Unauthorized migration has become one of the most visible and contentious political issues everywhere. As the catastrophe in Syria unfolds, the more ordinary atrocity of abject poverty continues to uproot populations. Perhaps the most alarming images related to this phenomenon are those of unauthorized migrants crossing the sea in insecure vessels. For years newspapers have been publishing photos of migrants' boats from locations as far from each other as the Canaries and Indonesia. These rickety vessels are overloaded with men, women, and children, drifting upon vast expanses of water. The spectacle has reached a new extreme in two areas of the Mediterranean – the Aegean Sea and the Waterway between Sicily and North Africa. Sunbathers confront exhausted survivors pulling themselves out of the water. Fishermen fear they might lift dead bodies with every fresh net pulled aboard. The most iconic of these images is the widely circulated photograph of a Syrian toddler lying face down on the beach in the Turkish resort town of Budrum. This macabre shot immediately went viral and within hours the hashtag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik – “humanity washed ashore” – became the top trending topic on Twitter. A few days later, the image of the boy – his name became a matter of some dispute – was cast as a symbol of our times. This book aims to give an answer to one question: What can the phenomenon these images capture tell us about the nature of legality?

It will come as no surprise that the contemporary migration crisis and its maritime aspects are a matter of some significance to legal theory, particularly international legal theory. As Hilary Charlesworth wryly observed, “International lawyers revel in a good crisis.” Crisis becomes a focal point particularly in a genre of international law characterized by a desire for “a counterweight to the formalism of the study of rules.” Indeed, it has been suggested that for the international lawyer crisis plays the role precedents play in the case method. As a so-called discipline of crisis, international law has often been exposed to a number of recurring pitfalls that seem to come with this fraught territory. These might be characterized as a certain penchant for drama.