Key political and legislative developments related to immigration in Italy in 2019 were crystallised, represented and powerfully mediated in public debate by the Sea-Watch incident, which was emblematic not only of the politicisation of immigration in Italy but also of underlying paradoxes. One paradox is that migration flows to Italy across the Mediterranean attracted huge political and media attention despite being much smaller than migration for family or employment reasons. Another is that Italians' attitudes to immigration have generally become more favourable, although issue salience has been persistently high with important political effects. The third is that, while ostensibly driven by the intention of reducing undocumented migration, Matteo Salvini's actions as Interior Minister may lead to its increase and feed the problems his actions are supposed to address. While paradoxes of these types are evident in other destination countries, the commitment and political will to resolve them has further diminished in Italy in 2019.

This article, conceived as a mainly empirically based contribution, analyses a discursive context composed of 58 documents proclaiming Internet-related human rights drafted and launched by different actors between 1997 and 2015. The article hypothesises that a discourse on Internet-related human rights is being shaped, autonomous from the broader discourse on Internet governance. Therefore, differently from other scholarly works, it does not focus on the many initiatives aimed at defining principles for the governance of the Internet but only on those documents that specifically aim to proclaim Internet-related rights and freedoms. The article, first, analyses the findings of a software-enabled content analysis aimed at (1) identifying the key issues that dominate the discourse, (2) assessing the evolution of the discourse in the last two decades and (3) identifying the thematic priorities of different types of drafting entities. Second, it discusses possible research, policy and legal developments.

Complementing and challenging the existing literature on the Italian asylum crisis, this article develops an actor-centred approach to open the ‘black box’ of asylum governance, showing the constitutive effects of governance on the asylum issue. It then applies this approach to the case of the Veneto region in Italy during the recent ‘refugee crisis’. By doing so, the article, first, investigates the cognitive mechanisms that shape key actors’ asylum policy decisions. Drawing concepts and ideas from framing and sensemaking theories, it shows that, while there is certainly a strategic element that shapes actors' policy preferences, there is also a meaningful cognitive component in asylum governance. Indeed, it argues that actors' strategies are shaped, more than by anti-immigration public attitudes per se (as often assumed), by how political actors make sense of these attitudes. The article then applies SNA to examine how actors' understandings are located within and depend upon network relations and investigate actors' agency, power and interactions. It ultimately shows that local asylum policy outcomes are deeply influenced by the ‘politics of policy-making’, that is by power dynamics and how powerful actors position themselves, behave and mobilize their understandings. Finally, by examining the impact of policy outputs on cognitive micro-level mechanisms, the article sheds light on the interplay between the ‘regulatory’ and the ‘public reaction’ dimensions of the Italian asylum crisis, illustrating the relationship between public attitudes on migration, frame emergence, asylum policy-making, politics and public mobilizations in the active constitution of the Italian asylum crisis.

What does the research literature on refugee and asylum migration tell us about the impact of global norms and standards on the protection of asylum-seekers and refugees? Do we see the effective reach of global standards or do we see responses to be dependent on ‘local’ contexts? We conducted a systematic review of the literature across six case countries on two key issues in contemporary refugee governance: ‘mobility’ and ‘containment’. After coding 252 documents, we found that while ‘the global’ has an important normative and aspirational resonance and is an identified source of rights expansion and increased mobility, there is significant evidence for the ‘localisation’ of global standards on asylum and refugee protection. This has important implications for the diffusion of global norms and standards. Our results also reveal a strong focus in the research literature on ‘containment’ policies and on the role of state actors in developing these policies.