Insurgesea: Anticolonial Ships in the Contemporary Mediterranean
How could contemporary oceans connect struggles by indigenous people, grassroots social movements and racialized multitudes fighting against (neo)colonial formations at and via the sea? Can we discuss and rather locate decolonization in saltwater - beyond the celebrated focus on land, its material resources, and cosmological meanings? Can there be an anticolonialism that neither pursues the takeover of territory nor articulates itself within the fixed boundaries of the firm terra? Drawing on years of research and active involvement in sea-centered movements of solidarity and resistance in the Mediterranean, including efforts to challenge the embargo in Gaza and to support border-crossing refugees, this presentation impresses that indigenous-led practices that engage contemporary oceans can be rethought in ways that relate directly to the politics of radical social change and, in particular, the question of anticolonialism today.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Political Studies at the American University of Beirut. He is also the co-founder and co-director of the research and community work collectives FLOATS (Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at Sea) and Decolonize Hellas. He works at the intersection of global studies and politics, international political economy and the anthropology of globalization, Middle East Studies and Maritime Studies, and the study of human worlds in non-human environments, and particularly the oceans. His research has been published in Public Culture, Environment and Planning D, Antipode, Social Anthropology, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal for Middle East Studies, Third World Quarterly, Millennium, Peacebuilding, Social Analysis, among others. His book, Master Peace: Lebanons Violence and the Politics of Expertise, is forthcoming with Penn University Press.