ethno-sexism”, racism, misogyny, and anti-feminism.¹⁶

However, feminist SAR activists are not silenced by these hateful and anti-democratic sentiments. In her newest book, Wutschrift, Pia Klemp echoes Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger”-speech from 1981, where the Black feminist concludes: “My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.”¹⁷ ¹⁸In this sense, Search and Rescue becomes Solidarity and Resistance.¹⁹

Zur Autor*in:

Dr.in habil. Mareike Gebhardt ist Politikwissenschaftlerin und leitet die Forschungsgruppe “Zivile Seenotrettung als Kristallisationspunkt des Streits um Demokratie” an den Universitäten Münster und Bonn. Von März 2025 bis Februar 2026 arbeitete sie als Karenzvertretung am Center Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung Innsbruck.
Ihre wissenschaftliche Arbeit fokussiert auf die Kritische Flucht- und Migrationsforschung, auf Fragen der Sozialen und Politischen Theorie sowie der Radikalen Demokratietheorie. Darüber hinaus arbeitet sie zu Poststrukturalismus, Dekonstruktion sowie zur Produktion von Alterität.

Romanticization

Criminalization

Demonization

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