Paper short abstract

This paper traces how the European fight against human smugglers has moved from visible border enforcement to the hidden realm of prisons in Italy. It adopts an abolitionist perspective to unpack enemy-making processes and challenge the naturalization of migrant illegality.

Paper long abstract

Over the last decade, the arrest of “human smugglers” has been a key element of the European border spectacle (De Genova, 2002). More recently, however, as disembarkation procedures have become more securitized and concealed, arrests at the border gradually declined (Italian Ministry of the Interior). By contrast, the number of people detained in Italian prisons for facilitating unauthorized mobility steadily increased (Italian Ministry of Justice). Moving away from the public spotlight of the borders, counter-smuggling activities now mostly unfold within the walls of the prison system.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sicily with individuals criminalized for migrant smuggling, this paper addresses the restlessness, incoherence, and ambiguity of the political discourse surrounding the criminalization of facilitation. It adopts an abolitionist perspective as ethical positioning and theoretical framework to investigate the genealogy of the crime, ultimately bridging migration and prison studies through a transnational perspective (Schiller, 2004). In doing so, the research aligns with those targeted by the international criminal justice system, privileging their self-representations over institutional narratives. Their lived experiences of confinement are hence conceptualized within a transnational system of control and containment. Facilitators emerge as “sorting agents” who simultaneously expose, disrupt, and possibly reinforce (Achilli, 2024) state selection tactics of social differentiation (Khosravi, 2007). By examining such processes of “enemy-making” through carcerality and unpacking the naturalization of “migrant illegality,” the paper advances an abolitionist critique that historicizes carceral border regimes and opens for newly thinkable futures.