Practices of externalisation in the time of COVID-19: the case of the Italian quarantine ships

The refrain, ’we’re all in the same boat’, which became a common response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and a reference to the global and apparently indiscriminate nature of the pandemic, was quickly revealed as a fallacy. Here, we take the space of the ‘ship’ to expose how people are, quite literally and metaphorically, in very different boats indeed. Our analytic focus is on two cruise ships repurposed as quarantine-ships under the Italian ‘emergency’ migration policy triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on two such ships, we present how these former cruise ships, devoid of their usual tourist passengers as a result of the pandemic, were transformed into sanitised, surveillance spaces in which migrants’ bodies were subjected to racialised biopolitical practices of control. These practices further externalisation policies, which typically relocate responsibility for refugee protection away from states that are signatory to the Refugee Convention.