Naturalising ‘Black Spaces’ in the Mediterranean: Towards a Political Ecology of Bordering Infrastructures

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the terminology of border infrastructures as a way to enrich a multi-perspectival approach to territorial bordering processes that takes seriously their stratifying and racialising dynamics. Building on the analysis of migrant informal dwellings, or ghettos, which are increasingly constructed as naturalised ‘black spaces’ in the Mediterranean, the paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it calls for more situated research into the multiple networks, connections and agencies involved in bordering processes, which often comprise complex interactions across ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘human’ and ‘more-than-human’ boundaries. Second, it proposes to foreground the socio-materiality of borders-as-infrastructures by analysing how these actively reproduce a logic of separation in both a political and an ecological sense. The article pushes forward a more immersive understanding and methodology that is able to unearth the stratifying, racialising dimensions of contemporary borderwork across and within the confines of nation-state territoriality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this topological understanding ‘reach’ refers to the ability of the state to permeate everyday life and to make itself present in the regions ‘at-a-distance’, as Allen and Cochrane put it (2010: 1074): ‘reach, in this latter sense, is intensive; it is inseparable from the social relationships which comprise it’ – reflected in terms like ‘reaching into’, ‘reaching out’ and ‘drawing within reach’ (see also Allen 2011).

2. In their discussion of the political rationality of modern geological science, both authors try to initiate a discussion on the complex relationship between the social construction of ‘nature’ and forms of political rationality (Braun 2000; Grosz 2008; Yusoff et al. 2012). In human geography, their terminology has been applied in urban studies (Gandy 2002, 2004; Graham 2009, 2010; Graham and Marvin 2001; McFarlane and Rutherford 2008; Solis 2005) and, to a lesser extent, in the geography of warscapes (Graham 2004; Gregory 2011) and mining (for a discussion see Luning 2020).

3. In Brenner’s words, planetary urbanisation advances a territorially differentiated, morphologically variable, multi-scalar and processual conceptualisation of urbanisation under capitalism, arguing that ‘the development, intensification and worldwide expansion of capitalism produces a vast, variegated terrain of urban(ized) conditions that include yet progressively extend beyond the zones of agglomeration that have long monopolised the attention of urban researchers’. The research agenda involves casting light over the ‘ever thickening commodity chains, infrastructural circuits, migration streams and circulatory-logistical networks that today crisscross the planet’ that involve ‘colloidal mixtures of rural and suburban landscapes’ on national, international, continental, and even global scales (Brenner 2013, 15–16).

4. It is useful to note here that in the historical Greek city-state (polis), the eschatia was exactly that area along the city’s confines that served as a buffer between the city and its territorial outside, a marginal and not fully incorporated land only partially integrated into the formal system of production and reproduction (Constantakopoulou 2018; Horden and Purcell 2000, 80;).

5. A key contribution in anthropology has been Brian Larkin’s, who suggests redefining infrastructures as the ‘material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space’ comprising the ‘relational networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space’ (Larkin 2013, 328–329, see also e.g., Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018; Kornberger et al. 2019;). His definition builds both on the anthropology of colonial architecture and urban planning that considers the hybrid and fluid use of state infrastructures (see e.g., Mbembe 2001; Stoler 2008) as well as the burgeoning literature on so-called infrastructures of migration and their role in the reconfiguration of capitalist supply chains (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013; Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012; Tsing 2005, 2009; Xiang 2012, 2013).

6. ‘The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment’, Theresa May, then the UK Home Secretary, said in 2012, and the Immigration Acts 2014 and 2016 were designed to make it easier to deport people from the UK: Hicks and Mallet’s (2019, 7).

7. A similar paradigm that emerges in this context is that of ‘zoopolitics’, or the simultaneous construction of the citizen as the ‘proper’ human subject in spaces of migrant animalisation across Europe. Taking the example of Libya, where migrants are detained in human ‘zoos’, Vaugh-Williams proposes to rethink the separation between citizen and non-citizen along human and non-human (animal) lines – founding his analysis on Derrida’s critique of Giorgio Agamben (Agamben 2004; Derrida 2008). Again, the question Vaughn-Williams leaves unanswered is how this boundary between the human and the non-human (or more- and less-than-human) is actively constructed through socio-material entanglements, or infrastructures, that also take active part in their definition (see also Kazaal and Almiron 2021).

8. Next to its Medieval European orgins, where ghettos used to predominantly designate the circumscribed Jewish quarters of the city, the term has spread to the US and to West Africa, where, in the words of Loic Wacquant, it refers more specifically to the ‘(…) spatially-based concatenation of mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control’ in the context of American racial segregation (Wacquant 1997, 342; Wacquant, Slater, and Borges Pereira 2014). In Africa the term ghetto refers more broadly to makeshift dwellings occupied by migrants form the same ethnic and occupational background (Agier and Lecadet 2014; Hoffman 2007).

9. With its $5 billion reparations package (to be paid over 25 years, mainly by ENI), the Treaty favoured Italian infrastructural investment in Libya and increased cooperation on migration controls, leading to joint patrolling operations in Libyan waters and pushbacks. In 2009, the Italian government passed a law that criminalised undocumented immigrants as unlawful subjects (Law No 94/2009), and Italian border patrols systematically started illegally to drive migrants back to Libyan waters (for a discussion see Pradella and Cillo 2021).

10. On this issue, see Ruben Andersson (2014).

11. The results of this exploration are shared in the ‘Archaeology of a Frontier’ project on www.mic-c.org.

12. The displayed billboards and recordings of this public intervention are shared on the projects page of www.mic-c.org.

13. During a visit to the reception centre in the Summer of 2017, I counted 50 registered inhabitants on a total capacity of 300.

14. The legal reform (dubbed Piano Casa) proposed by the government of Matteo Renzi was commented by the director of the association Avvocati di Strada at the time: ‘Without residence, you cannot vote, you do not obtain health care, you cannot receive a pension nor benefit from local welfare, you cannot obtain formal employment, you are not entitled to legal assistance … [In short] taking away the residence permit from people who occupy a building literally means placing those people outside of society, making them invisible, erasing in one single shot the possibility to confront their difficulties’. (Godio 2021).

15. According to official numbers, the first level reception centres were already working at 24% over their capacity in 2014: Rapporto sulla protezione internazionale in Italia 2014. http://www.anci.it/Contenuti/Allegati/Rapporto_low.pdf (Last accessed: 23.10.2018; see also Novak 2019).

16. Minister of Interior, various reports, see www.interno.gov.it/it/stampa-e-comunicazione/dati-e-statistiche/sbarchi-e-accoglienza-dei-migranti-tutti-i-dati.

17. Since 2001, the Dublin regulations stipulate that so-called first countries of arrival need to take responsibility over the migrants’ asylum claims. This principle was further rebolstered in the 2013 Dublin III agreement with the official intent to counter ‘asylum shopping’ by incoming migrants from Northern Africa.

18. Apart from the ‘state racism’ the residence permit exemplifies (Foucault 2004, 254–261), the sale of fake residences has also been the object of an expanding parallel market in Italy since 2014: for a discussion see Gargiulo (2020).

19. see http://archaeology.mic-c.org/mulini-matinelle.

20. Quoted in The Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2010.

21. For details see http://archaeology.mic-c.org/borgo-boreano.

22. Interview 9 February 2017.