Democracy and the Bordered Horizon: Notes from the Other Side
Maurizio Albahari, University of Notre Dame
Overview
Abstract
Efforts against maritime or otherwise purportedly unwanted immigration are routinely pursued not only at sea and on the coast of EU countries, but also well beyond national and EU territory. In the emergence of what today is called border externalization, the Katër i Radës shipwreck (March 28, 1997) stands out in the pioneering context of Italian blockades and pushback operations. More broadly, Italian-Albanian bilateral agreements foreshadow Italian-Libyan and Italian-Tunisian agreements, as well as a panoply of other national and EU “deals” (e.g., with Turkey). Rather than halting or calling into question dubious procedures and unrealistic policy objectives, that lethal collision between an Italian warship and the Katër i Radës was used to further entrench and escalate a system that continues to produce “crimes of peace,” as I called them.
Following a basic outline of the events and their legal and artistic legacy, my overarching argument is that the surge in bilateral, “technical”, and intergovernmental agreements fostered, and continues to foster, a depoliticization and technicalization of (border) governance. For example, the surge of militantly bordering technodemocracy may allow governments and migration officials to avoid some of the judicial scrutiny they ordinarily face nationally, and to take costly decisions that remain opaque to the vast majority of citizens and media. At the same time, border externalization and the consolidation of emergency and crisis governance modes may reshuffle power relations between countries (or is it merely their governments?). In one example: the Italian establishment of detention/processing/repatriation facilities on Albanian soil points to historical continuities, discontinuities, and perhaps reversals of more or less stereotypical tropes of gratitude. Be that as it may, consolidated regional migration governance, the externalization of borders (and their internalization—more on this if space/time allow), and neoliberal governance more generally, shatter the political promise that, perhaps ephemerally, emerged across the Strait of Otranto as a plural, equal, and open space.
Introduction to the speaker
Maurizio Albahari (Ph.D., UC Irvine) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of Arts and Letters of Notre Dame University, Indiana, USA. He also serves as a concurrent Associate Professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs and as a Faculty Fellow at the Kellogg, Kroc, and Nanovic Institutes.
Albahari’s research, teaching, and public work focus on migrant and refugee mobility, as well as antiracist democratic engagements, particularly in the Euro-Mediterranean region. A political anthropology lens illuminates ongoing experiences and predicaments of borders, urban citizenship, and emergent democracy, tackling broader tensions between structural injustices and the decolonisation of European and Mediterranean relations. Related articles, op-eds, interviews, and chapters have appeared in a variety of social science, humanities, art, and global news forums. Albahari is the author of the book Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Recent reviews of the latter have appeared in venues including International Migration Review, American Ethnologist, POLAR, City and Society, International Political Science Review, International Criminal Justice Review, International Affairs, the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology, Human Rights Quarterly, Cultures et Conflicts, Social Anthropology, Migration Studies, Political Studies Review, the Boston Globe, Choice, and Times Literary Supplement. Email: malbahar@nd.edu.