Paper short abstract:

This contribution aims to analyze the complex relationship between mobility and inequalities. By analyzing the Italian railway system, I focused on how the security policies related to migration have been reconfigured into those related to mobility; they are an important economical and political vector of control linked to citizenship's rights.

Paper long abstract:

Today, rail transport systems have seen important changes that have reorganized the patterns of possible movements of travelers, commuters and migrants, making evident power differentials between people on the move and between the territories themselves. This contribution starts on a case study of a railway line in north-west Italy and on an analysis of the railway system, in terms of business and policy management.

The intent of the contribution is focused on the inequalities produced in the context of mobility processes, mobility as a brutal fact (Cresswell, 2006).

Moreover, rail transport represents an important vector of control, since the mere presence of the ticket implies the possibility or not to move: it is on the one hand an economic but also a political possibility related to citizenship rights: the possibilities of movement of migrants are thus limited because they are related to the processes of identification and expulsion.

This theme, together with the "racialization of control", has led to a progressive security of the mobility apparatus and to the encouragement of security policies in the government of railway movements. Thus, on the one hand we see the integration of a "single" European network, by High Speed railways, on the other hand, a progressive exclusion of "marginal travelers", migrants, poor, indecorous.

The study of migration, as well as of "social exclusion", must therefore go through not only an analysis of long-range mobility but also the daily one, this brings anthropology towards new disciplinary relations involving new linguistic and theoretical approach.