“From One Shore to the Other”: Other Revolutions in the Interstices of the Revolution

This interview with Imed Soltani and Federica Sossi focuses on the campaign of the families of the missing Tunisian migrants, “From One Shore to the Other: Lives that Matter”. The campaign started in 2011 to demand that Italian and Tunisian institutions be held accountable for the disappearance of young Tunisian migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy. The campaign brought together the families of Tunisian migrants and the Italian feminist collective “Le Venticinqueundici” as part of a migration struggle that involves the entire region but is rarely taken up as a cross‐shore militant campaign. The conversation between Soltani and Sossi illustrates the strengths of the campaign and the difficulties that arose in running it across shores, and offers a theoretical reflection on the notion of political recognition in an effort to decolonise the gaze on what counts as political subjectivity and political struggle.     

Double opening,split temporality,and new spatialities: an interview with Sandro Mezzadra on ‘militant research’

Abstract

A militant research approach, Mezzadra suggests, should gesture towards a ‘double opening’: towards struggles on the one hand, and towards the production of concepts and theoretical innovation on the other. Mezzadra defines militant investigation as ‘the ability to localize and consolidate the possibility for ruptures’ and as a practice that does not take the meaning of ‘political struggle’ for granted. Building on the ‘within and against’ militant posture of the Italian Workerist tradition, Mezzadra reflects on the split temporality of militant investigations and on the contested spaces of a political epistemology of migrations.     

Towards a history of the geometric foundations of mathematics

Many XIX^th century «geometers»—such as Bernhard Riemann, Hermann von Helmholtz, Felix Klein, Riccardo De Paolis, Mario Pieri, Henri Poincaré, Federigo Enriques, and others—played an important role in the discussion about the foundations of mathematics. But in contrast to Euclid's ideas, they did not simply identify “physical space» with the «space of the senses». On the basis of our experience in space, they intended to determine the main properties of space and put them at the very foundation of geometry. The axioms of geometry were hence based on active knowledge of space and were not aa priori, as in the case according to kantian philosophy. Moreover, in the last decade of the century some Italian mathematicians—De Paolis, Gino Fano, Pieri, and others—founded the concept of number itself on geometry, by using results of projective geometry. Arithmetic, was then founded on geometry and not reversely, as David Hilbert tried—without success—to do some years later.     

Challenging the discipline of migration: militant research in migration studies,an introduction

Abstract

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a proliferation of studies on migrations that, taking human mobility as their focus, contributed to the profiling of migrations as an object of research and to the institutionalization of its stakes. While, on the one hand, this has coincided with the becoming a discipline of migrations (i.e. their acquiring the status of a specific field of scholarly knowledge), it has, on the other hand, coincided with a disciplinarization of migrations themselves, a sort of disciplining effect of migrations' contested politics at the very moment of their academic heyday. This contribution interrogates the discipline of migrations as an academic domain of knowledge, as the governmental conduct of mobility, and as the governmentality at the intersection of these two layers.     

Migration discipline hijacked: distances and interruptions of a research militancy

Abstract

In this paper we reflect on some instruments to interrupt the governmentalization of knowledge production at play in migration studies – mainstream, critical, and radical alike. We take knowledge production as the struggle-field where confronting, resisting, and interrupting the disciplining of migrations that arises from their academic and governmental incorporation as objects (of research and of policies). In contrast, we sketch a political epistemology of migrations, asking: which knowledge practices and interventions account for the contestedness migrations spark, and for the turbulence, excess, and upheavals migrants trigger? The paper discusses two of such paths. First, we sketch an approach to research that works ‘within and against’ the distances that perform and define migration field-sites and their pristine subject positions; second, we argue for the development and deployment of interruptions against those unquestioned chains of equivalences that are embedded in migration knowledge. Building on our engagement with Libyan war refugees in Tunisia and in Italy, we reflect on how these instruments somehow bring scholarly knowledge to its limits while working within its premises.     

Mediterranean Struggles for Movement and the European Government of Bodies: An Interview with Étienne Balibar and Nicholas De Genova

The conversation between Étienne Balibar and Nicholas De Genova engages with the Mediterranean of migration as a multifaceted, productive, and contested space, which can represent a counterpoint to a deep‐rooted Eurocentric imaginary. Looking at the Mediterranean as a space produced by the mobility of the bodies crossing it and by the combination of different struggles, Balibar and De Genova comment on some of the political movements that have taken center stage in the Mediterranean region in the past few years and suggest that the most important challenge today is to mobilize a “Mediterranean point of view” whereby the political borders of Europe and its self‐centered referentiality can be challenged.     

Shifting Bordering and Rescue Practices in the Central Mediterranean Sea,October 2013–October 2015

This counter‐mapping project illustrates the areas of intervention of different operations geared toward rescue and enforcement between 2013 and 2015, including the Italian Navy's “Mare Nostrum” search and rescue mission, the EU border agency Frontex's “Triton” enforcement operation, the humanitarian interventions of commercial vessels, and the action of civil‐society rescue vessels such as those operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF—Doctors Without Borders). The project offers a spatial understanding of the Mediterranean border‐scape, the practices of rescue and enforcement that occur within it, and the risk of sea‐crossing at this particular moment. Through these maps, the Central Mediterranean Sea emerges as a striking laboratory from which novel legal arrangements, surveillance technologies, and institutional assemblages converge.     

The Humanitarian War Against Migrant Smugglers at Sea

This paper engages with the military‐humanitarian technology of migration management from the vantage point of the European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) “Operation Sophia”, the naval and air force intervention deployed by the EU in the Central Southern Mediterranean to disrupt “the business model of human smuggling and trafficking” while “protecting life at sea”. We look at the military‐humanitarian mode of migration management that this operation performs from three vantage points: logistics, with a focus on the infrastructure of migrant travels; subjectivity, looking at the migrant profiles this operation works through; and epistemology, building on the mission's first stage of intelligence and data gathering. Through this multi‐focal approach, we illuminate the productivity of this military‐humanitarian approach to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.     

Mafia doesn't live here anymore: Antimafia policies and housing prices

It is well known that the value of a house depends both on the physical characteristics and on some features of the neighborhood in which it is located. If so, organized-crime activities can significantly affect urban real estate values. Antimafia policies, in turn, can be intended as a tool to influence those external features. This paper compares the effects on real estate values of the two main antimafia policies implemented in Italy since the 1990s at the municipal level. While we do not find any significant effect of dismissal policies on house prices, we find a statistically significant effect of reassignment policies depending on the specific destination of confiscated property.