The Origins of Iuventa
Like other rescue NGO's, the Iuventa was a direct action with a humanitarian mandate to save life at sea. But unlike many humanitarian organizations, the Iuventa’s project was expressly political.
It was rooted both in the broader struggles for mobility that marked the “long summer of migration” and in the period’s massive and protracted protests against austerity, neoliberalism and the policing of civil society within Europe itself.
These networks – which carried and sustained projects like the Iuventa – did not aim solely protect the human rights of migrants at sea. They were also attempts to practice and build upon the kind of solidarity from below that would involve migrants and Europeans in a joint project to reimagine a world beyond capitalist and imperialist exploitation. For many of us, these mobilizations promised the beginning of something that might change our lives as well.
Mobilizing around ships modeled the direct action approach of initiatives such as the Alarm Phone which had, since 2014, cultivated an extensive network of activists to assist migrants on their journey by phone and to pressure maritime authorities to perform their duty to rescue them. Now, activists organized to do the rescuing themselves.
Ships have long been spaces of alternative political imaginaries. When the Iuventa set sail on her first mission on 27 July 2016, she was both a powerful tool of direct action and a symbol of opposition to Fortress Europe that harnessed the energy and aspiration of a vast network that bridged older generations of autonomist Marxists and younger Antifa militants bred in the European counter-culture scene, anti-racist radicals and people who had never previously been involved in politics.
For the Iuventa, carrying to sea that militant tradition of direct actions meant not only rescuing people on the move, but forging political alliances that could help define a common struggle on land.