In this episode of InsurgenSeas, we sit down with Daniel Powers, Lizzie Malcolm, and Stefanos Levidis to explore how the sea is being remapped from below.

Our conversation moves through the Flotilla Tracker as a tool of maritime activism: who builds and uses it, who it serves, and how it circulates within networks of solidarity. We trace the origins and ambitions of Forensic Architecture, unpacking its methods and political commitments to evidentiary practice against state violence. Together, we reflect on the power of mapping to make movements at sea visible, while questioning how visibility itself is shaped by the state’s surveillance gaze and migrant “mobility tracking.”

Turning to the tragic Pylos shipwreck, Stefanos shares insights into documentation efforts and the challenges of contesting state narratives and legal obfuscation surrounding responsibility for mass death at sea. The discussion broadens to “mapping from below”, who these counter-mapping practices serve, who their allies are, and how they reconfigure the terrain of struggle across maritime borders.

Finally, we pause to reflect critically on mapping as an aesthetic practice: does it risk beautifying suffering and movement, or can it hold space for political urgency without flattening lived realities?

A conversation at once academic and human, this episode invites us to rethink the sea as a contested archive where evidence flow alongside currents of control.

Link of episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIprW8-d10U

Notes:

In this episode, Kostas Fourikos, a filmmaker and activist, speaks to us aboard the Greek ship of the Sumud Flotilla, sailing south of Crete on its way to Gaza.

His life’s work moves between cinema, cultural organizing, and political struggle and on this ship, all of these threads meet.

We discuss the flotilla as a refusal of siege, borders, occupation, and genocide. From a country whose government conforms with the global order of domination and war, even when its people have showed histories of solidarity, Kostas reflects on what it means to resist within and against these structures.

Dr. David Featherstone is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow whose recent work has illuminated the radical geographies of solidarity, resistance, and internationalism. Building on Doreen Massey’s legacies, he has published widely on political ecologies, labor histories, and transnational movements, including co-editing Doreen Massey: Selected Political Writings (2022) and Revolutionary Lives of the Red and Black Atlantic (2022). His research connects the struggles of dockworkers, anti-colonial activists, and contemporary movements for climate justice, foregrounding how place becomes a site of possibility through collective action. At Glasgow, he teaches and supervises across political ecology and spatial politics, while his recent lectures speak to his commitment to making geography a practice of critical solidarity.

In this conversation, we touch upon the following points:

- The importance of maritime spaces and labour in relation to shaping forms of internationalism from below.

- The Interplay between past and present forms of maritime solidarities.

- Contested and ambiguous aspects of maritime spaces and labour especially in regards to racialisation and automation.

- Solidarity as a space of learning & exchange and challenging more top-down/one way flows of strategy and knowledge.

In this episode, Dr. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is joined by historian Dr. Isa Blumi and student Dina Al Amood for a powerful conversation on the Yemeni embargo in the Red Sea as an act of maritime solidarity in support of Gaza and Palestine.

Dr. Blumi explores the dynamics of the Yemeni embargo on the Red Sea, positioning it within a longer history of indigenous resistance and maritime autonomy. The conversation unpacks how the current blockade reflects the tactical response to the ongoing Gaza war, Blumi also discusses how Yemenis have long resisted external interventions through their continued relation to the sea.

Drawing on his extensive research, Blumi connects the embargo to broader transformations in the global political economy, while also emphasizing the significance of reading Yemen from the coast, rather than the capital. The episode invites listeners to consider how indigenous relationships to the sea open new ways of understanding sovereignty, survival, and solidarity in the age of maritime warfare.

In this episode, Dr. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos joined by student Roua Chakaroun speaks with Mrs. Huwaida Arraf, Palestinian-American lawyer, activist, and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement. Known for her work organizing the Gaza Freedom Flotillas, civilian ships that challenged the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, Arraf reflects on the political force of collective action at sea.

The conversation moves from the Mediterranean to broader oceanic geographies, exploring how communities around the world are using water not only as a space of livelihood but also as a site of protest, memory, and resistance.

The episode connects the daring voyages with other local struggles across the globe, tracing how voices from the oceanic frontlines are catalyzing a broader shift in the global landscape of resistance.

Listeners are invited into a deep, discussion that navigates law, activism, memory, and the sea as a battleground of sovereignty, solidarity, and hope.

Dr. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos, political anthropologist, associate professor at the American University of Beirut, amateur sailor and host of the InsurgenSeas project, sets the stage for a new conversation about oceans and the politics of oceanic change. Drawing from decades of research and activism around the sea, he reflects on how the sea is often seen either as an empty space, a state-controlled border, a new investment horizon, or a lawless frontier, but can be reimagined as a site of radical possibilities and community reclaiming. Why turn to the sea at all? What does it mean to think politically from the rising waterlines? Through stories, interviews, and theoretical provocations, Kosmatopoulos invites listeners into an unconventional way of seeing the seas: one that connects frontline struggles, deconstructs oceanic essentialisms, and breaks new floating ground for thinking and acting with the sea and its communities.