The Aerial Witness and Infrastructures of Solidarity

Abstract

European social movements in solidarity with migrants have taken many forms, from maritime struggles at the edge of territory to antideportation protests in urban centers. Over the last five years, a new site of solidarity and struggle has emerged in the skies, with activist pilots and civil society organizations launching their own aerial surveillance operations to challenge the state's monopoly over the aerial view. The materiality of aviation and the legal and spatial systems that govern flying mean that the scope for political action and solidarity practices via the plane is always constrained. This article examines the affordances and limitations of aerial infrastructure as a vehicle for contesting state power and expressing solidarity with the agential movement/s of migrants.

Introduction

In the context of border policing and migrant solidarity movements, infrastructure—from drones to fences to mobile phones—plays a critical role. While solidarity has been described as a social infrastructure in itself,¹ solidarity and political activism rely on infrastructure's “hardware” to engage in political action. More than simply a platform or vehicle for action, infrastructure forms an important component of sociomaterial assemblages of spaces, subjects, laws, media, and the elements that actively shape political interventions. In the European border zone—a frontier of contested jurisdictions that Eyal Weizman has referred to as a “lawless battlefield of our colonial present”²—the airplane and aviation systems have emerged as a critical infrastructure for witnessing, documenting, and intervening in state violence. These interventions are conducted by civilian aircraft running countersurveillance operations, crewed by activists and humanitarians in migrant solidarity efforts. Their purpose is to identify boats in distress, advocate for rescue, and gather evidence of violations by European state actors. At the same time, EU and state actors perpetuate and legitimate state violence using aerial surveillance over the Mediterranean Sea to identify migrants traveling in boats and have them returned to Libya. The vertical distance created by the aerial view is used by states to evade responsibility for these violent forced returns.

Aviation in this context is fundamentally bound up in shifting relations and dynamic contestations; it's the machinery of mobile struggles over violence, law, witnessing, and politics. The surveillant plane is thus both social and material, and, as Lauren Berlant has argued of infrastructure more broadly, defined by both movement and relationality.³ Over the Mediterranean, the plane is a vehicle that is used to command an aerial view, a perspective fraught with violent colonial histories of air strikes, warfare, imperial mapping projects, and, more recently, drone surveillance and drone violence.⁴ From these violent histories, aviation infrastructure is commanded in new ways by these “activist pilots” in order to exercise solidarity with migrants’ movements and challenge the violent order of border policing. While the state has, throughout history, largely maintained a monopoly over the skies and aviation, there are always moments of escape and excess, where infrastructure is appropriated by agential subjects: the hijacker, the aerial stowaway, the activist pilot. Such seizures of infrastructure thus cause “trouble in the system”⁵ in a way similar to how the activist pilots and their planes pose a challenge to the state's dominance of the aerial view over the Mediterranean today and deploy this view to political ends. While infrastructure tends to be often most “visible in its failure,”⁶ such creative appropriations of infrastructure also draw attention to infrastructure's affordances and materialities. While the European authorities aim to obstruct, decelerate, and reroute migrant mobilities, the activist pilots and their initiatives appropriate the same infrastructure (aviation) to seek to “interrupt the circulation of violence.”⁷

The air is thus a new site for contesting the politics of rescue, a battle that has long played out between states and civil society actors in the maritime environment. Like the sea, the air has its own elemental properties and force,⁸ which are harnessed by the technologies of flying to generate movement.⁹ The material properties of infrastructure afford a certain scope of action while also constraining and placing limits upon action. In the context of aerial surveillance by activists and civil society actors over the Mediterranean Sea, aviation infrastructure offers movement at great height and speed, as well as a vantage point for witnessing and gathering evidence. In all kinds of political activism, activists must navigate a fraught terrain “between compromise, complicity, resistance, and evasion.”¹⁰

This article explores the particularity of aviation infrastructure as a vehicle for European solidarity practices that are dynamic, constrained, complicated, and mobile. In border assemblages, which entail a range of human and nonhuman agents, actors, technologies, laws, elements, spaces, and infrastructures, the plane is one component that shapes—at times violently—the types of encounters that take place. In its relation to human action, the plane is enrolled in the visual, ethical, and political complexities and limits of undertaking “aerial solidarity” work at the border.

