The Pessimism of the Shipwreck: Theorising Μigration in International Relations

Abstract

In ancient, and often modern, scholarship every human attempt to cross the sea is philosophically handled with suspicion and pessimism. Philosophers and poets, from Lucretius to Nietzsche and from Horace and Virgil to Voltaire, seem to question ‘sea-crossing as an imprudent if not blasphemous moment, analogous to contravening the inviolability of the earth, i.e., breaking the law of the terra inviolata’. As a result, contravening the law of the land and state cannot but lead to a shipwreck. This chapter argues that this tradition of pessimism towards the symbolic inevitability of the shipwreck is shared by mainstream IR in the ways it fails to challenge its state-centred certainties in migration theorising and deems migrant suffering and loss of life unavoidable in the European refugee crisis.