Nestled between the Republic of Malta and Tunisia, the Isle of Lampedusa sits south of the southernmost part of Italy and seventy miles off the coast of Tunisia. Since 2000, the island has experienced several episodes of large scale influxes of people arriving from the African continent (Council of Europe 2011). However, it was in 2013 that Lampedusa started to hit the international news, as it became a hotspot for entry into the European Union. On 3 October 2013, a boat carrying an estimated 500 people, mainly Eritreans, left Libya and capsized claiming 359 lives, in what was the start of a large scale crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean (BBC News 2013). The island again hit the headlines when on 12 April 2015, 400 people on a boat launched from Libya drowned off the coast; 19 April saw 650 people drowning when their boat capsized south of Lampedusa; and a day later, on 20 April, 800 people drowned in the largest recorded Mediterranean shipwreck (BBC News 2015a). In the space of a week, approximately 1,600 people had perished trying to reach Europe. As 2015 progressed, there would be over 1 million sea crossings, starting with the southern Mediterranean routes, but with the intensifying conflict in Syria a new hot spot emerged in the Aegean sea, between Turkey and Greece.

By mid-2015, refugees as a topic were beginning to hit the international press with harrowing accounts emerging. The media documented the movement of individuals in and around the European Union, reporting on shipwrecks, drowning and mass deaths as well as conveying the images of individuals walking along newly erected borders in Hungary, seeking access to the European Union. At the same time though, there were increases in flows from the southern Mediterranean. The movement of refugees and migrants from states such as Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia led to mass tragedies unfolding in the Mediterranean, whilst all the while the European Union struggled to grapple with the scale and enormity of the situation on its doorstep. Instead, the European Union has implemented policies of border controls, focusing on what it termed pull-factors – factors viewed as encouraging individuals to make such journeys (Mediterranean Migration Research Project).