The Rise of Aerial Activism

In the period since 2017, following the so-called European migration crisis, one of the most notable changes to European border policing strategies has been the increased reliance by the European Union and its member states on aerial assets for border surveillance.¹¹ Across the central Mediterranean Sea, these aerial assets, including drones and crewed aircraft, have played a central role in coordinating with the Libyan Coast Guard to apprehend migrant vessels at sea, prevent people from arriving in Europe, and facilitate their forced return to Libya.¹² This coordination with Libya has been led by Italy through a series of bilateral agreements, while the aerial surveillance is conducted by aircraft belonging to individual states such as Italy and Malta, as well aircraft operating under the auspices of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex.¹³

Emerging and evolving in dialogue with state aerial bordering practices are civilian aerial surveillance operations that seek to intervene in and resist state practices of returning people to Libya. Realizing in 2015 that their rescue boats were having difficulty spotting migrant vessels, civil society actors launched their own aerial operations to improve the chances of seeing boats in need of rescue. These civilian surveillance initiatives using lightweight crewed aircraft are operated by three European civil society organizations. The first of these operations is a collaboration between the Swiss Humanitarian Pilots Initiative (HPI)¹⁴ and the German NGO Sea-Watch,¹⁵ which began in the European spring of 2017, with Sea-Watch already experienced in maritime rescue, having operated in the Mediterranean since early 2015. Around one year later, in April 2018, another initiative was launched by the French group Pilotes Volontaires (PV).¹⁶

While originally launched with the intention of being able to more effectively spot migrant vessels over a large search area, these civilian aerial operations have taken on a far more political role in response to state tactics over the period of their operation and have been the target of restrictions and groundings in return. The civilian planes and the ground infrastructure they are connected to became unique sites for exposing state violations, and have thus emerged as a new focus of EU efforts to criminalize solidarity. Both European state authorities and civilian activist pilots deploy a range of tactics to variously expose and contain one another in contesting the border. These tactics include the deployment of law and regulations, the use of media and documentation, attempts to shape and color public opinion, and the use of technological aviation signals. Ultimately, these contestations have at their heart questions of visibility and invisibility, and the political role of the activist pilots as aerial witnesses.

The activist pilots and their crews and aircraft are tethered to broader humanitarian and aviation infrastructures on the ground and at sea, and also in the air. The pilots and their crews are connected to their own civil fleets (such as the ships of Sea-Watch and other maritime rescue initiatives), to volunteer operations such as Alarm Phone, and to the networks of migrant-led activist initiatives on the ground across Europe. Through the Alarm Phone, activist pilots and their crews are mobilized in liaison with migrants traveling in boats at sea, who phone in their coordinates when experiencing distress. The pilots and crews also liaise with state actors, including the Libyan Coast Guard, and with pilots from Frontex and member state aircraft, as well as search and rescue (SAR) infrastructures such as Maritime Rescue Coordination Centers (MRCCs). At times this engagement with state actors is to advocate for rescue and advise state actors that the violations they are perpetrating are being recorded. But this engagement is also owing to the regulatory environment of flying—which requires pilots to communicate and coordinate to avoid collision—and also responds to SAR procedures that specify reporting obligations regarding ships in distress. The activist pilots are bound by these regulatory requirements in order to remain operational, and yet these requirements create complicated dynamics for the pilots in terms of their political commitments to expressing solidarity with migrants.

In the sky, the pilots are bound by legal and regulatory governance of the airspace, which requires them to engage and coordinate with other pilots. These governance measures include techniques of air traffic management (ATM) and various other types of technology that locate planes visually within systems of air traffic management. Weiqiang Lin has argued that these visual technologies make the sky more material, rendering it visible and therefore governable.¹⁷ While the key focus for the activist pilots is violations by state actors, the Mediterranean is a crowded space where all sorts of private¹⁸ and nonstate actors (including militia group Tareq Bin Zeyad)¹⁹ are also engaged in various alliances contesting migration politics.

