A particular kind of humanitarian negotiation space? Negotiating the rescuing of lives at sea in the Central Mediterranean

Humanitarian negotiations have gained increased attention in recent years in the practitioner and scholarly fields alike. The attention has so far mostly been directed at negotiations in situations of armed conflict. Here, we approach the question of how humanitarians negotiate for access to rescue lives in a situation that is not one of armed conflict, but the European Union’s (EU) external borders, where migrants risk their lives in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. As NGO-led rescue operations are seen with suspicion, accused of facilitating migration to Europe, their operating space is severely reduced. How do they negotiate in distress situations at sea, to obtain access to European harbours to disembark the rescued? What ethical dilemmas arise, and how do they approach these? Following interviews with officials from various NGOs conducting Search and Rescue (SAR) at sea in the area between Libya and Italy, we find that most of our interlocutors see the overarching situation as a “non-dilemma” (to rescue is a must). Yet, in what is a severely restricted negotiating space, we still identify how some concerns are and need to be weighed against others, and how the SAR NGOs find ways to approach these.