Research: The system of protection and control actors in the Sicily Channel: national coast guards, supranational agencies, NGOs.
This project fits in migration law and policy studies and analyses, in comparative terms, the principles, methods and results of the protection and control actors on the migratory route of the Sicily Channel. To this end, it selects as study subjects European coast guards (Italian and Maltese), North-African ones (Tunisian and Libyan), supranational ones (Frontex) and similar actors from the private social sector (NGOs that offer services of Search and Rescue). The study uses as timeframe the current situation, to outline a detailed and comparative picture of the system of protection and control in force. The work will be based on the collection of institutional and monitoring data, the conduction of interviews with the institutional and private stakeholders, the analysis of national and international judicial proceedings, and the comparative systematization of the literature on the issue, be it Italian, Maltese, Tunisian or Libyan. The research questions are indeed two: first of all, I want to understand in a systematic and comparative manner of who are the actors of protection and control on Sicily Channel and on the basis of which principles, methods and results they operate. Second, I want to evaluate if in the Sicily Channel the traditional institutional grammar of border control and migrants protection - partitioned according to the principle of territoriality, that has as its extreme feature the abandonment of subjects in spaces of exception from national and international law – has been substituted by new emerging systems of transnational public and private coordination, based on new principles, methods and results.