The Borders of Responsibility: Migration Control in the Mediterranean Sea

Speaker: Kiri Santer, University of Bern, Switzerland. 

While migrants face many dangers in attempting to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea—from drowning to dying of dehydration—they also confront an elaborate legal system that is designed to return them to the shores from where they have fled. This talk outlines the architecture of these systems and how they help Europe evade legal responsibility for rescuing migrants and admitting them to European jurisdictions. Focusing on legal agreements between Italy and Libya that have resulted in the systematic interception of migrants, it shows how Europe’s liberal identity is belied by legal agreements that let migrants die at sea or that send them back to dangerous, exploitative situations in post-Gaddafi Libya or their home countries. Through the concept of “jurisdictional irresponsibility” the talk proposes to think of law in migration control, as a tool that enables states to affect control beyond territory, whilst disappearing their responsibility for violence across border assemblages.  

Kiri Olivia Santer is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research broadly looks how the European Union regulates its relation to the rest of the world with a special focus on its political and economic relations to the Global South. She has conducted research on the EU border assemblage and the outsourcing of migration control to Libya. Her more recent research examines practices and discourses around the regulation of trade for the green transition, with a focus on carbon pricing and metal value chains. Her interests cover socio-legal approaches to complicity and responsibility, borders and migration, carbon valuation, the articulation between geopolitics and law and global governance. She is the author of The Borders of Responsibility: Migration Control in the Mediterranean Sea (Duke University Press 2026) and her work has appeared in Anthropological Theory, Social & Legal Studies, Globalizations, Journal of Cultural Economy and Economy & Society.