October NUI Galway Lecturer Publishes New Book on the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis

The book interrogates the human consequences of conflict and displacement, challenges the thinking of statist security agendas that divide the world into zones of sanctuary and abandonment, and reflects critically upon our interconnected global sense of precarity

NUI Galway Lecturer, Dr John Morrissey has published his fifth book, Haven: The Mediterranean Crisis and Human Security, which presents a transformative understanding of security in responding to the Mediterranean refugee crisis by drawing critically on the UN concept of ‘human security’.

From a range of Arts, Humanities and Social Science disciplines, and through case studies incorporating key governmental, NGO and refugee perspectives, the book critiques the major geopolitical, economic and social issues of the crisis. It documents the prioritisation of population management techniques that are underpinned by conventional territorial logics of security, before considering the alternative priorities of human security that can facilitate an active human rights framework and a more holistic and humanitarian interventionism.

In advancing a human security approach to the crisis, Haven: The Mediterranean Crisis and Human Security interrogates the human consequences of conflict and displacement, challenges the impoverished thinking of statist security agendas that divide the world into zones of sanctuary and abandonment, and reflects critically upon our interconnected global sense of precarity, particularly so in the Covid-19 world.

Dr Morrissey said: “Haven: The Mediterranean Crisis and Human Security was inspired by three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s tragic drowning in September of 2015. I was deeply affected by the photographs of his little body washed up and hauntingly alone on a Turkish beach. The book is dedicated to all those who have died in the Mediterranean over the last five years, and dedicated too to a determined calling out of our responsibility in Europe to safeguard human rights and human security for all.

“My thanks to the wonderful colleagues and graduate students who fed so inspiringly into an Irish Research Council project I received funding for in 2016. The book is a culmination of that project, and the contributions, which come from leading international writers, Irish Navy personnel, students and activists, reflect a deep empathy and concern for solidarity in an interconnected world – a world whose precarities have become even more acute and visible since the outbreak of Covid-19.”

Dr Morrissey is a Senior Lecturer in Geography, Programme Director of the MA in Environment, Society and Development, and Associate Director of the Moore Institute for Humanities at NUI Galway. He has published widely in the areas of geopolitics, security and international development.

His other books include: Negotiating Colonialism; Key Concepts in Historical Geography; Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis; and The Long War: CENTCOM, Grand Strategy and Global Security. His research has been supported by various grants, from the British Academy and UK Economic and Social Research Council, to the Irish Research Council and Clinton Institute for American Studies, and in recent years he has held prestigious visiting fellowships at City University of New York, Virginia Tech, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and Australian National University.

The book was supported by the Academic Council on the United Nations System, an NUI Publications Prize and an NUI Galway Grant-in-Aid Award.

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