Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescued over 110,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2015 and 2017. From 2017, EU member states and agencies increasingly criminalized these organizations, accusing them of ‘colluding with smugglers’ and acting as a pull factor. In this climate, as Italy, Malta and the EU increased cooperation with Libya to stop people from taking to the seas, many suspended their operations. This article explores the search and rescue efforts of NGOs in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2014 and 2018. We examine the criminalization of this NGO activity and argue that it is made possible through an oscillating neo-colonial imagination of the sea as mare nostrum and mare nullius, our sea and nobody’s sea, respectively. We build on the work of other scholars who have pointed to the activation of the Mediterranean as ‘empty’ in response to migration flows, erasing the historical connections of colonialism, empire, trade, and exchange in the Mediterranean as well as the contemporary legal geographies that govern the space. Here, we go further to develop the idea of a neo-colonial sea, which is alternately imagined as empty and ‘European’. We explore how NGOs disrupt these depictions, as well as the disappearing figures of the migrant and refugee amidst the contestations between NGOs and states.

非政府组织（NGOs）在2015年至2017年期间在地中海中部营救了11万多人。从2017年起，欧盟成员国和机构越来越多地将这些组织定为刑事犯罪，指责他们“与走私者进行勾结”并成为拉动因素。在这种气候下，随着意大利，马耳他和欧盟与利比亚加强合作以阻止人们出海，许多人暂停了行动。本文探讨了2014年至2018年间在地中海中部非政府组织的搜寻和营救工作。我们研究了将该非政府组织活动定为刑事犯罪，并辩称通过将新殖民主义想象中的海洋作为母马和母马，这成为可能。零星，我们的海洋和没人的海洋。我们以其他学者的工作为基础，他们指出地中海是对移民潮的回应，是“空虚的”，消除了殖民主义，帝国，贸易和交流以及现代法律地理学在地中海的历史联系。控制空间。在这里，我们进一步发展了新殖民海的概念，也可以将其想象为空的和“欧洲的”。我们将探讨非政府组织如何破坏这些描述，以及在非政府组织与国家之间的竞争中移民和难民的消失。