Debordering Europe: Migration and Control Across the Ventimiglia Region

254 Pages·2021·3.997 MB·English

by  Livio Amigoni, Silvia Aru, Ivan Bonnin, Gabriele Proglio, Cecilia Vergnano

MIGRATION,
DIASPORAS AND
CITIZENSHIP
Debordering Europe
Migration and Control
Across the Ventimiglia Region
Edited by
Livio Amigoni · Silvia Aru
Ivan Bonnin · Gabriele Proglio
Cecilia Vergnano
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
Series Editors
Olga Jubany
Department of Social Anthropology
Universitat de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
Saskia Sassen
Department of Sociology
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA
For over twenty years, the Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series
has contributed to cross-disciplinary empirical and theoretical debates on
migration processes, serving as a critical forum for and problematising
the main issues around the global movement and circulation of people.
Grounded in both local and global accounts, the Series firstly focuses
on the conceptualisation and dynamics of complex contemporary
nationalandtransnationaldriversbehindmovementsandforceddisplace-
ments. Secondly, it explores the nexus of migration, diversity and
identity, incorporating considerations of intersectionality, super-diversity,
social polarization and identification processes to examine migration
through the various intersections of racialized identities, ethnicity, class,
gender, age, disability and other oppressions. Thirdly, the Series critically
engages the emerging challenges presented by reconfigured borders
and boundaries: state politicization of migration, sovereignty, security,
transborder regulations, human trade and ecology, and other imperatives
that transgress geopolitical territorial borders to raise dilemmas about
contemporary movements and social drivers.
Editorial Board:
Brenda Yeoh Saw Ai (National University of Singapore, Singapore);
Fabio Perocco (Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Italy);
Rita Segato (Universidade de Brasília, Brazil);
Carlos Vargas (University of Oxford, UK).
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14044
· · ·
Livio Amigoni Silvia Aru Ivan Bonnin
·
Gabriele Proglio Cecilia Vergnano
Editors
Debordering Europe
Migration and Control Across the Ventimiglia
Region
Editors
Livio Amigoni Silvia Aru
University of Genoa Politecnico di Torino
Genova, Italy Turin, Italy
Ivan Bonnin Gabriele Proglio
Political Science University of Gastronomic Sciences
Roma Tre University Pollenzo, Italy
Rome, Italy
Cecilia Vergnano
Department of Anthropology
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISSN 2662-2602 ISSN 2662-2610 (electronic)
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
ISBN 978-3-030-56517-6 ISBN 978-3-030-56518-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56518-3
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Writing this book has only been possible thanks to the efforts of all the people
who struggle against the border regime, individually or collectively, then
and now.
It’s to them (and especially to those less privileged) that this book is
dedicated.
Foreword
The book you are about to read tells stories of abjection and resistance,
and it pits practices and struggles of mobility against technologies of
control, which also means a multifarious humanity on the move against
the shifting geography of a multi-layered border regime. The stakes are
high, as it is often the case at the border. Hatred and anger, violence and
exploitation are the prominent features of many borderlands,as we know
atleastsincethepublicationofGloriaAnzaldúa’sBorderland/Lafrontera
(1987). But that book also taught us to look at the border as a site of
often unexpected encounters, political and cultural inventions, emerging
forms of life. Such an ambivalence of the border is brilliantly explored in
the pages that follow, from multiple disciplinary angles and employing a
wide array of narrative techniques and theoretical frameworks.
The focus of the book is a single border, the French-Italian border
observed from the coastal town of Ventimiglia. This town is perhaps less
well known than other sites in or at the margins of Europe that compose
a specific geography of abjection, bordering and migrant resistance. One
thinks here, for instance, of islands, like Lesvos in Greece or Lampedusa
in Italy, of Spanish enclaves in North Africa, like Ceuta and Melilla, or
of the infamous ‘Jungle’, the migrant camp in Calais. Nevertheless, the
position of Ventimiglia within this geography is prominent. Since 2015,
the Italian border town has indeed become a crucial bottleneck in the
map of migrant routes across Europe. There is definitely a need to know
more about it.
vii
viii FOREWORD
Astheeditorsofthebookexplainintheirintroduction,‘manygeogra-
phies are at work’ in the making (and unmaking) of the borderscape and
border regime in Ventimiglia. Focusing on the juncture (and tensions)
betweenEuropeanpoliciesandnationalmeasuresprovidesoneimportant
anglefortheanalysis,whichneverthelessmustbesupplementedbyother
gazestomakesenseofthemultiscalaroperationsoftheborder,involving
bothhumanactorsandenvironmentalelements.Aboveall,thegeography
of border control clashes and intermingles with the spatial practices of
migrants, which connect Ventimiglia with the multiple routes into and
across Europe traced by their movements—with the map of what Luca
Queirolo Palmas and Federico Rahola call ‘underground Europe’. The
seeming stability of the border, a ‘line in the sand’, vanishes, while its
effects continue to be no less concrete, violent and even lethal.
While from a historical point of view there is no shortage of tensions
surrounding the French-Italian border in Ventimiglia, in the wake of the
Second World War it became quite a ‘normal’ intra-European border,
and even more so in the framework of the implementation of the
Schengen Agreement. Things began to change in 2011 with the arrival
in Ventimiglia of thousands of Tunisian migrants, who had crossed the
Mediterranean after the revolution up to Lampedusa and were trying to
