From Samos to Tenerife: "Securitarian" Turn in the Logistical Control of Migration at the Gateway to the Mediterranean Sea
From Samos to Tenerife: "Securitarian" Turn in the Logistical Control of Migration at the Gateway to the Mediterranean Sea
Tuesday, 8 July 2025
Location: SJES024 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Distributed Paper
Recent solutions of management of migratory movements towards Europe and the governance of the spaces of containment and confinement-especially of refugees and asylum seekers - suggest a strong “securitarization” and “de-humanitarization” of “othering” and “bordering” practices (Stierl, Dadusc 2021, Heller, Pezzani, Stierl 2023), and advance the idea of a structural “necropolitical sacrificability” of people on the move (Fabini, Firouzi Tabar 2023).
The recent European Pact on Asylum and Migration, Italy's restrictive asylum and reception laws, the structural segregation of thousands of migrants on Greek islands, the staggering number of people who have died in the last year on the Atlantic route, and the deportations of migrants from Italy to Albania's new detention centers are just a few examples of this repressive torsion.
Two ethnographic researches carried out on the islands of Tenerife and Samos, both located at the center of important migration routes to Europe, confirm this trend, but at the same time show empirically how even the harshest forms of socio-spatial confinement do not simply aim to exclude migrants from the European space, but on the contrary foster new forms of “logistical” management and violent subaltern living conditions.
The hypothesis advanced therefore is that even the most radical processes of criminalization, segregation, marginalization and social abandonment are functional to new, increasingly authoritarian and violent processes of “production of subjectivity” functional to ensure the most suitable forms of “differential inclusion” of migrants in territories within the current continental and global conjuncture (Mezzadra, Neilson 2013, De Genova 2013, Cutitta 2016).
These researches have chosen to take the counter-conducts and resistances enacted by migrants as an interpretative lens of the power mechanisms identifiable in these contexts.
The recent European Pact on Asylum and Migration, Italy's restrictive asylum and reception laws, the structural segregation of thousands of migrants on Greek islands, the staggering number of people who have died in the last year on the Atlantic route, and the deportations of migrants from Italy to Albania's new detention centers are just a few examples of this repressive torsion.
Two ethnographic researches carried out on the islands of Tenerife and Samos, both located at the center of important migration routes to Europe, confirm this trend, but at the same time show empirically how even the harshest forms of socio-spatial confinement do not simply aim to exclude migrants from the European space, but on the contrary foster new forms of “logistical” management and violent subaltern living conditions.
The hypothesis advanced therefore is that even the most radical processes of criminalization, segregation, marginalization and social abandonment are functional to new, increasingly authoritarian and violent processes of “production of subjectivity” functional to ensure the most suitable forms of “differential inclusion” of migrants in territories within the current continental and global conjuncture (Mezzadra, Neilson 2013, De Genova 2013, Cutitta 2016).
These researches have chosen to take the counter-conducts and resistances enacted by migrants as an interpretative lens of the power mechanisms identifiable in these contexts.