Activist pilots representing each of the three organizations conducting civilian aerial surveillance were interviewed as part of this research.²⁰ Each of the pilots had a founding position within their organization and was also an active pilot undertaking civilian aerial surveillance. We had been connected through a mutual friend who knew the pilots through their collective involvement in European activism around border violence and volunteer initiatives such as Alarm Phone.²¹ These sorts of connections and gestures of trust by affiliation also form part of the extensions of solidarity's infrastructure. My interest in exploring these questions stemmed from wanting to understand what specifically had changed about solidarity politics and border struggles with the infrastructural and elemental shift toward the skies.

Infrastructures of Solidarity

Infrastructure is a site around which solidarities can cohere. The fundamental infrastructures needed to produce and reproduce our lives—from water, electricity, shelter, and sanitation²² to care practices, mutual aid, and informal welfare in times of crisis²³—have often been the locus of community-building and solidarity struggles. Solidarity itself has been understood as an infrastructure of social and communal life, as Athina Arampatzi, Hara Kouki, and Dimitris Pettas suggest in their examination of mutual aid efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that such forms of care maintain and organize social life.²⁴ Infrastructures, like logistical chains, also lend themselves to modes of resistance, disruption, and appropriation.²⁵ These forms of disruption and appropriation can take the form of citizens or marginalized populations making claims upon infrastructures that generally are controlled by the state.²⁶ Thinking solidarity through the lens of infrastructure highlights the role of material relations in political life.²⁷ While attending to the materiality of infrastructural forms, this does not mean doing away with concepts like power, state, capitalism, race, or democracy in favor of networks and assemblages.²⁸ Rather, infrastructure's materiality is one of the many qualities that constitute its power. These material properties work in a “mutually structuring” way with infrastructure's symbolic, affective, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions.²⁹

The Mediterranean Sea is one site where “powerful states can both inflict violence and deny they have done so,”³⁰ which raises the question of who bears witness and gathers evidence of these crimes. Reflecting on the work of the research agency Forensic Architecture,³¹ Eyal Weizman has explained how the easy capture and dissemination of digital data through new technologies has “expanded the capacity to bear witness,” while also simultaneously transforming and eroding the meaning of testimony.³² Through this enhanced capacity to bear witness, activist imagery and documentation can be gathered and disseminated at accelerated speed, as we have seen recently with Palestinians’ recording and dissemination of devastating footage out of Gaza in real time. The activist pilots, engaged in this sort of “forensic” evidence-gathering combine newer digital technologies with the relatively old technology of crewed aircraft. Through the combination of these technologies, the activist pilots’ evidence is able to reach public channels, despite the exclusive nature of the aerial gaze being available only to a select few. Weizman argues that such forensic engagement connects aesthetic practices, activism, and the evidence-based nature of science, which requires taking sides and defending one's claims.³³

The possibilities of civilian aerial witnessing are deeply entangled with the material factors of aerial surveillance. Unlike state surveillance, activist pilot operations are limited to daylight hours as they lack the resources for more sophisticated surveillance equipment, such as thermal vision cameras. On patrol, the civilian surveillance operations rely on daylight, the human eye, and binoculars to spot boats or signs of boats. The pilots believe that a well-trained, experienced crew can really “read the ocean surface” and even “spot much better than the military assets with cameras and all this stuff.”³⁴ There are a number of other factors that determine the likelihood of civilian operations identifying boats, including the weather and its impact upon the routes of boats, and the surveillance patterns and duration flown by the civilian operations. For the activist pilots, the air's elemental properties and the materiality of flying affects the choices they make, fundamentally structuring the ethical, moral, legal, and spatial dimensions of their practice.