reach France. French authorities closed the border, while tense negoti-
ations were going on between the Italian and the French government.
But the situation really escalated in 2015, in the middle of what critical
scholars and activists call ‘the long summer of migration’.
Theuncontainablemovementofhundreds,thousandsofmigrantsand
refugees across the Aegean Sea and the so-called Balkan route in the
summer of 2015 was indeed a moment of insurgent politics of migra-
tion (although at a tremendous cost), an opening that invited a radical
rethinking of the European border and migration regime, as well as of
the very relation of Europe with its multiple outsides. As we know, after
an initial moment characterised by widespread solidarity in welcoming
refugees from Greece to Germany, the European response to the chal-
lengeofthe‘longsummerofmigration’wasnotcharacterisedbyopening
anddemocraticinventiveness.Theoppositewasratherthecase.Wallsand
fences proliferated along borders in many parts of the continent, and
even free movement within the Schengen zone was restricted in several
instances in the framework of a re-nationalisation of border controls and
politics.ThisiswhatrepeatedlyhappenedsinceJune2015inVentimiglia,
transforming the Italian border town into a bottleneck for thousands of
FOREWORD ix
migrantsandintoacrucialsiteinthegeographyofEuropeanborderand
migration control as well as of migrants’ routes across Europe.
‘Secondarymovements’isthegovernmentalnotionemployedtograsp
andstigmatisethemovementswithintheEuropeanspaceofmigrantsand
refugeesaftercrossingan‘externalfrontier’oftheEU.Inthewakeofthe
‘longsummerofmigration’,acomplexsystemofcontrolwasdeployedto
control and stop ‘secondary movements’. That system includes the rein-
statement of border control at Schengen borders, like, for instance, in
Ventimiglia, selective police interventions on trains, at railway stations,
andspecificsitesofgatheringofmigrants(withtheinevitableuseoftech-
nologies of racial profiling), as well as the establishment of ‘hotspots’ as
institutionalspacesofcontainmentanddetention.Fromthelatterpointof
view,thegeographyoftheborderregimeinVentimigliaisstretchedonce
again, to include, for instance, the ‘hotspot’ of Taranto, in the South of
Italy, where migrants apprehended in Ventimiglia are regularly deported.
While the ‘hotspot approach’ introduced by the European Commis-
sionin2015specificallytargetscountrieslikeGreeceandItaly,prompting
the proliferation of border zones within their territory, an analysis like
the one pursued in this book allows to critically grasp the articulation of
the operations of the border regime in Europe and at the maritime as
well as at the land ‘external frontiers’ of the EU. The steady closure of
legal entry channel to the EU has been accompanied over the last years
by a reinforcement of border control both across the so-called Balkan
route and in the Mediterranean, where the EU-Turkey deal in March
2016 has made passage across the Eastern Mediterranean almost impos-
sible and the Civil War in Libya has cast a bloody shadow on Central
Mediterranean crossings. Moreover, ‘external frontiers’ of the EU have
been increasingly ‘de-humanitarised’ as a result of a process of criminali-
sation of NGOs pursued by several national governments (including the
Italian). The border regime in Ventimiglia is in many ways articulated
withsuchprocesses,whichshapeinparticulartheborderexperiencesand
biographyofmigrantsandrefugeeswhohappenedtogatherintheItalian
coastal town since 2015.
While the book offers a grounded and detailed analysis of the opera-
tions of a single border, it also provides readers with a mirror, with a lens
that enables reading wider operations and transformations of the border
regime, at the ‘external frontiers’ of the EU and within its space. Even
moregenerally,theborderisnotmerelyaresearchobjectinthepagesthat
x FOREWORD
follow. It also becomes a methodic perspective on the tense and conflict-
ridden constitution of the European space, better still on the multiple
spacescontainedbythesignifier‘Europe’aswellasonthepoliticalstakes
surrounding the frictions and clashes among them.
Somethingremainstobesaidregardingthisbook.Allauthors,despite
theirdifferentdisciplinarybackgrounds,shareanapproachtotheanalysis
of borders and migration that could be defined in terms of a primacy of
movement. This is an approach that considers the challenge to borders
posited by migrants and refugees as the primary factor to understand the
operations and mutations of border regimes (that in a way take on ‘reac-
tive’ characters). From this point of view, the book joins the lively inter-
national discussion on the ‘autonomy of migration’, which is embodied
bythemanystoriesofbordercrossingandresistancethatreaderswillfind
in the following pages.
Needless to say, taking the ‘autonomy of migration’ as a point of view
on the border regime in Ventimiglia implies a clear political stance and
a specific politics of knowledge. Most authors of the book are involved
as activists in the multifarious forms and practices of contestation of the
border regime in Ventimiglia. They can therefore narrate in first person
thewidefabricofsolidaritywithmigrantsthatincludestheorganisationof
demonstrations and border camps, advisory and help in border crossing,
monitoring of technologies and actors of control. Moreover, they have
engaged as activists in sustained discussions with the local populations.
The participation in such activities and in particular the ensuing rela-
tions with migrants have built invaluable ‘sources of knowledge’. The
rigorous deployment of more traditional ethnographic research tech-
niques in several chapters takes those sources of knowledge as a basis
and leads to pieces of writing that are no less academically accurate than
politically committed.
Suchacombinationofresearchandactivismonbordersandmigration
nurtures many projects as well as collective and individual endeavours in
Europeandelsewhere.Thisbookispartofwhatcouldbecalledacollec-
tive attempt to translate into writing the challenge to borders posited by