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The deaths of at least 1200 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea within merely one week in April have highlighted, once more, the scale of human suffering along Europe’s external borders. More than 1700 people have lost their lives in 2015 alone and many more can be expected to follow in the coming months. Rather than a fateful tragedy, these deaths are the direct result of a European politics of deterrence that actively reduces possibilities for safe and legal entry into Europe, making paths toward Europe evermore precarious and dangerous. Since the cessation of the expansive Italian military-humanitarian rescue operation Mare Nostrum, no adequate rescue programme has been installed. To the contrary, the European border agency Frontex launched a border protection operation (Triton) and advised EU member states, mainly Italy, to disengage from rescue operations in non-territorial waters. Also after the most recent shipwrecks, Europe responds by outlining militaristic strategies to intervene against the trafficking industry, an industry, however, that thrives from Europe’s border control practices and technologies. As so often in recent years, some symptoms will become superficially addressed, thereby reinforcing border surveillance and migration control, and further endangering migrant lives.

Maurice Stierl, a PAIS teaching assistant, engages in the activist network Watch The Med. Activists from Europe and North Africa created an Alarm Phone for people in distress at sea in October 2014 and have since dealt with various emergency situations (http://watchthemed.net/index.php/main). In the past few weeks, shift teams of the alarm hotline have been in direct contact with passengers on various vessels seeking to reach Europe. They were able to assist passengers by passing on advice as well as by forwarding crucial information to rescue agencies. Members of the hotline regard the Alarm Phone as a political intervention in spaces often considered reserved for border security practitioners and outside of democratic oversight. In enabling direct forms of engagement with people in distress at sea, the Alarm Phone project has created a presence in maritime spaces, capable of building pressure on coastguards to conduct rescue operations. The project supports the freedom of movement of all and seeks to make the often dangerous and deadly routes toward Europe less violent and more secure.

The Alarm Phone has received a lot of media attention in the past weeks, especially after the shipwrecks costing hundreds of lives. Maurice Stierl has been interviewed in Germany for three national and regional TV programmes and has also given interviews for print media outlets (http://www.daserste.de/information/politik-weltgeschehen/morgenmagazin/videos/fluechtlings-aktivist-stierl-man-kann-von-mord-reden-100.html, http://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/ndr_aktuell/NDRAktuell,sendung363130.html, https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/zapp/Schwierig-Berichterstattung-ueber-Fluechtlinge,fluechtlingsschiff114.html, http://taz.de/Hotline-fuer-Fluechtlinge-in-Seenot/!158286/)

The Alarm Phone has also published a position paper countering the 10 point action plan of the Joint Foreign and Home Affairs Council of the EU (http://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/04/23/ferries-not-frontex-10-points-to-really-end-the-deaths-of-migrants-at-sea/).

On 16 May, 2015 at 1pm the film “Grandma’s Tattoos” by Swedish filmmaker of Armenian descent, Suzanne Khardalian, will be screened at the Warwick Arts Centre cinema in association with the ERC Starting Grant Project “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty” and Warwick’s Festival of Social Sciences.

The 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide is being commemorated in 2015. One hundred years ago on April 24, the Young Turk regime of the collapsing Ottoman Empire started to round up and either eventually massacre or expose to an imminent death in the Syrian desert an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians.

“Grandma’s Tattoos” is a documentary of a rarely told story, about the faith of women and their difficult survival during this grim period. Seeking to unravel a family taboo associated with the tattoos on the hands and face of her own grandmother, Khardalian travels to Lebanon, Syria, and the United States, and opens up a discussion about history, memory, silence, and current diasporic life across different continents. Khardalian is expected to join the conversation after the film, together with Dr. Maria Koinova, director of the ERC Project "Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty."

Synopsis of the Film

Maurice Stierl, former PhD candidate here at PAIS, recently accepted a job offer from the University of California, Davis. He will be Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Border Studies for the duration of two years.

Georg Löfflmann, who recently completed his PhD at PAIS and is currently an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advances Studies has published an article in Geopolitics: "Leading from Behind - American Exceptionalism and President Obama's Post-American Vision of Hegemony"

The article examines the political performance of American exceptionalism for U.S. foreign and security policy, concluding that under President Obama the discourse of exceptionalism is neither one of primacy nor isolationism, but augments an un-exceptional policy vision of limited engagement and hegemonic restraint. 

The article is available under: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14650045.2015.1017633?journalCode=fgeo20# Geopolitics, Vol. 20, no. 2 (2015): pp. 308-332

Congratulations to PAIS student Markus Markert, our iPad Air 2 winner in our 90% NSS completion rate competition.

We remain number 1 at the university with a 92 per cent response rate, if you have not filled in the survey yet, you can do it here: www.thestudentsurvey.com