While the aerial view is often theorized as a relationship of distance and estrangement that helps to enable certain forms of detached or remote violence,³⁵ activist pilots and their crews are positioned in a different type of downward-looking relationship with those below. It is a position of aerial solidarity—an affective and political investment in the distress situation being resolved, yet with a somewhat limited capacity to resolve it. In hovering above a sinking or capsized vessel, there is a sense of both urgency and radical impotency in relation to the act of rescue desperately needed below. One activist pilot compared the experience of being involved in rescues at sea to his current aerial role:

While direct sea rescue also requires the rescuer to witness distressing situations, it entails a sense of agency and a capacity for action. There is a proximity that enables the rescuer to pull people from the water with his hands, whereas airborne rescue allows him only to circle uselessly above. In this excerpt, the pilot considers the capacity of the human body to reach out and “pull people out of the water” and all the immediacy and intimacy of that direct action, in comparison to the infrastructural and elemental position he is cast into via his position in the aircraft. The activist pilot is not only constrained by the law and regulations surrounding aviation in general but is also constrained by the very materiality of this particular infrastructure moving through the air. It is the nature of the plane, its sealed cabin, its position within three-dimensional space, that places the pilot at an essential distance from the maritime event unfolding below. Any decision, any action, that can be taken within this event is constrained by the infrastructural and elemental conditions of flying. The material properties of the plane and the environment it moves through thus form part of the constraints—and all political action is constrained³⁷—and the limits upon solidarity.

The act of witnessing a boat in distress casts the pilots into a relationship that only intensifies as they approach the boat and make visual contact with its passengers. Not permitted to make radio or other sonic contact with the boat, the activist pilots rely on visual communication. The activist pilots and their crews can clearly see the people on board. They can count how many passengers there are, they can see their faces, they can see if they have supplies of food and water, and they can see hands moving and T-shirts waving to attract attention. At times the pilots need to fly low to get closer to the boat and assess the situation to determine how critical it is and to prioritize which boats need rescuing first. If the planes are low enough, they can also film and photograph the situation in more detail, which they use to advocate for urgent rescue. The risk of this, however, is that the desperate boat passengers may try more urgently and ardently to communicate with the plane—standing up, waving, and risking capsizing the boat.

While there is an intimate and embodied proximity entailed in sea rescues, the limitation of the plane-body in a rescue situation is its distance from the water's surface—the same quality that enables the plane to have a vast aerial view to spot the boats:

The materialities of aerial witnessing pertain not only to vertical space and the spatial positioning of the plane in relation to the water but also to the horizontal effects of the incessant churning and drifting of the dynamic ocean.³⁹ For those at sea, these oceanic movements, which from above appear as a topographical swirling of the waters, have the capacity to change the course of vessels and lives. One pilot recounted a story of a small boat carrying twenty-five people that departed Libya only to suffer an engine failure quite quickly. The boat drifted for eleven days, until “the wind slowly, slowly brought them back to the Libyan coast. . . . After eleven days, there were only eleven survivors.”⁴⁰ Exposed to the elements, being driven by the wind and the ocean's currents, fourteen passengers on this boat died of dehydration, drifting within the Libyan territorial waters—an airspace the activist pilots are not permitted to enter. ⁴¹ This story echoes that of the case of the 2011 “left-to-die” boat, where seventy-two migrants departed Tripoli and drifted for fourteen days in heavily surveilled waters before landing back on the Libyan coastline with only nine remaining survivors.⁴² Despite the vast surveillant capacity of the aerial vessels, the vertical view lacks the capacity to make the sea truly legible along the horizontal axis—the stratum at which migrants traveling in precarious vessels experience the treachery of the watery elements.

One of the pilots lamented, “We know that many, many boats, most probably thousands of people, have disappeared without anyone knowing about them.”⁴³ Such stories layer upon one another over time and highlight again and again the elemental nature of the border zone—where various human and more-than-human circulations in the air and at sea differentially harness, or are exposed to, the elements. This exposure can result in dehydration, drowning, heat exposure, or the ungoverned drifting back to the point of departure. The plane and its material capacities—its height, the nature of its environment—thus offers not only height and speed but also a protective capacity from the elements.

Boat wreckages and boat rescues leave only a temporary trace on the ocean's surface. For some wrecked boats spotted by the pilots, the remains have been inscribed by NGO rescuers with the word rescue and marked with a date. Where possible, boats are destroyed to prevent them from becoming “strange things, floating and becoming an obstacle, potentially dangerous for any boat passing in the night,”⁴⁴ and to prevent these already weakened boats from being reused. But for other boats, there is nothing—nothing inscribed to convey the fate of the travelers once aboard. The pilots are left with an encounter that is at once impersonal and intimate. As the elemental forces of wind and the water gradually disperse these objects further from one another, the pilots use a spatial measure of the objects’ distribution to assess the passing of time, to answer the question of when this event may have occurred.

