Cover photo: ©Jonathan Cooper
The alarm was launched on April 5, from somewhere in the Central Mediterranean. A small boat departed from Tajoura, a town in the northwest of Libya, towards the EU shore. On board as many as 120 people: men, women, and children from Eritrea, Sudan, Syria, Ivory Coast, and many other countries. They paid everything they had to be here.
Suddenly their boat started taking in water. Panic erupted, the dinghy capsized. Yet another tragedy at sea. At least 80 people went missing while a merchant vessel and a tugboat managed to save 32 people, whom the Italian coast guard transferred to the Lampedusa island. The scene was being watched by a satellite, tracked by Frontex aircraft, and ignored by every coast guard that had the legal obligation to help them.
This is not a metaphor. This is a regular warm Sunday on the Mediterranean Sea.
The Mediterranean is the world’s most monitored stretch of water and, year after year, one of the deadliest crossing points. It has become the biggest cemetery of unknown people in the world. Since 2014, more than 34,000 people have died or gone missing crossing the Mediterranean—and 63,000 more have perished on migration routes worldwide. Most bodies were never found.
Nonetheless, the Mediterranean is also the site of some of the most consequential geopolitical contests of our era: a scramble for gas reserves, a power vacuum left by the fall of Assad, the precarious situation in Libya, a popular uprising in Iran redrawing the eastern arc of the basin, a fossil fuel race locking in climate damage for decades, and a growing confrontation between those who would close this sea to the dispossessed and those who insist on keeping it open.
This issue of Turning Point turns its gaze to the Mediterranean — not as a ‘migration crisis’ to be managed, nor as an ‘energy opportunity’ to be exploited, but as a living space whose contradictions reveal the violence at the heart of the current world order.
The Mediterranean has always been a space where empires write their ambitions in water. Our first article on this issue recovers that history, tracing the arc of piracy from the corsairs of the Ottoman era to the present day. The pirates were not simply outlaws — they were political actors, operating in the intersections of imperial contests, responding to the same dynamics of sovereignty, statelessness, and the exploitation of ungoverned maritime zones that structure the sea today. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes: the vacuum left by Gaddafi’s fall, the fracturing of Libyan sovereignty, the EU’s calculated use of that fracturing to externalize its border—these too are a form of governance by piracy, with the violence simply redistributed to those deemed expendable.
We will also examine what may be the defining energy contest of the Eastern Mediterranean: the gas reserves beneath Cypriot waters and the political architecture—alliances, pipelines, exclusions—being constructed around them. Cyprus sits at the crossroads of everything: a divided island whose southern government has become a pivot for the Greece-Israel-U.S. strategic triangle, while Turkey contests its maritime claims with naval force. The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum excludes Turkey, while Cyprus’s alignment with France, the United States, and the Gulf deepens by the year. First gas production from Cypriot fields is expected by 2027. What should concern us is not simply who profits from that gas—though that matters—but the broader dynamic: energy development is being used as an instrument of geopolitical alignment, fossil fuel dependency is being locked in for decades, and the ordinary people of the region—in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Turkey, in Cyprus itself—have no seat at the table where these decisions are made.
The gas also has another dimension that rarely makes it into the geopolitical analysis: the climate. The Mediterranean basin is warming roughly 20% faster than the global average. Wildfires, droughts, rising seas, and collapsing fisheries are not future threats — they are the daily reality for the more than 500 million people living along its shores. The wars that produce the refugees crossing this sea are themselves partly rooted in resource scarcity and climate-driven displacement; the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Syria — climate breakdown did not cause these conflicts alone, but it deepened them. And yet the response of European governments is to drill for more gas, to sign more energy deals, to treat the Eastern Mediterranean seabed as a resource frontier rather than a commons under threat. The same sea that buries the nameless dead is being strip-mined for the fuel that is accelerating the conditions that produce them.
Nowhere is this reshaping more volatile than in Iran. The mass protests that erupted in late 2025 — met with internet blackouts, mass arrests, and lethal force — represent one of the most significant popular uprisings the region has seen in a generation. A destabilized Iran, or a prolonged conflict with the U.S. and Israeli forces already repositioned in the Eastern Mediterranean, would have immediate consequences for the entire basin: shipping lanes, energy infrastructure, Lebanon, and the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. The people in the streets of Tehran are not an abstraction — they are part of the same arc of resistance and repression that runs from the Libyan coast to the Levant.
Another article brings us back to the sea itself, to the confrontation unfolding in real time between those who would rescue and those who would push back. In November 2025, thirteen European search-and-rescue organizations formed the Justice Fleet, suspending cooperation with Libya’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre after documenting at least sixty violent maritime incidents — shootings, hijackings, dangerous maneuvers — committed by the Libyan Coast Guard since 2016. The alliance’s formation followed the August 2025 attack on the Ocean Viking, in which armed Libyan coast guard personnel fired on the rescue ship in international waters, threatening to “kill everyone on board.” The EU expressed concern. The funding continued.
This is the obscene arithmetic of European border policy: hundreds of millions of euros to a fragmented militia force with documented links to human trafficking, in exchange for ensuring that the people drowning in the Mediterranean drown on the Libyan side of an invisible line. The Justice Fleet’s refusal to participate in this system is not charity — it is a political declaration. International maritime law requires ships to rescue people in distress. European externalization policy requires ships to let the Libyans intercept them first. The Justice Fleet has chosen the law over the policy. That choice deserves our full solidarity.
The Mediterranean is, in the end, a sea of connection as much as a sea of division. It has carried philosophers and conquerors, traders and refugees, revolutionaries and empires, in both directions for five thousand years. The forces working to militarize it, to privatize its seabed, and to turn it into a moat are powerful. But they are not unopposed. The crew of the Ocean Viking, the activists of the Justice Fleet, the communities resisting dispossession from the Levant to the Maghreb these are also Mediterranean stories. They are the ones we want to tell.
