Mediterranean Thresholds: Humanitarian Fantasies and Necropolitical Regimes

This chapter examines the Mediterranean Sea as a critical threshold where humanitarian imaginaries and necropolitical regimes converge. Rather than treating the Mediterranean as a fixed border, it conceptualises it as a liminal dispositif, a space of tension, transition, and governance shaped by visual culture, cartographic practices, and political infrastructures. Drawing on theories of liminality, necropolitics, and critical cartography, the chapter analyses how contemporary representations of migration produce a humanitarian fantasy grounded in visibility, empathy, and rescue, while simultaneously sustaining regimes that expose certain lives to death. It further explores how cartographic regimes of vision participate in this continuum by transforming the sea into a calculable and governable space. Through examples of counter-mapping practices, including forensic cartographies, artistic interventions, and pedagogical mapping experiments, the chapter proposes a shift toward a “cartography of care”, capable of holding together critique and compassion. Ultimately, it argues that re-mapping the Mediterranean requires rethinking not only borders and mobility but also the ethical and epistemological conditions of representation itself.