PirateCare
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## Context
„Piracy in the early eighteenth century was, at bottom, a struggle for life against socially organized death.“[^1] This definition of piracy, however, was surely not the one that former Italian minister of interior Matteo Salvini had in mind, when he proclaimed "yet another act of Piracy by an outlaw organization", in June 2019, after the crew of Sea-Watch 3 had rescued 52 people from a rubber boat in distress.[^2] And yet, the struggle that has been going on for five years in the central Mediterranean Sea is just that; a struggle for life against socially organized death. European states have created a zone at their margins, where all their proclaimed values, their human and civil rights are suspended: A state of exception that reduces the sea to a weapon, people to bargaining chips – and the fluid southern frontier of EUrope to the deadliest border in the world.[^3]
> Piracy in the early eighteenth century was, at bottom, a struggle for life against socially organized death.[^1]
This definition of piracy, however, was surely not the one that former Italian minister of interior Matteo Salvini had in mind, when he proclaimed "yet another act of Piracy by an outlaw organization", in June 2019, after the crew of Sea-Watch 3 had rescued 52 people from a rubber boat in distress.[^2] And yet, the struggle that has been going on for five years in the central Mediterranean Sea is just that: a struggle for life against socially organized death. European states have created a zone at their margins, where all their proclaimed values, their human and civil rights are suspended; a state of exception that reduces the sea to a weapon, people to bargaining chips – and the fluid southern frontier of EUrope to the deadliest border in the world.[^3]
The European activists who oppose this state of exception are of course neither pirates in the historical, nor in the legal or ideational sense: If, according to Markus Rediker, historical piracy was a (class) struggle for the pirate's own life, which presupposed sheer defiance of death itself[^4], then civil sea rescue activism is primarily a fight in solidarity, starting off from the privileged position that it is not the activist's own life that is at stake. Nonetheless, the parallels that Matteo Salvini's repeated accusations of piracy unintentionally point to can't be ignored when looking at civil sea rescue as an act of pirate care: "the term pirate has been highly ideological from antiquity forward, functioning more or less as the maritime equivalent of barbarian—that is, anyone who was an enemy of the Romans."[^5]