Alpine Border Conflicts

This book focuses on the effects of the EU and intra-EU border regime not only on migrants but also on receiving societies, in terms of social and political polarization.

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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”.