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Luna Vives Gonzalez is a political geographer and Professor at Université de Montréal and Assistant Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Montreal. She has a background in sociology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), geography (University of British Columbia) and social work (McGill). Her research explores how governments in the European Union and North America use borders to filter people and exclude certain groups of migrants.

In issue #155 of The Internationalist, she speaks to Tanya Singh about her latest book, On the Gates of the Sea, discussing the militarisation of the waters by Europe and workers attempting to break this siege.

Tanya Singh: To take us behind the book, could you speak to its genesis? What was the catalytic moment or the accumulating evidence that compelled you to undertake this specific study?

Luna Vives Gonzalez: This book was born in July 2019, on a pier, by one of Spain’s orange rescue boats, though I did not realise it then. I was working on a project about undocumented migrant children when the government suddenly forbade SASEMAR crews (Spain’s maritime safety agency, also known as Salvamento Marítimo) from speaking to journalists and researchers. Only union representatives were still allowed to talk.

Those first interviews with representatives from the main union (anarcho-syndicalist CGT, the Confederación General del Trabajo) opened the door to a powerful alternative to official narratives on sea migration and border control. Reading their newsletter and following their work over the years transformed the way I understood resistance, not only as a fight against something terrible, but as a fight for something better that is best done collectively, without illusions of purity or perfection.

At the same time, I tracked Spain’s enduring commitment to the SAR Convention’s core principle: that all human life deserves to be protected at sea. This commitment has been under intense pressure in recent years. One of its lifelines has been the work of the CGT’s leadership, which has combined two struggles: better working conditions for rescue crews and cross-border working-class solidarity. As one of the Union’s general secretaries put it: “We don’t rescue migrants, we rescue shipwreck victims.” That refusal goes back to the universal spirit of the SAR Convention, but is also a rejection of the politics of alienation within the working class that makes it possible for us to accept the current treatment of people on the move all around the world.

Another rescuer told me another story that captures this same spirit. Back in 2006, while working in the Atlantic, he was often the first to spot migrant boats. State security forces later use this information to identify and prosecute captains as smugglers. But this rescuer had come to respect and admire these fellow seafarers, often fishermen who could teach him how to navigate without instruments, just using the stars and the currents as points of reference. These men were smuggling their neighbours because they could not make a living as fishermen. When asked by a police officer to identify a captain, he refused, joking that he couldn’t tell Black people apart. It wasn’t true, of course, but it was his way of rejecting a system that pits workers agains one another. He saw captains not as criminals, but as comrades struggling against the same currents. He refused to be the one sending them to prison.

I don’t want to romanticize the union, which is a complicated organization full of contradictions. But conversations like these are what made me want to write this book. Not only did they shape my research, but they also radically expanded my sense of where resistance can emerge and how it endures, even in places and times of overwhelming darkness.

TS: You frame the current crisis of Europe’s naval militarisation through the ancient debate between 'Mare Liberum' (open seas) and 'Mare Clausum’ (closed seas). Does Europe now employ both—a 'Free Sea' for capital and resources, and a 'Closed Sea' for people of color—and that this selective application is the very definition of a racialised, Fortress Europe?

LVG: Ocean geopolitics are in a process of profound transformation. From the point of view of ownership, sovereignty, and jurisdiction, Western understandings of ocean space have long combined these two views of the sea as a common space (Mare Liberum) and as a space to be exploited and governed without outside interference (Mare Clausum). These were not abstract legal doctrines, but tools of empire used by European colonial powers to justify expansion, extraction, and dispossession overseas. We have inherited these tools.

Today’s framework for ocean governance is built on the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which essentially establishes a gradient of state power that weakens with distance from the coast. Yet, advances in technology and the insatiable demand for rare earth minerals on the ocean floor are triggering a new scramble for the sea – a race that exposes the limits of this legal architecture and reactivates old colonial logics of domination and expropriation. An example is the flurry of deep-sea mining deals brokered by the International Seabed Authority despite the alarm and dismay of the scientific community.

My book, however, is not about ownership or sovereignty. It’s about responsibility—specifically, the duty to rescue. This duty is one of the oldest and most deeply ingrained principles at sea: when there’s an accident at sea, you rescue first and ask questions later. After the Titanic disaster, states began to codify this shared obligation, creating an international framework for maritime safety and rescue.

The UNCLOS requires states to respond to emergencies at sea to minimize the loss of human life. The 1985 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR Convention) builds on that principle by designating zones of responsibility and outlining what a search-and-rescue system should look like. Together, these treaties are meant to ensure that no emergency at sea goes unanswered and that all human life is protected.

But, as with many universal legal frameworks, the cracks appeared as soon as those rights were claimed by racialized people from poorer countries. We’ve seen this before: with the Geneva Convention, questioned when asylum seekers are not white; and with the European Convention on Human Rights, now under attack in the UK. The right to be rescued at sea faces the same double standard. Equal rights, it seems, were never truly equal for everyone.

To evade their rescue responsibilities, European governments have found ways to offload them to countries that don’t really rescue, but instead intercept and detain people, in exchange for EU funding. Libya, Turkey, Mauritania, and Morocco are all part of this outsourcing system. Another strategy is to extend domestic immigration and border laws into international waters, claiming jurisdiction in zones of responsibility are beyond territorial waters and contiguous zones.

To summarize, then, this is not simply a matter of applying the Mare Clausum logic to racialised bodies, but about the ocean becoming a mirror of global inequality: a space where the ideals of universality and solidarity are being systematically hollowed out by racialised geopolitics and economic interests.

TS: The book reveals the CGT SASEMAR union—a group of state-employed rescuers—as a crucial, unexpected line of defense against the militarization of Europe's borders.

