Overview

Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers’ mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states’ debt, the book focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. In particular, the book aims to challenge the idea of a supposed lack of morality of all non-white migration facilitators (derogatorily called “passeurs”), in contrast to white facilitators’ ethical and political commitments; and the supposed incompatibility between white workers supporting reactionary populism and the New Left’s “Welcome Culture”.

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9781666922134

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Reviews

This deeply researched and beautifully written book turns the spotlight onto the violence faced by racialised life seekers as they encounter and traverse Alpine borderscapes and asks the important question of what these experiences tell us about and mean for European society. -- Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives, University of Amsterdam

This deeply researched and beautifully written book turns the spotlight onto the violence faced by racialised life seekers as they encounter and traverse Alpine borderscapes and asks the important question of what these experiences tell us about and mean for European society. --Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives, University of Amsterdam

Author Information

Cecilia Vergnano is social anthropologist and is FWO senior postdoctoral fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, member of the Observatorio de Antropologia del Conflicto Urbano (University of Barcelona) and the Observatoire des Migrations des Alpes Maritimes (University of Nice).

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