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The Gates of the Sea examines the paradoxes of maritime search and rescue at Europe’s frontier. Focusing on Spain, Luna Vives explores how governments have redefined maritime rescue systems towards border control. Unlike other European countries, Spain chose not to assign this responsibility to a militarized state security force, but to a civilian agency whose workers often liken themselves to firefighters of the sea: they are dedicated to saving lives, not enforcing borders. Caught between their duty to protect life at sea and government efforts to transform them into border enforcers, rescuers have pushed back, primarily through their anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT. Committed to border abolition and international solidarity, the rescuers’ struggle positions them within a global movement of resistance to the politics of organized abandonment along the external borders of the European Union. Vives’ revelatory, deeply researched and accessible book grapples with both state methods of control and containment and, crucially, ways in which solidarity activism can thrive in unexpected places.
Price: $32.00
Pages: 228
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Imprint: Fernwood Publishing
Publication Date:
16 September 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781773637662
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Geopolitics
“Nation-states have pushed the violence of their borders into the sea, causing a tidal wave of misery and deaths. It is poor, negatively racialized people who are increasingly left to die. This study of the small Spanish maritime agency, SASEMAR highlights the efforts of its workers and their anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT, to keep their mandate of universal rescue. Not all people have abandoned ‘migrants’ to the sea.”
— Nandita Sharma, professor and graduate chair, University of Hawai’i
“In this meticulously researched account, The Gates of the Sea explores the tensions between militarized border control and a universal approach to search and rescue at sea. Providing a historical and socio-legal context, the book traces the colonial, labour, class and economic forces that shape ideas that the sea can and should be conquered. Luna Vives provides us with case studies that clash, leaving us to ask who deserves the ethical and moral imperative to be saved in the open waters. An important work to read in our times to understand how the EU and especially Spain treats movement of people, whether migrants, tourists or citizens, differently, and how borders are a true fiction.”
— Jamie Liew, professor, University of Ottawa
“The Gates of the Sea is a truly remarkable book. With expertise, experience, and skill, Luna Vives weaves together her impressive findings and offers a serious advance in state-of-the-art research regarding the evolution of the Spanish Search and Rescue system in the context of sea migration.”
— Maurice Stierl, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University
“A book such as this will flourish in the world. Vives’ writing style bridges deep research and theoretical underpinnings with real world examples.”
— Petra Molnar, Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab, York University and author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
“The Gates of the Sea inserts the story of rescue not only into that of borders, migration and practices of externalization, but also the parallel and intersecting story of the geopolitics around oceans, and the history of both rescue as well as international law in that environment.”
— Sebastian Cobarrubias Baglietto, Universidad de Zaragoza
This is a powerful and provocative book. It deserves wide reading by academic researchers and students of migration across disciplines, and by officials and policymakers responsible for migration governance, not only in Europe but around the world.
— Belinda Dodson, University of Western Ontario
— Nandita Sharma, professor and graduate chair, University of Hawai’i
“In this meticulously researched account, The Gates of the Sea explores the tensions between militarized border control and a universal approach to search and rescue at sea. Providing a historical and socio-legal context, the book traces the colonial, labour, class and economic forces that shape ideas that the sea can and should be conquered. Luna Vives provides us with case studies that clash, leaving us to ask who deserves the ethical and moral imperative to be saved in the open waters. An important work to read in our times to understand how the EU and especially Spain treats movement of people, whether migrants, tourists or citizens, differently, and how borders are a true fiction.”
— Jamie Liew, professor, University of Ottawa
“The Gates of the Sea is a truly remarkable book. With expertise, experience, and skill, Luna Vives weaves together her impressive findings and offers a serious advance in state-of-the-art research regarding the evolution of the Spanish Search and Rescue system in the context of sea migration.”
— Maurice Stierl, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University
“A book such as this will flourish in the world. Vives’ writing style bridges deep research and theoretical underpinnings with real world examples.”
— Petra Molnar, Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab, York University and author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
“The Gates of the Sea inserts the story of rescue not only into that of borders, migration and practices of externalization, but also the parallel and intersecting story of the geopolitics around oceans, and the history of both rescue as well as international law in that environment.”
— Sebastian Cobarrubias Baglietto, Universidad de Zaragoza
This is a powerful and provocative book. It deserves wide reading by academic researchers and students of migration across disciplines, and by officials and policymakers responsible for migration governance, not only in Europe but around the world.
— Belinda Dodson, University of Western Ontario
Luna Vives is a political geographer and associate professor in the Department of Geography, Université de Montréal. She has a background in sociology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), geography (University of British Columbia) and social work (McGill). Her research explores how governments in the European Union and North America use borders to filter people and exclude certain groups of migrants. She has studied the situation of unaccompanied migrant children, the transnational mothering practices of Senegalese women living in Spain, the use of the “crisis” framework to push forward radical and costly changes to migration and border policy, and the standardization of maritime search and rescue systems in Europe. Her work has been published in several academic journals, including Geopolitics, Political Geography, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, International Migration, Criminologie and the Journal of Borderland Studies. She also contributes regularly to print media and radio. Her current research focuses on the use of drones and atmospheric and low earth orbit satellites to watch over the border.
Chapter 1: : Sea Migration and the Politics of a Manufactured Crisis
Chapter 2: : Defining Safety, Jurisdiction, and Responsibility at Sea throughout the 20th Century
Chapter 3: : The Origins of Salvamento Marítimo
Chapter 4: : The Western Mediterranean
Chapter 5: : The Canary Islands
Chapter 6: : The Rescuers’ Union: Resistance from Within
Chapter 7: : Epilogue: Death, Resistance, Hope