Thinking the Mediterranean, Rethinking Migration

Migration and the Mediterranean

When we frame migration today, it is almost impossible not to envision the Mediterranean. It is a place where migration happens, is interrupted, or fails to happen altogether. The Mediterranean appears simultaneously as concrete geography and imagined space: a sea to be crossed, a border to be controlled, a route to be managed.

It is evoked through images of tragedy and violence, but also through everyday practices of survival, care, and hope. Spoken of in terms of security and fear, it is equally shaped by labour, mobility, and belonging. The Mediterranean is a space where movement encounters politics and inequality–where migration both happens and is actively made to fail.

Over the past decades, the Mediterranean has increasingly been framed as a “crisis zone”. Public and policy debates often reduce it to a theatre of emergency, where solutions are imagined primarily in terms of control, deterrence, and management. In these narratives, migrants’ experiences are abstracted into numbers, flows, or risks, while the region itself is treated as a neutral backdrop rather than as a historically layered and politically contested space.

Beyond Crisis: A Lived and Relational Region

What gets lost in crisis framings of the Mediterranean? Long before becoming a symbol of emergency, the Mediterranean was–and remains–a space of circulation, exchange, domination, and resistance. Far from mythological or orientalist images of harmony and exotic diversity on the one hand, or its reduction to a permanent “crisis space” defined by borders, spectacles, and closure on the other, the Mediterranean exceeds these simplified representations.

Its shores are connected through intertwined histories of empire and colonialism, trade and labour, cultural encounters, and political struggle. These histories continue to shape contemporary migration dynamics, producing profound and uneven asymmetries in mobility, visibility, and rights across the region. Approaching migration from the Mediterranean therefore requires moving beyond episodic narratives of crisis, arrival, and rescue–beyond the “spectacle”. It calls for attention to the everyday infrastructures and practices that enable or constrain movement, to the political economies that govern labour and precarity, and to the social relations through which belonging is negotiated and contested.

Why Start from the Mediterranean?

Taking the Mediterranean as a starting point allows migration to be analysed regionally and relationally, rather than solely through national lenses. Using the Mediterranean as a category of analysis in migration studies (Med-Thinking) foregrounds connections across three continents, multiple political systems, and uneven regimes of governance, instead of focusing only on destination countries or isolated border sites.

This integrative and reflexive regional approach helps to challenge methodological nationalism, eurocentrism and white-centrism as well as to capture dynamics that are otherwise fragmented or obscured. It makes visible how migration is shaped by intersecting histories, institutions, and power relations that cut across borders, while also inviting critical reflection on the categories, scales, and assumptions through which migration is studied.

At the same time, starting from the Mediterranean opens space for questioning whose experiences and knowledges are made visible, and whose remain marginal within dominant narratives. By shifting attention away from crisis-driven and security-centred framings only, this perspective allows for more generative and affirmative ways of thinking about migration to emerge–ones that take seriously migrants’ agency, social contributions, and everyday practices of belonging, without denying the structural constraints and inequalities that shape mobility. The goal is not to deny the reality on the ground, but rather to amplify, complexify and give nuance to it.

Thinking Across Scales and Shores

Migration in the Mediterranean is shaped by intersecting scales: from local neighbourhoods and urban governance to national policies, international agreements, and global labour markets. These scales overlap, interact, and sometimes collide, producing complex configurations of mobility and immobility. Think Med seeks to create a space for polycentric and bottom-up conversations on Mediterranean migration, where knowledge is built collectively by engaging with diverse experiences and viewpoints and, when possible, by adopting a variable focal length. Attending to these intersections allows for more nuanced analyses of border practices, labour regimes, social transformations, and everyday experiences of inclusion and exclusion across the region–in its cities, villages, countries, and shores. It also foregrounds the importance of multiple perspectivism: foregrounding voices from across the Mediterranean, including migrants themselves and their relatives, civil society actors and journalists, policymakers, and scholars whose work challenges established canons.

As we move horizontally and vertically–geographically and symbolically–across political spheres of power and existence, another often overlooked dimension comes into view: the virtual. Digital spaces are increasingly central to how migration is imagined, organised, governed, and lived. Bringing this dimension into a multiscalar perspective allows us to capture the multiple worlds and realities that co-exist in the Mediterranean, whether online or offline, but always real in their effects.

Let’s Think Med Together

This opening post introduces Think Med as a space for reflecting on migration from the Mediterranean. Rather than offering definitive answers, the blog invites contributors and readers to think together, to question dominant framings, and to explore alternative ways of understanding mobility and its governance. Through Think Med, we aim to nurture a community attentive to the ethical, political, and social implications of migration research. It is addressed not only to academic audiences, but also to practitioners, policymakers, activists, and wider publics concerned with migration in the Mediterranean. Language and accessibility therefore matter: Think Med seeks to open conversations across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and to engage with issues that are often marginalised, silenced, or deemed not yet “publishable,” despite their urgency. Reframing the Mediterranean together is not only an academic exercise; it is also an analytical and normative endeavour. By creating space for reflection, dialogue, and critical engagement, Think Med aims to contribute to more just, attentive, and responsive ways of thinking about–and acting on–migration in this region. Let’s navigate the Mediterranean together–and move from the page to the world.