Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses the proliferation of different, but intersecting forms of containment and segregation implemented in contemporary Italy. The development of agro-industrial districts is shown to interact with specific migration routes and their control.

Paper long abstract:

The paper analyses the proliferation of different, but intersecting forms of containment and segregation implemented in contemporary Italy. The development of agro-industrial districts is shown to interact with specific migration routes and their control. Based on over five years of participant, engaged research in several such districts and among its migrant-worker populations, as well as in the countries of origins of some such workers (most notably Nigeria and Romania, but also Bulgaria) it shows how institutional labour camps and supposedly more informal shantytowns, where migrant farm labourers have lived for over two decades, are contiguous to asylum-seeker reception centres, but also to migrant detention centres and prisons, as well as to those "ghettoes" that litter the sub-Saharan migration route to Europe. Thus, the regime of mobility control and its employment of dispositifs of apartheid (which fragment and aggregate populations along ethnic, racial, gender and citizenship lines), become functional to the production and re-production of a cheap, disposable, just-in-time labour force and of its reserve army. The paper builds on analyses of the camp form and its critiques, especially those centred on the political-economic dimension. Thus, it theorises the contiguity of forms of containment with the proliferation of so-called 'zones' in which a multiplicity of power dynamics coexist and interact, creating borders, spaces, (il)legal apparatuses, which have complex genealogies that intersect slave-trade, colonial and plantation regimes. At the same time, such regimes are ever imperfect attempts at containing continuously resurfacing, protean lines of resistance and flight.