Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnography of reception centres for asylum seekers in central Italy, the paper broadens the analytical gaze on externalisation to account for the wider range of border management policies and interventions that are inextricably related to the so-called European migration crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Recent academic debates on externalisation tend to focus on the activation of border controls away from border lines for the purposes of migration management. They correctly emphasise the extent to which borders have become mobile in the attempt to tame human movement, operating away from and across national territories.

Yet, by framing the conceptualisation of externalisation and internalisation exclusively by reference to the border-migrant dialectic, these debates fail to account for a wider range of border management policies and interventions that seem instead inextricably related to such dialectic.

The paper addresses this inadequacy engaging with the themes of this panel through the prism of development, one of the most neglected processes in studies concerned with the so-called European migration crisis. Through an ethnography of Extraordinary Reception Centres in a central Italian province, it traces three trajectories of uneven development: a global one, explaining the structural context in which migration to Europe takes place; a regional one, emphasising the uneven process of integration of European peripheral states; a national one, underscoring the significance of uneven incorporation of Italian regions into the national space. Linking these three trajectories to border management policies and practices, the paper offers a spatially nuanced and historically informed conceptualisation of externalisation.