Borders within. An Ethnographic Take on the Reception Policies of Asylum Seekers in Alto Adige/South Tyrol

Abstract

Recent developments in border crossings, commuter migration trajectories, secondary movements, forced mobility and the involuntary settlement of populations on and across the edges of nation-states within Europe and at its sea and land thresholds, have urged border scholars to rethink the theoretical and analytical tools used to describe this "multilevel complexity of borders". This has meant a "processual turn" in analysing how borders and «border regimes» (Fontanari 2017), conceived of as "practices of bordering/border-making", are created (Paasi 1998; van Houtum, van Naerssen 2002; Newman 2006). 2 Autochthonous and migrant populations, ideologies, policies, narratives and daily practices, as well as classificatory processes promoted by institutional and nongovernmental actors such as those operating in the communication and public service sectors, all foster the development of bordering processes. The processual approach to borders has turned out to be particularly salient when it comes to capturing the complexity of those informal settlements inhabited by wandering migrants such as "the Jungle" of Calais or the towns of Šid in Serbia, Bihać and Velika Kladuša in the Bosnian canton of Una-Sana, and the Italian municipalities of Ventimiglia and Bolzano, all located at the gateways of migrant trajectories. The understanding of the dynamics Borders within. An Ethnographic Take on the Reception Policies of Asylum Seek...