Rubber boats: transnational legal encounters in the Mediterranean

Abstract 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.