The activist pilots are haunted by the unseen; not only the drifting ships that may go completely unobserved but also the spectral geographies of debris and personal effects that can tell only a partial story to which the pilots bear remote witness.

Aerial Witnessing and Its Limits

In carrying out civilian aerial surveillance, the plane becomes an infrastructure of witnessing. It is through the plane—its capacity for speed and height—that the pilots are able to bear witness to state violence. It is through the plane that they attempt to enact an ethics that always places them at risk of being implicated in the violence of the state and its weaponizing of the geophysical border against migrants.⁴⁶ However, without the plane, the pilots would not be able to apprehend the violence of the state, nor to intervene in it. In his work on nonviolent resistance in the context of Palestine, Stephen Frosh theorizes the role of a “witnessing third,” whereby this “third”⁴⁷ is “actively implicated in the injury caused by oppression and is called upon to do something about it.”⁴⁸ This “engaged witness” has an ethical imperative to take political action, “particularly when the witness is already implicated in the original injury . . . simply because of alignment and association with the oppressor.”⁴⁹ The activist pilots are thus already implicated, prior to taking to the skies, by virtue of being European, given Europe's role in historical and contemporary imperial formations, including current border control mechanisms and successive immigration policies. For Michael Rothberg, thinking about the “implicated subject” offers a new way to think about violence, inequality, and historical and political responsibility beyond the dyad of victim/perpetrator.⁵⁰ Implicated subjects inherit and benefit from systems of domination and histories of harm without occupying control centers in such regimes of power. Rothberg argues that recognizing the implicated subject means “recalibrating our understanding of responsibility for violence,” which can also lead to new forms of “long-distance solidarity.”⁵¹ The activist pilots thus recognize their position as implicated subjects—Europeans with high degrees of mobility, including the capacity to fly—and seek to redeploy this position via acts of solidarity, however constrained.

Among the constraints placed upon their expressions of solidarity is the regulatory governance of both aviation and SAR regimes. By taking to the skies, the pilots are able to cover a huge distance and utilize the aerial vantage point to identify migrant boats in distress that they would not otherwise be able to observe from NGO ships. However, the legal regime of Search and Rescue requires the activist pilots to immediately report any identified boats to the relevant MRCC. The activist pilot crews are forbidden by SAR regulations from communicating directly with any nearby boats via radio to coordinate a rescue of the distressed vessel. Instead, they are required by SAR regulations to report the vessel to the relevant MRCC to assign the rescue/interception.

When they spot a boat, the activist pilots report the coordinates and conditions of the boat to the relevant MRCC, which is usually Libya, Italy, or Malta. This reporting of the distressed boat logs the precise time at which the authorities were made aware of the case and allows activists to track the responsiveness of authorities. By strictly following SAR protocols and reporting cases to the MRCC, the activist pilots hope to create legal and procedural pressure for the MRCC:

Due to European coordination with Libya, reporting boats to the MRCC (whether the Italian, Maltese, or Libyan MRCC) is likely to result in the MRCC contacting the Libyan Coast Guard and forcibly returning the boat's passengers to Libya. In this scenario, the activist pilots have wrestled with the ethical question of whether their surveillance and reporting practices place migrants at additional risk of being apprehended and returned to Libya. Most of the boats they identify are located within Libya's extensive SAR zone, an area that Libyan authorities would be unable to cover without working in coordination with Italian and other European state aerial assets. By surveilling within the Libyan SAR zone, the activist pilots risk catalyzing the interception and return of people to Libya. At the same time, if the activist pilots strategically plan the geographic scope of their surveillance to avoid identifying boats until they get close enough to European shores, they may fail to see a boat in distress and its passengers may drown. One pilot reflected upon their role in intervening in the trajectory of these vessels:

It is clear for the pilots that the enhanced role of the Libyan Coast Guard in cooperation with European aerial surveillance since 2017 has changed the likely outcomes for those attempting to make the crossing. The pilot below implies that in 2016, reporting a boat in distress would result in a European rescue, whereas in the period of aerial-maritime coordination with the Libyan Coast Guard, the pilots would consider not reporting a boat if it's not in distress:

