4 690 migrants have lost their lives in the Mediterranean this year, making 2016 once again set a tragic record and the Mediterranean account for more than three fourths of all registered migrant casualties worldwide. In his most recent book chapter, “The Perfect Storm: Sovereignty Games and the Law and Politics of Boat Migration”, Research Director and Professor Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen argues that the current inability to adequately address the plight of boat migrants may perhaps best be understood as an instance of “the perfect storm”, i.e. a confluence of circumstances that in their sum aggravate a given state of affairs dramatically.