How does their dual struggle, fighting both for their members' working conditions and for the universal right to rescue, expose the fundamental contradiction at the heart of a system that tasks civilian rescuers with enforcing a lethal border policy?

LVG: I can’t and won’t speak on behalf of rescue workers or the union, as I don’t belong to either group. But from the outside, I see several contradictions between states’ legal obligation to rescue and current attempts at closing the border that play out on at least three levels in this particular context.

The first level is personal. The boat crews I’ve met are ordinary people, workers who think of themselves as firefighters at sea. Most are middle-aged men, the kind you might see on a supermarket run, who grew up in the years after Franco’s death, raised on the belief that everyone is equal. Their mandate is simple: pull people from the water and bring them safely to shore. Their job is to save lives. But increasingly, they’re not rescuing the living: they’re retrieving decomposing bodies from boats that have been at sea for weeks. As border policies tighten, migrants are pushed into more dangerous routes, and rescuers are primary witnesses to the consequences (people on the move and their families and communities are, of course, the main victims). Meanwhile, Spain’s civilian rescue agency is being deliberately undermined, and working conditions for those crews have worsened dramatically. Some crews deployed in areas of migration work week-long shifts on small boats, or month-long ones on larger vessels, with minimal rest. Many veteran rescuers told me that this isn’t what they signed up for. The tension between their humanitarian mission and the grim reality of their work, compounded by the strain of long, punishing hours, gradually erodes their sense of humanity.

The second level is institutional. SASEMAR’s very mandate is incompatible with border enforcement. It’s not a policing agency; its workers aren’t trained or inclined to act as armed officers. In today’s Europe, that makes SASEMAR something of an anomaly. Its survival depends largely on its structure and on the tenacity of the union defending frontline crews. In the book, I describe how the CGT’s leadership has managed to protect the agency by building unlikely alliances. It’s an anarcho-syndicalist union operating within state institutions — a pragmatic stance that recalls the Second Republic in the second half of the 1930s, when anarchists held the ministries of Justice, Commerce, and Industry. One of the most contemporary and striking examples I came across was an ephemeral collaboration between CGT and Esquerra Republicana, a Catalan pro-independence party. The party made its support for the national budget conditional on adding a fourth crew member to certain rescue boats operating in migration zones, delivering a small but meaningful win. These tactical victories have kept the rescue service afloat, but they remain fragile. Both SASEMAR and its crew are at a critical juncture.

The third level is political. Here we move into the realm of the CGT’s social action branch, which sees the state not just as an employer but as a maker of worlds. The tension between neoliberal governance and anarcho-syndicalist principles becomes most visible at sea, where racialized members of the working class (people on the move) encounter rescuers, who are also workers, in a space that belongs to no one. What’s happening there isn’t just a contradiction; it’s a collision between two opposing visions. The union’s discourse, especially in its newsletters, highlights the core paradox of liberal democracies: the belief that equality can coexist with an economic system built on exploitation and exclusion. But, as I mentioned earlier, the CGT’s approach is strikingly pragmatic: rather than rejecting this paradox, as some anarchists might, they choose to inhabit it and to carve out small spaces of resistance where solidarity, mutual aid, and internationalism can endure. They don’t always succeed. But their persistence is itself a form of resistance.

TS: EU has strategically outsourced and militarised maritime rescue in the Mediterranean, creating 'black boxes' of accountability where human rights obligations vanish. How do you see these established tactics of maritime control and strategic abandonment being applied in the current international context, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, where civilian flotillas attempting to deliver aid to Gaza were intercepted, detained, and accused of 'collaborating with terrorism'?

LVG: Seas and oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet’s surface. They form a vast, brutal, and beautiful environment that shapes every aspect of contemporary human life, yet most of us know almost nothing about it. Politically, the sea is where the artificial nature of borders becomes most visible. It reminds us that the world we inhabit (with its boundaries, hierarchies, and exclusions) is not natural, but the product of political choices, made and remade over time.

The militarization of the sea is one way those choices become remade and normalized. When Israel illegally appropriated Gaza’s territorial and international waters and declared them a “danger zone,” it didn’t just restrict movement and cage the population of Gaza to the West: it imposed its vision of the world upon that space, rewriting its rules of belonging and exclusion onto the water itself.

Much of what happens at sea remains invisible to most people. This invisibility makes it a space where crimes often go unpunished: crimes of abandonment by governments, shipping companies, and private actors who are legally obliged to rescue those in distress but fail to do so for different reasons. Yet this “out of sightness” has also allowed networks of solidarity to take root — sometimes clandestine and often resilient. Across Europe, informal shore-to-shore solidarity movements have emerged to challenge border violence and defend the rights of people on the move. They’re not centralized, and they don’t have a single mandate, but they share a refusal to accept that some lives are worth less than others.

The Global Sumud Flotilla was part of this broader landscape of resistance. (It’s worth noting that some members were SASEMAR rescue workers.) Their mission (to break Israel’s illegal naval blockade of Gaza) sought to make transparent the hypocrisy of our elected governments, which condemn atrocities in words while profiting from the systems that enable them. The way I see it, the Flotilla also sought to denounce that, as citizens, we are being asked to carry an impossible burden: to witness the systematic destruction of Palestinian life and somehow continue as if nothing is happening. They rejected that normalization of violence: the idea that Palestinian lives are disposable and their deaths inevitable.

In that sense, the principles behind universal search and rescue at sea and the flotilla’s mission share the same foundation: to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this is the conviction that all human life is precious, and that our very humanity depends on defending that belief. If that is terrorism, we should all be terrorists.

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