By not reporting a boat, they also risk that it may capsize and its passengers drown:

The witnessing “third,” according to Benjamin, plays a key role in the “perpetrator-victim” or “oppressor-oppressed” relationship, as if the third point in a triangle.⁵⁷ Depending upon the position assumed by the witness, the third point moves, and the triangle changes its shape.⁵⁸ In this case, if the activist pilots change position in relation to information sharing, they can alter the relationship between perpetrator and victim of border violence. The core of their civilian surveillance mission is to see boats, and yet they have an uncomfortable and ambivalent relationship with determining the migrants’ fate, with the implied violence attached to any decision. The pilots expressed their constrained agency and the ways they are implicated in different forms of violence, regardless of whether or not they choose to report the boat.⁵⁹

The pilots, by virtue of their position as aerial witnesses located within a web of regulations, are locked into two different poles of violence. On the one hand, if they choose to ignore a boat and not report it, hoping that it might safely reach European shores, they risk being implicated in a fast death, with the boat capsizing and the passengers drowning. They also risk their operations being shut down altogether if they fall afoul of regulations that require them to report. On the other, if they report the boat to the authorities, as they are required to do under the SAR regime, they worry their reporting may trigger an interception by the Libyan Coast Guard that returns the migrants to Libya, where they may face the fast violence of detention, torture, or death,⁶⁰ or the slow attritional violence of poverty and a potential forced return to their country of origin. For the pilots, there is no decision the witness can make that does not risk being implicated in the border's violence. As Frosh notes, the third party is inevitably and inescapably part of the system.⁶¹

Ultimately, this risk is a calculated one, where the stakes of different expressions of solidarity are weighed. One activist pilot explained the reason they continue their operations in spite of these risks:

For the activist pilots, search and rescue regulations of aviation limit their scope for action. The proscriptions of the SAR regime obligate them to report boats to the relevant MRCC. Thus, it is the same aerial infrastructure that facilitates their witnessing and their intention of preserving the life of the other that also places them within a set of regulatory constraints. The tight regulations surrounding civil aviation mean that if they do not adhere to the requirements of the SAR regime, their aircraft can be grounded by the authorities. In this way, the pilots are caught up in the more general predicament that humanitarian and solidarity interventions always face, which is the risk of stabilizing—and even giving legitimacy to—situations of violence.

The spatial properties and infrastructural capacities of the plane offer both height and speed, which propel activist pilots and their crews into the position of witness. While civil aviation provides the witness position, it is a position that demands its occupants make decisions in relation to maritime vessels below. These decisions directly implicate activist pilots within the life-and-death stakes of border governance and border violence, where their actions are constrained by SAR regulations that require them to report identified boats to the relevant authorities. In addition to legal and regulatory constraints, the materiality of the plane and its infrastructural and technical limitations, along with the elemental nature of the air and the maritime environments, together shape the scope for solidarity actions via the plane.

Despite the various constraints placed upon the solidarity politics of the civilian surveillance operations via the regulatory governance of aviation and the legal regime of Search and Rescue, the aerial witness does not occupy a wholly passive position. In addition to the political value of forensic witnessing and documenting, and what this might mean in terms of outcomes for migrants and holding the state accountable for violations, the activist pilots also lay claim to aerial infrastructure in novel ways. State and corporate actors have long monopolized civil aviation and the aerial view, and via their surveillance operations, the activist pilots intervene and challenge this dominance. While these types of small civilian aircraft are generally licensed for tourism and sightseeing cruises, infrastructure routinely exceeds the purposes for which it has been constructed and thus becomes a constant political battleground. Here, aviation infrastructure is not merely a conduit for migrant solidarity activism that expands and supplements activism on the ground and at sea; rather, the infrastructure of aviation shapes the form that solidarity politics takes. In doing so, civil aviation infrastructure—which is usually itself implicated in exclusionary bordering practices through the regular functioning of scheduled flights worldwide—is recast as amenable to antibordering practices. The materiality of the plane's infrastructure is thus never neutral but always inherently bound up in its capacity for political action.

Notes

Works Cited