Control and Abandonment: The Power of Surveillance on Refugees in Italy, During and After the Mare Nostrum Operation

Abstract

Migrants' daily arrivals to Italy's southern coasts and continuous shipwrecks in the Mediterranean have captured international media attention, producing a fixation on the scene of landing and a deliberate marginalization of what happens to migrants and refugees after the moment of landing. This paper aims to refocus analytical attention on the lives of asylum seekers after landing in Europe, breaking through the institutional silence that is cast upon the infrastructure of the camp, the logic of assistance and the bureaucratic waiting zone asylum seekers are stuck in. By documenting political changes in European and national policies, the paper reflects on the forms of institutional control and abandonment refugees are subjected to once they land in Italy, and are housed in the governmental camps and extraordinary structures which arose at the time of the Mare Nostrum Operation where strict discipline, carelessness, uncertainty and confusion intertwine.

Military-humanitarianism

“…Military-humanitarianism has long become a key migration management tool Tazzioli, 2016, 2017a andb;Loyd et al, 2016;Pallister-Wilkins, 2015 and 2017Williams, 2015. This has contributed to framing migration crises as situations to forcefully intervene on and, on the other hand, to performing operations of migration containment in the name of saving migrants.…”

“…From this vantage point, military-humanitarianism looks like a flexible technology that allows state-powers to zoom in and out of the body of refugees according to the political need of the moment. So, for instance, when the Italian militaryhumanitarian Operation Mare Nostrum was established, its bipolitical goal was the humanitarization of the shipwrecked refugee to be rescued from the waters (Basaran, 2015)-and eventually abandoned to various forms of destitution on land in Italy (Pinelli, 2017). With Operation Sophia the biopolitics of military-humanitarianism fences up and intervenes against the logistics of refugees' arrivals in Europe: refugees' bodies become, on the one hand, something to protect the EU from, to keep off shore, off the European shores, through the military-humanitarian warfare against the smugglers ferrying them there; and, on the other hand, bodies to be protected from smugglers' abuses.…”

Introduction: Mediterranean Movements and the Reconfiguration of the Military‐Humanitarian Border in 2015

“…Barbara Pinelli's contribution focuses on the workings of humanitarian borders after rescue at sea and on the mainland, directing analytical attention to the government of migrants and refugees after the moment of landing, and contending that migrants are the objects of constant monitoring and abandonment while at the same time having access to humanitarian procedures on land. This double move of both not letting people die and blocking them in place is the result of asylum policies and administrative procedures, Pinelli () contends, focusing on the Dublin III regulations in particular. The paper reflects on the various forms of institutional violence refugees are subjected to once in Italy and documents their struggles and survival strategies.…”

Governing Global Displacement in Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Berlin's Refugee Housing Crisis

“…According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there is a distinction between refugees and asylum seekers. Despite rich contributions to debates about the urbanization of refuge (Darling, 2017;Ehrkamp, 2017;Sanyal, 2012) and its often violent articulations Pinelli, 2018), we know little about the material and socio-spatial dimensions of Europe's refugee crisis at the urban scale, where struggles over scarce resources -including affordable and permanent housing -come into sharp relief. In this article, I use 'refugee' to describe both groups of forcibly displaced migrants originating from what the German state considers to be 'unsafe countries', e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.…”

“…resources associated with provisioning for refugees in the countries of arrival (UNHCR, 2016). Despite rich contributions to debates about the urbanization of refuge (Darling, 2017;Ehrkamp, 2017;Sanyal, 2012) and its often violent articulations Pinelli, 2018), we know little about the material and socio-spatial dimensions of Europe's refugee crisis at the urban scale, where struggles over scarce resources -including affordable and permanent housing -come into sharp relief. As the Mayor of Barcelona put it: 'it may be that [federal] states grant asylum, but it is its cities that provide shelter' (Eurocities, 2016: 7).…”